Tag: love

Galatians 5:2-15 – Faith Expressing Itself Through Love

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year BLeave a comment
Faith, expressing itself through love, is the grace others need from us.
            I didn’t grow up committed to learning the Bible or following Christ.  I pretty much went my own way throughout my childhood, and especially my teenage years.  I still remember what it feels like to not be a Christian.
            I think that people who have a past where they didn’t live by grace but only looked out for themselves have a temptation to embrace strict rules when they become Christians.  They know what it feels like to not have Jesus in their lives, so they sometimes can go beyond Scripture and impose standards on themselves, and then others, to keep on the straight and narrow.
            If, and when, that happens, the Apostle Paul has something to say about it.  Embracing certain practices to obtain or maintain righteousness mean nothing in God’s kingdom.  Here is how Paul put it, for the church who went down the path of strict outward rule-keeping:
“You people who are trying to be made righteous by the Law have been estranged from Christ. You have fallen away from grace! We eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness through the Spirit by faith. Being circumcised or not being circumcised doesn’t matter in Christ Jesus, but faith working through love does matter.” (CEB)
 
            Christianity which ignores God’s grace in favor of controlling one’s own faith through certain rules is no Christianity at all, and Paul would have nothing to do with it.  His position was clear and pointed:
“You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only don’t let this freedom be an opportunity to indulge your selfish impulses, but serve each other through love.” (CEB)
 
Grace is the currency in God’s kingdom, flowing freely through love.  God has your back.  His grace forgives, and never runs out.  His love endures and never withdraws.  When we get a hold of this essential and beautiful truth about God, the only rule we want to keep is the continuing debt to love one another.
            So, are there any practices, rules, beliefs, or doctrines which you hold to that you impose on yourself which are burdensome to you?  Why do you do them?  Do you expect others to do so?  What would change if you threw grace and love in the mix?

 

Gracious God, your love has extended so far as to give your one and only Son on our behalf.  Through Jesus, I embrace the faith and love gifted to me through his redeeming work.  Help me to daily die to myself and my propensity for outward rule-keeping, and to live the gracious life you died to procure for me.  Amen.

1 Corinthians 8

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year BLeave a comment
            Consider an issue you care about.  Likely, one of the big reasons you care is that you either see some abuse, neglect, inattention, or lack of love applied toward someone or a group of people.  So, you want to see it be different.  Now, here comes the interesting part: We are motivated by love, but we often end up addressing the problem or issue in the realm of thought and/or belief.  We rely on the political, theoretical, and intellectual to solve the problem.  In other words, our hearts are attuned but we turn to knowledge and rules to achieve a change.
            The Apostle Paul knew that we are primarily lovers – not thinkers or believers.  Thinkers and believers traffic in knowledge and faith in belief systems.  These are of great significance, yet they are not the primary or ultimate ends for Paul.  Instead, Paul took on a divisive issue in the Corinthian church (whether one can eat food which was originally sacrificed to idols, or not) by saying this:
“Knowledge makes us proud of ourselves, while love makes us helpful to others.”
 
Paul begins with love and ends with love.  This issue of certain kinds of food was neither an intellectual nor a faith issue – it was a love issue.  Paul’s answer to the problem dividing them on food was that food is a secondary issue.  To look at it through the lenses of love makes it clear what you ought to or ought not to do.  This doesn’t make thinking and believing irrelevant, it just places it in its proper place and supports love.
            Whenever our opinions and thoughts, and our faith and belief structures are handled without love, then special interest groups begin to form.  Then, division occurs based upon what we think and believe about certain things.  But when love is supreme, knowledge is no longer the tail wagging the dog.
            Love is meant to enlighten us not only to the problems among us; love is also the answer to those issues we care about most.  Let that statement be added to your knowledge so that you encourage and build-up others, and not discourage and tear them down.  It really is all about love.

 

Loving God, you demonstrated your own love for us through sending us your Son, the Lord Jesus, who is the perfect embodiment of love.  May He be so manifested within me that love becomes not only the motivator to change, but also the answer to change; through the power and help of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Awakening to Love

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality BlogLeave a comment

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Quite frankly, love is something that everyone on planet needs.  We all require to both receive and to give love.  But not everyone has a heart open to accepting love, and, so, find it nearly impossible to dispense love.  However, the good news is that love is near to each one of us.  We only need to reach and touch it because it is so close.

