Love & Keep

You shall therefore love the LORD your God and keep his charge, his statutes, his rules, and his commandments always.
Deuteronomy 11:1

God did not want to make of His people Israel a nation of blind adherents to the Law. The key to the relationship was love. God loved and cared for them. They loved and kept His commands. The reciprocal nature of the relationship was meant to build the nation into a powerful witness to the world of God's great and unfailing love.

God enters into relationship with us and we should act on our end of that relationship. We should love God. He is always the initiator because we are unable to truly come to Him as dead sinners. But when we feel the call, we must respond! That way that love is expressed is by living for Him, keeping His commands from our hearts. Living as a Christian is all about making our heart's passion that of pleasing our Lord. It is surrender and love in being all consumed in Jesus! It is like what a married person knows in finding joy in the things that delight and please their spouse.

The challenge for me today will be to love God by doing what He loves and commands. It means practicing the right choices, loving people around me even while they are imperfect and even hurtful, just like God loves every sinner while they were still sinners. It means expecting righteous living in my own heart, thoughts, and actions just as God expects that those who love Him would truly love Him from the heart!

- Posted with my iPad. The Apple Kool-Aide tastes fine.

Great in power, choosing to love.

Behold, to the LORD your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it. Yet the LORD set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day.
Deuteronomy 10:14-15

Moses gave a charge to the next generation of Israel, reminding them of the greatness of God and the compelling nature of God's loving choice of them as His people. They were to enter Canaan and take over its territory because of God's might, power and love. God's ways were powerful, beyond anything that they could ever do. His love that was set upon Israel was great beyond all other love. He stayed with them even when they strayed.

God never is diminished by faithfully loving His creation. Love is not a weakness. It is part of His majestic power. Moses sets the scene of God's inexplicable, amazing, loving choice of sinful Israel by first talking about God's power and sovereign control of all things. His love is thus a sovereign choice rooted in His wisdom... down deep in His ways.

Love is an emotion, but that is often so corrupted in weak human nature. We frequently love imperfectly with sentiment and self driving a feeling we have. And if someone does not feed that sentiment or selfish impulse, we can quickly switch from love to anger or hurt or even hate.

But that is not what God does. God loves because it is His nature to love and He is sovereign and strong in His great love. His love does not just hurt, but it heals and brings glory to Himself by so doing. God is great in love. His is majestic and holy in love. He is wise and sovereign in love. I have a lot to learn from Him about how to love!


- Posted with my iPad. The Apple Kool-Aide tastes fine.

Truth & Love: a beautiful balance

And now I ask you, dear lady - not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but the one we have had from the beginning - that we love one another. And this is love, that we walk according to his commandments; this is the commandment, just as you have heard from the beginning, so that you should walk in it.
2 John 5-6

Love is a dominant theme in all of the apostle John's writings. And this little postcard is no exception. But it isn't about gushy emotions. There is a necessary relationship between love for fellow believers and love for the Lord shown by obedience to the truth of His commands. John says that walking in obedience to the Lord is the first step in real love among Christians.

This is important because the very next section (2 John 7-11) - what is really the heart of the epistle - warns against associating with false teachers. False doctrine is wrong because it does not walk in Christ's commands. It cannot be love. It must be avoided and confronted.

The necessary relationship between truth and love is vital to the church. It makes us unique. Truth cannot exist without love or it is just stale fact that is void of life. Love cannot exist without truth or it is just sappy emotionalism. Both must exist in commitment to each other as evidenced in the lives of Christians who together walk in love according to Christ's commands.

- Posted with my iPad. The Apple Kool-Aide tastes fine.

How to love my neighbor.

You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.

Leviticus 19:17-18

There are three insights into social relationships that I think are interesting to talk about from this passage. The first has to do with the words that are used to describe relationships with other people. The concepts of brother and neighbor are used interchangeably in this context. I think the idea is that my obligations to other people are closer than I think. Of course I may be tempted to deal more fairly with a family member than with a stranger, and the point is I must apply myself in relationship with both. I cannot hate my brother. I should not sin against my neighbor.

The second insight is that sins on the social scale affect my walk with God. If I am not right with other people due to wrongs I have done to others, I am not right with God. The warning against striking out against brother or neighbor points out that sin will result. And this is just after a LENGTHY section of Leviticus has detailed the multitude of sacrifices meant to deal with sin issues. The point is not missed. Any sin is a serious matter. God sees sins against people as sins against Him as well. As a counselor, I often have to help people deal with the effects of how the hurt they have put on others has hurt their relationship with God. They have also hurt themselves. This is true stuff.

The third insight is the role of love. It is what defines our relationships with others. Since I would not hate myself, I should not hate my neighbor. Since I love and serve God, I should love and care for my neighbor. And Jesus made it clear that any person is my neighbor when He told the tale of the Good Samaritan. Jesus was bold enough to say that love defined the true two great commandments. The first was to love God. The second was to love my neighbor as myself. So this is no light obligation or minor suggestion. It defines the heart of all my relationships.

Technorati Tags: Leviticus,Love,Social Relationships

a different kind of love story.

Then I bowed my head and worshiped the LORD and blessed the LORD, the God of my master Abraham, who had led me by the right way to take the daughter of my master's kinsman for his son.
Genesis 24:48

This is indeed a love story, but one with a much different focus than we normally tend to think about this time of the year. Abraham is incredibly old, he has lost his wife, and is concerned that his son Isaac marry the right woman. He binds his household manager to a solemn oath to find a wife for Isaac among Abraham's own kinsman. The servant knows this is a daunting and dangerous task, but does so.

When he arrives in the territory of Abraham's family, he realizes that the task must be divinely directed. You have to hand it to Abraham. He had instilled a vivid faith in the members of his household as evidenced in the servant's prayers to God. And God heard and answered them with the events that clearly made it apparent that Rebekah was an outstanding, caring, and hard-working young lady. Again, not at all like how we might think of a love story today, but she is the right woman because of her character.

The result was that God was worshiped in such a human matter as procuring a wife and arranging a marriage. Abraham's servant acknowledges God's direction in the provision of Rebekah. Her family recognizes the hand of God in the matter by letter her go to be the wife of Isaac. Rebekah follows God's clear direction by agreeing without hesitation to leave home and family and marry a man she has never even seen!

In the end two things usually at odds are perfectly harmonized. God is glorified by clearly leading in the matter and perfect obedience to Him yields a wonderful result. Secondly, Abraham got exactly what he desired for his son, showing that his desires and wants were in keeping with God's will. And Isaac and Rebekah seem to truly have found a remarkable love, as evidenced in her response to him and his willingness to take her as wife. All in all, quite the happy ending... at least for chapter twenty-four.

Technorati Tags: Genesis,Abraham,Isaac,Rebekah,Love,Marriage