Monday, December 8th, 2003 - Live in Love

Are you ready for this - perhaps the most important blog entry yet. The odd thing is, its words will be something that most of you already know. Tonight, I learned something that I already knew, and my perspective changed. I am eager to share it with you.

At Bible Study tonight, we listened to a recording of Greg Boyd speaking about living in love. In sum, the message was that we are to live as Christ by obeying the Greatest Commandment - love God and love others (Matthew 22:37-39). Don't judge or condemn others but love them. Boyd even mentioned in his talk that this is part of Christianity 101; it is one of the most basic and core attributes of the Gospel Message of Jesus Christ. The way this message is elaborated upon and explained spoke to my heart and changed the way I view myself.

One powerful introductory comment was that this message is not only one of the most basic and essential but that it is also one of the most absent in the Church. Boyd backed up this statement with a question: if the prostitutes and tax collectors (considered the "worst sinners" at the time) sought out and were drawn to Jesus, why do the prostitutes and tax collectors of the modern age run from and avoid Christians? Our number one goal is to imitate Christ, so why the disparity in people's reactions? This must be because we are not loving like Christ did.

Greg Boyd's words are much better than mine, so I have uploaded segments of his talk in .mp3 format. You will have to right click the link and then click "Save Target As..." to save the file to your computer. You will need a program such as Winamp to play .mp3 files. The entire talk is exactly an hour long, so I plan to somehow get the entire message out in Boyd's words by typing it all out - more to come later.
Main Point (6 mins.) - coming soon
Boyd's Mall Experience (5 mins.) - coming soon

I will attempt to summarize the part of Boyd's talk that hit me. Since we are created with a need for God's love that only He can fill, we become desperate for love when we are not allowing Him to fill that hole in us. The only other place we have to turn is the world, and the most common source of worth and love that we seek in the world is other people. Even if not outwardly, we, in our minds, lower other people's worth to make ourselves look greater.

I agree with Boyd that it is a part of human nature for every person to do this in his or her head at some point and to some degree. Boyd describes an experience he had in the mall as he observed people there. In his head, he would say, "that person is a bad parent, that person is lazy, that person has problems, that was disgusting, I can't believe he just did that... etc." He challenges to examine yourself; I found that I, too, say bad things in my head about people whom I don't even know. Subconsciously, we are taking the worth out of others to make ourselves feel better, as if we are saying "I may be sinful, but at least I'm not as bad as that person."

The answer is to continually surrender our time and our lives to God, allowing Him to fill that God-shaped hole in all of us. Through this, we love God, ourselves, and other people. It helps to realize that every person is created and loved by God - our job is to imitate God and therefore love all people. Boyd refers to Matthew 7:3-5 and offers the suggestion that we should consider at all times ourselves to have a large log while other people have but a speck of wood in their eyes, even if that may not necessarily be true. Automatically assume that our own sins are greater than those of those around us, and it will be easier for us to truly love them and show it.

Boyd used Jesus' words in Luke 10:5-9 to show how loving others fits into sharing the Gospel message to others. When we meet someone, we should first bless them, then share in fellowship with them, serve them, and then use words to tell of the Kingdom of God, all in that order. We bless them by praying for them, fellowship by hanging out with them, serve them by many different means, and tell of God's Kingdom by sharing Christ's message with them. Boyd emphasized the order here; we are to be an example of Christ in three different non-verbal ways before sharing the new life that is found in Christ. In short: the world does not want to hear the Gospel message - they want to see it and recognize it by our lives first.

Again, this whole message of loving others is very basic, and often we say in our heads, "Yeah, of course, I know that." The point is that although we may love, very few of us live in love. And love is what God is all about - to imitate God, our number one goal and purpose in life is to live in love. The Bible is littered with verses like "everything is useless if it is not done in love" and "above all else, love each other." Love is placed before all other things, so why is it so absent so often in us?

I think it is because we don't make it enough of an effort. We don't prioritize it as highly as we need to. God is love and love is God - Father, Jesus, and Holy Spirit; our purpose, goal, job, effort, vision, ultimate priority is to seek this very thing! Too often we brush this simple, rudimentary idea off to the side after understanding it for the first time. What God showed me through this Greg Boyd talk is that I need to revert back to this simple train of thought. And not just now, or tomorrow, but continually. Daily. Hourly. By the second, even!

I think of the line in the song The Heart of Worship: "I'm coming back to the heart of worship, and it's all about you, Jesus." I'm coming back to heart of Christianity, the heart of all that we believe: love. Love. Love, and live in love. It is much more simple than I make it out to be, because I often look past the absolute focal point of God's character. Guess what it is. Go ahead. My prayer is that I will consider my own eye to carry a log compared to the speck in others' so that I will truly love like the believers in Acts 2:43-47 that went out and changed the face of this earth forever.

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