We have all likely heard the dictum “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.”  Even if we have not used the phrase, the concept is common throughout the world.  Perhaps the chief hindrance to receiving and giving love is this reciprocal notion.

For example, much of Western society turns on the wheels of transactions.  This is seen in the many words we have for money and financial exchanges:  bills; coins; cash; credit and debit cards; stocks and bonds; bank accounts; 401k; paychecks, etc.  You get the idea.  We can scarcely imagine a culture without putting something into an account so that we can engage in commerce and consumerism.

None of this is neither inherently bad or good; it just is.  A problem arises when people allow the idea of transactions to seep into relationships.  When a person chooses to view the world primarily through the financial lenses of a transaction, we set ourselves up for a deficit of love.

It works something like this:   A parent invests time, money, and resources into a child’s life.  Mom and Dad do everything they can to set up little Johnny for success in this life (which, by the way, is often defined as getting a good paying job someday and being financially independent).  But when little Johnny decides to go all avant garde and does not live up to his parents’ expectations, their reaction betrays the transactional: “Look at all we did for you, and you repay us by not going to college and running off to do only God knows what!?”

Put in the context of a workplace, some bosses are only happy when the employee is producing and making money.  Management doesn’t understand why workers are upset.  Paying them more money doesn’t seem to do it.  They only see the transactional view of the world.  In the realm of personal relationships, we sent a Christmas card to that family and they never sent one back, and that makes us mad.  When it comes to God, we went to church, kept our nose clean and were ethical, and now something terrible happens in our lives.  We think God did not make good.  We invested in this God thing and He didn’t follow through with the transaction to give us the good life.

But God operates in a different economy.  Grace trumps transaction.  Grace is the gears and the grease of God’s love toward us.  The good news of Christianity is that God loves us, even when we have nothing to give, and even when we are far from the words and ways of Jesus.

“Christ died for us at a time when we were helpless and sinful.  No one is really willing to die for an honest person, though someone might be willing to die for a truly good person.  But God showed how much he loved us by having Christ die for us, even though we were sinners.” (Romans 5:6-8, CEV).

It is likely that all of us, at some time or another, have felt the sting of someone else’s disappointment with us.  They “invested” in us in some way.  We “repaid” them with a decision or a different direction than what they expected.  Or, it went the other way.  We put time and effort into someone or a group of people, and they didn’t come through for us (e.g. and ironically, pastors and church volunteers often feel this way).

The first step to awakening to love is to forsake a transactional view of relationships and adopt a gracious approach to people and to God.  God is gracious, merciful, and kind.  It isn’t just what He does; it is who He is.  He gives love because He is love.  Until we get that basic understanding, we will flounder in our human relationships because true love will forever be elusive due to the transactional view.

Grace is the most effective way to the world of love, and the best way to the good life.  Yet, surprisingly, this is at no cost to us.  What are we to do?  Give yourselves to God, as people who have been raised from death to life.  Make every part of your life an offering to God.  Don’t let sin keep ruling your lives because you are ruled by God’s kindness and not by the law of the transaction.  Awaken to love because God is love. (Romans 6:12-14; 1 John 4:8-11)

2 John

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year CLeave a comment
            Perhaps it is ironically significant that today’s lectionary New Testament lesson is all about love.  After an acrimonious season of electoral politicking, and a forward look at some more of the same, we need the message of this oft forgotten little epistle.  And, so, yet another irony is that this brief letter is nestled in a place in the New Testament where few believers ever take a peek.  Perhaps love itself has become a forgotten virtue among the very people entrusted to uphold its beauty and grace.
 
            Everything in the Christian life rises and falls with love.  Even to say this is a gross understatement because God himself is love.  John is known as the Apostle of love, and he consistently and constantly espoused the primacy and permanence of love whenever he had the chance.  Truth and love must go together, always.  John says to the church, personified as a very special woman, “We love you because the truth is now in our hearts, and it will be there forever.”
 
            The true muster of the church and of individual believers is their love.  A profound lack of love is the litmus test that belies a faulty and heretical doctrine of Jesus.  No love is always the clue that there is going to be some impure teaching behind it.  The real enemy of Christ is the one who claims Christianity but does not love in either word or deed.  If we really want to love God, we will love one another, and vice-versa.
 

 

            Loving God, there is never a time when you do not love.  Let that same virtue dwell in me all the time, as well, so that the world will know there is a God in heaven who cares.  Amen.