My word for 2016 is “Phenomenal” and that is exactly what the first 3 days of the 28 day challenge have been. God is revealing truths to me that I have just not grasped fully until this time and no doubt I will not fully grasp it until I meet Jesus face to face.
Lets talk about love for a minute, that is where Holy Spirit has been speaking to me the past 24 hours.
“The most transformational teaching in the New Testament related to relationships revolves around the use of the term love. When discussing love, New Testament writers talk about it in terms of something one does as opposed to how one feels. While most of us were content to merely fall in love, New Testament authors instruct us to behave in love. We’re told to make love a verb. Jesus went so far as to use it as an imperative. In the Gospels, he reiterated the famous Old Testament imperative to love our neighbors as ourselves. But he went a step further. He instructed his followers to love their enemies (Matthew 5:44)! Clearly he wasn’t talking about love as most of us know it. He was referring to the verb version: a decision to do something in spite of how we feel. The verb form of love is the hallmark of the Christian faith.” Andy Stanley
So love is not a warm, fuzzy, feeling. Love is not that feeling you get when a chill runs down your spine or when you get chill bumps all over your body. Those things all represent feelings and that’s not what Love is. Love is a verb.
This means when Jesus says to love your enemies, He isn’t in any way saying that we need to have warm fuzzy feelings related to them, we may not even like them but we will serve them in acts of love. Whoa…
This means when Jesus says to love your neighbor as yourself and you say, “I don’t even love myself,” so I guess that lets me off the hook. NO, actually it puts us all on the hook to serve our neighbors, to love them in actions of love.
I don’t know about you but this is and should be life changing for me and every Christ follower on the face of the earth. Let’s take relationships for a moment and how this relates with my bible time this morning.
Romans 12:1-2, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice,holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. 2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Replace the word “body” with “yourself” because that is what is meant here. Offer yourselves as a living sacrifice.
Sacrifice is what Jesus did on the cross. Jesus placed Himself on the altar as our ultimate sacrifice. Jesus is God and in order for us to live, He had to offer Himself, all of Him, His being, for us. He loved us… Not warm, fuzzy, feeling loved us, He loved us as in “verb,” action word, loved us. He did something that wasn’t easy and something he would like to have found another way to do. Go read where Jesus asked the Father if there was any other way, please let this part pass from me. But there was no other way.
There is no other way for us either. We need to change the perception in our world, lets start in our own lives. The perception that Love is easy and love means you like the people you love, and that there is anything remotely warm and fuzzy about it at first. I say at first because I truly believe if we act on this love as a very thing, it will transform our marriages, our friendships, our churches, our communities, and our world.
I love you guys and I think that means I have to do that in verb form.
Pastor Ronnie