May 19, 2019 Readings:
John 13: 31-35
Jesus leaves his friends
with this commandment from John 13: beginning at verse 34: “A new command I give you: Love one another.
As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will
know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” Now I ask you when people outside
look at the church disciples of today what do they see?
The most powerful, most
needed, and most essential teaching has always been and will always be Love. Love is our foundation and our destiny. It is
where we come from and where we’re headed. As St. Paul famously says, when all
the other gifts have ceased these three remain “faith, hope, and love but the
greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). The Hebrew
word for "Love" is Ahava (Ah-ha-vah.) But, love is more than just
a word. It is an emotion that involves action and in Israel,
where Hebrew is the national language, love is
also a way of life! The root of the word lay in giving not receiving. The Greek word is “Agape” meaning, your love
must be an outpouring that is free and without condition.
My hope this morning is when
I speak I am able to help clear away any hindrance or obstruction[SR1] allowing you to trust and to
begin participating in Gods foundational Love. May I suggest that God’s love was planted
inside each of us upon conception and it is the job of the Holy Spirit who,
according to Jesus, when the spirit is awakens within “will teach you the truth
about everything and remind you of all that Jesus has taught you” (John 14:26).
To Love is to know who’s you
are and how you were meant to live. Our goal then is to love as Jesus loves. When you don’t live according to his
love, you are living outside the foundation of Gods will. In doing so, you’re basically not real or true
to yourself. When you love, you are
acting according to your deepest being, your deepest truth by expressing God’s
divine image. {1 John 4:7-8.} When you
do, you are operating according to the
divine power that was given to you. For
a simple description of the kind of love I am talking about, let’s just use the
word outflowing.
Hopefully this will become clearer as we proceed.
All I can do is remind you
of what you already know deep within your True Self and invite you to live your
life connected to this divine power. The
phrase you need to focus on is, Jesus telling us that if I am in the father and
you are in me, then we are one with
God’s love. Repeat the last line of
the phrase using I instead of we: “I am one with God’s love.” You can study this by reading the scripture
that is known as Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer.
John 17: 1-26 Your Homework for
the next two weeks is to study this prayer, it will be the focus of my sermon on
Sunday June 2nd.
John the Evangelist writes, “God is love, and whoever remains in love,
remains in God and God in them” (1 John 4:16). The Judeo-Christian creation
story says that we were created in the very “image and likeness” of God—who
sets the highest bar for this kind of outflowing love. In Genesis 1:26-27 we read: 26 Then God said, “Let us
make humankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the
fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild
animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”27 So
God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he
created them; male and female he created them.
Out of the Trinity’s reproductive and infinitely flowing
relationship, confirmed in verse 26 by the use of the plural “LET US”, all of creation takes form, mirroring the
goodness of God in its deepest identity.
We have heard this phrase so often that many do not get the full
concept of what “created in the image and likeness of God” is saying about us. If this statement
is true, you have to think deeper because this implies that the human family of
origin is divine. It is saying that we were created by a loving God to be love in the
world. Love then must be an outpouring
of that which already exists in you, it is not a receiving station where you
become loved, you are meant to be love itself.
We get confused because the world
teaches us the complete opposite. That
you go looking for love, that in order to feel whole or to feel loved, someone
must show you that they love you. There is an old country song that suggests:
We can spend a life time, looking for love in all the wrong places.
May I suggest that our core
is actually original blessing, not
original sin? We just read it in Genesis 1: 26-27. Our starting point is “very good” (Genesis
1:1-31 tells us it is all for good). If
the beginning is right, the rest is made considerably easier, because we know
and can trust that: God is good all the
time, and all the time God is good.
We must all overcome the
illusion of separateness. It is the primary task of religion to communicate not
worthiness but union, to reconnect people to their original identity “hidden
with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). The Bible calls this state of
separateness “sin.” God’s job description, is to draw us back into primal and
intimate relationship. We read in 1 John 3:2:
2 My dear friends, we are now
God's children, but it is not yet clear what we shall become. But we know that
when Christ appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he
really is.
Henceforth, all our moral
behavior is simply “the imitation of God. Ephesians 5:1” First observe what God is doing
all the time and everywhere, and then do the same thing. And what does
God do? God does what God is: Love. God
does not love you if and when you change. God
loves you so that you can change! May he add his blessing to my words, let us
pray.
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