You Can’t Hurry Love

Americans tend to fill every waking moment with activity. With our full schedules it is difficult to find time to squeeze one more thing into our days. 

When the opportunity comes our way to help and serve some one, it often comes at us as an inconvenience. It is interrupting our schedule. So we try to hurry through it so we can do a good deed and still check off everything on our to do lists.

Sadly, this leads people feeling more like an inconvenience or an afterthought rather than feeling truly loved. 

To be different, Christians need to slow down and understand that one of the sacrifices that we make on behalf of God is the interruption of our schedules. By letting God disrupt our lives we are saying that His will is more important than our will. We are also saying that people matter more than our personal agendas.

Loving our neighbor can’t simply be blocked off on our schedules. These opportunities to love people will  appear in our lives during inconvenient times, forcing us to choose between our agendas and God’s command. 

For us to truly love people we need to sacrifice our time, our agendas, and our money to be present in the lives of other people.

This is how we can love our neighbors well.

What Can We Do?

 We live in a sin corrupted world where violence and death too often reign, and we are powerless to do anything about the evil that surrounds us.

 In moments like these all we can do is focus on what is within our power to control. So we pray, asking God to intervene in the cares and concerns of our heart, and we commit to loving our neighbor. 

This what is under our control to do.

Seek to Discover Jesus

Reading through the book of John it becomes evident that there were great disagreements about Jesus' identity.  This is even seen in the Pharisees. Here is a group that we generally talk about opposing Jesus, but the reality was that there was a disagreement about Jesus among them (John 9:16).

In John 10:19 we again see that people had a disagreement about Jesus: When he said these things, the people were again divided in their opinions about him (NLT). 

 

There was this disagreement, or division, because Jesus provided a paradox for them. 

On the one hand Jesus taught with great authority and insight. 

On the other hand Jesus did not obey the culture expectations of the day. He was not always a "good" Jew.

All these centuries later, people still have disagreements about who Jesus is. 

• Some want to classify him as a good teacher who was able to give profound spiritual insight. 
• Some may elevate him to the position of prophet, a man of God giving people a word from God. 
• Some label Jesus as a liar who led people astray. 
• Some call him a myth who never existed. 

People are still divided about who Jesus is.

Since I claim to follow Jesus, it is important that I understand who Jesus is to the best of my ability. 

Now, I admit, it is easy, even by looking at the biblical account, to create Jesus in my image. To make a Jesus I am comfortable with, who will support my agendas, and promote my worldview. 

 

Even within the Church there are many different ideas of who Jesus is, how he lived, and what he taught.

This means we need make an effort to discover who Jesus is. 

• We need understand the culture in which Jesus lived which provide much needed context to his teaching. 
• We need to seek to hear his teaching through the ears of his intended audience.
• We need to learn why see his miracles and ministry through these first century eyes.

 It is easier to engage the Gospels, as well as the whole of Scripture, at just the surface level, as we look for those eternal truths to apply to our lives. But, I have come to believe that we miss much of the truth God has for us by not digging deeper into the text. 

People will always be divided over who Jesus is, but that shouldn’t keep us from the responsibility of doing what we can to discover the Jesus of history. 

I believe that when we commit ourselves to such a study we will be blessed with the gift of getting to know who Jesus is and all that he has done for us.

Liberty Depends on Virtue

 I love this John Adams quote for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is because it reminds me that the most important thing I can spend my time doing is making disciples. Freedom and liberty are not independent of the choices that we make. 

Living with virtue makes us free from the consequences of bad choices that lead to our enslavement. When we are not enslaved we are free to help and serve those around us. This is how we live as a benefit to our community.

The second reason I like this quote is that virtue reminds us that there is an outside authority  that defines right and wrong. We are not the ones who define good and bad, rather we look to God for His wisdom to guide us in the type of life we should live.

A loss of liberty in the United States can be traced back to the reality that as a country we have lost the notion of virtue. Instead of virtue we have turned to politics to determine what is right and wrong. 

This is why every election turns into “the most important election of our lives.” 

Instead of electing people to lead us, we fight a battle to determine who has the authority to determine what is right and wrong. It is a fight that will always be nasty and brutal as dividing lines between people and groups are created.

It is impossible to have unity when there is no common understanding of what virtue is. There is no hope for unity in the United States apart from a common understanding of virtue.

Instead of using political power to try to conform people to our understanding of right and wrong, we need to focus on discipleship and teaching people the true source of virtue: the wisdom of God.