Category: Spiritual Formation

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The Praxis of Love (pt 4)

This is from a sermon give at East Balsam Baptist Church 9/25/2011 (pt 4)

I want to shift our attention now from loving God with our whole being to loving our neighbor as ourself. There are a couple of questions we needs to ask at this point. First, who is our neighbor? Jesus answered this in a parable about the good Samaritan. To summarize Jesus’ teaching our neighbor are those people in need who we can or do interact with. They might be the person living next door or across the street. It might be your co-worker in the next cubicle. It might be a homeless person you pass by with out even really noticing. It could a be a group of people you could minister to on a missions trip. In short, your neighbor is the person God has placed in your path so that you can love them.

Second, how do you show them love? To be honest I don’t know, you need to listen to their story to see how you can love them. Don’t be worried that you won’t be able to help them because if God placed them in your path you will be equipped to serve their needs. It’s important to remember that the love we have to share is a love that comes from God. Take a look at what 1 John 4:7 says, “My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God.” We are being God’s hands and feet as we love our neighbors.

As we thing about how to love our neighbor we might want to think a about the qualities of love that we can apply. Take a look at 1 Corinthians 13:4-8
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. (ESV)
These different qualities of love are the same qualities we need to display to our neighbor for they are the same ones that God displays to us. 1 John 4:7 says God is love, and so if these are qualities of love they are also qualities of God.

For me loving my neighbor is lived out in the passions that God has place on my heart. One way my daughter wants to serve others was by helping to change their flat tires. She wanted to do this driving around the Twin Cities, but I didn’t think that was all that safe. However, God knew her desire and has delivered two people (strangers) into our driveway who needed help changing a flat tire and my daughter was there. If you are willing and listening to God, He will bring across your path people who need to be loved in practical ways and he will equip you with the resources you need to show God’s love to them.
So what are the take aways today? First, the praxis of love needs to be carried out in relationship. Love is not something that can be carried out in a vacuum. We know that one relationship is with God, but who are the neighbors you can develop relationships with?

Second, when we love God we are to do it with our whole being. How are you showing God you love Him with your passions or heart? What spiritual disciplines are you practicing to draw your soul closer to God? Prayer, meditation, solitude, silence? How are you studying (reading is a discipline, studying is the exercising for your intellect) God’s word and other Christian writers? How are you allowing God to transform you?

Finally, how can you show God’s love to your neighbor? Have you listened to anyones story lately? Has God been nudging you to interact with someone? What are your gifts and talents that God can use to minister to others? Brandon Heath sings a song “Give Me Your Eyes” and the chorus reads:
Give me your eyes for just one second
Give me your eyes so i can see
Everything that i keep missing
Give me your love for humanity

Give me your arms for the broken hearted
The ones that are far beyond my reach?
Give me your heart for the one’s forgotten
Give me your eyes so i can see

You see loving our neighbors is nothing more than looking around with God’s eyes and God’s love looking for those in need of a touch from God through you.

Take some time this week to think about these things and then respond the way God leads you.
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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?