Category: Serving Others

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The Praxis of Love (pt 3)

This is from a sermon give at East Balsam Baptist Church 9/25/2011 (pt 3)

As we talk about loving God Jesus sets a pretty high standard – “Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.” Our passion comes from our heart, our prayers come from our soul, and our intelligence comes from our mind. Jesus says that we need to love God with our whole being. As we serve others we are showing our love for God. As we spend time in prayer and listing to God we grow our relationship with and strengthen our love for God. As we read and study God’s word we get a better understanding of who God is and again our love deepens. Loving God with our passion, prayers and intelligence leads us to a stronger, deeper relationship with and love for God.

In my life this is how I live these principles out – two things I want to be clear about 1) I don’t always succeed in doing these things but I do the best I can and 2) It is up to each of you to determine for yourselves how this will look in your life. The passion God is stirring in my heart to the desire to come along side people in their journey through life and help them in their struggles. I show my love of God by doing my best to put this passion into action. I have been serving the last four years at Lino Lake state prison working with offenders in the IFI program to better understand their beliefs and values and make sure that they are Biblically grounded. At work I help faculty better understand the use of technology are they prepare our future Christian leaders. I am being trained as a Hopelink minister to come along side a person who is in a rough patch of their life and listen to them for a while. I try and model a Christ-like life for my kids. All these acts of service come out of my God given passion of serving others.

I have come to a deeper understanding of prayer and how vital it is in ones life. To be honest I haven’t really taken a lot of time to develop this spiritual discipline in my life. God is working on me to change this. True prayer, not the wish list prayer, is what God desires so that He and I can have conversations together. Remember in prayer it is a two way street, don’t only talk to God but be sure and take the time to listen for God’s still small voice. I take time away from life to go on spiritual retreats where God and I can spend time together alone. Finally, I do my best to spend an hour or so every morning quietly waiting upon the Lord. I read, pray, ponder, and write. These things all add to and show my love for God by simply spending time with Him.

I confess that I am an educational junky or as I am referred to in higher education, a life long learner. I have four post-secondary degrees, a graduate certificate, and I am working on my DMin (Doctor of Ministry). I enjoy digging into Biblical text to understand what the author is saying and then convey that information to other. It is through these intellectual endeavors that my understanding of God has grown and by default my love of God has grown. This educational experience is not so I can get a bunch of letters after my name, rather it is about the transformation that God is causing in me. It is about me trusting God, being obedient to His word, and allowing Him to complete a good work in me. It doesn’t matter if you are pursuing God through a degree or not, rather the question is Are you pursuing God at all? Are you allowing God to transform you into the new creatiom you already are through Christ?
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The Praxis of Love (pt 2)

This is from a sermon give at East Balsam Baptist Church 9/25/2011 (pt 2)

In the Gospel of Matthew we have an encounter being played out between Jesus and some of the religious leaders. The leaders were trying to trap Jesus by asking the question “What is the greatest commandment?” but what they got was a reply that silenced them once and for all.

When the Pharisees heard how he had bested the Sadducees, they gathered their forces for an assault. One of their religion scholars spoke for them, posing a question they hoped would show him up: “Teacher, which command in God’s Law is the most important?” Jesus said, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.’ This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: ‘Love others as well as you love yourself.’ These two commands are pegs; everything in God’s Law and the Prophets hangs from them.” (Matthew 22:34-40 MSG)

From my journal Dec 2010        
I have found myself being drawn to these verses as the driving values for my life. Love God and love others. But when I really dwell upon this notion of loving, what does it look like in practice? How is it that I express this sense of love? Maybe a more basic question is what is love? How does one define it? I want to inject here that I am talking about the love of others, not the love of things. I have to pause when someone asks me how I like my iPad. The first thing that pops into my mind is that I love it. Do I really love it? When I say I love it, what I mean is that it is a great tool for me because it allow me to consume information from the Web in a way that fits me. I don’t think that is a true definition of love, but because of the wide pool of definitions for the word love, maybe it is.

I want to take a deeper look at this passage in Matthew and unpack with you what it might look like to put love into practice.

When I look at love in the context of the passage above, I see that love has to happen in a relationship. To love God I need to be in a relationship with God. To love my neighbor I need to be in some type of relationship with them. You can’t love someone in isolation. Love is about doing, love is active – in 1 John 3 we read:
By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.
 (1 John 3:16-18 ESV)

Love is active and can only be carried out in relationship. The only love that can be carried out alone is loving ourself (I’m talking about the narcissistic type of love) and loving the world. To develop relationships one needs to spend time with the other person(s) in the relationship. So what does that look like with God and what does that look like with others?
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The Praxis of Love (pt 1)

This is from a sermon give at East Balsam Baptist Church 9/25/2011 (pt 1)

We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us! But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love. (1 Corinthians 13:12, 13 MSG)

Paul was writing to the church in Corinth to encourage them in their struggles and hardships. In these verses Paul writes that while we are doing life we don’t always see or know the answers to our “why or how or when or who” questions. When we stand before God we will have the answers, but for now Paul tells us to hang onto our faith, hope and love.

Our faith is in God who was, is and always will be with us. This faith does not promise us a trouble free life, rather is promises us we will always have someone to lean in good times and when things get rough. Our hope is in the new life and restored relationship we have through Jesus Christ. Peter tells us in 1 Peter 3 to “always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.” We have a hope to share with other and a faith that anchors our trust in God. Then we have love – in The Message it says “love extravagantly.” Paul tells us of the three: faith, hope and love, that love is the best. Two questions come to mind here: What does it look like to love extravagantly? and How do we know love is best? The answer to the first is what we will be exploring today and the answer to the second is 1) Paul’s writing were inspired by God and 2) it is a reflection of what Jesus taught when ask the question about the greatest commandment.