November 28, 2011
You’re invited
Every once in a while I’ll get a request through the Christian
Ear to follow another person’s blog. Normally their motive is an effort to help
them build up their own readership. However I find it curious that they don’t
at least try to establish a relationship by interacting with comments to the
Christian Ear…they just want me to follow them. I can just imagine Jesus saying,
“Come follow me” and then not
investing Himself in His followers. Thankfully the Lord’s ministry was not about
just building up His stats. “But
small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find
it.” (Matt 7:14 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----Love and truth are closely related concepts. I have a friend who excoriates the freedoms I take in dragging some words to their their very boundaries of connotation which her dictionary boldly draws. Sometimes I even kick them across those circumscribed lines.
-----To love, as the Bible calls us to do, drags that word to its outer boundary. What loyalty has one for his enemies? What strong kinship affection do we have for our neighbors? What devotion and attachment do we feel towards the other six billion folks still kicking up dust? We haven’t even met them, let alone do we know them!
-----This is where truth comes in and the dictionary gets a bit excused. No forgiveness from my friend is needed; the love spoken of in God’s Word is the love from a Greek word. The core of its meaning has more to do with social and moral sense than with the sensation of affection. Certainly the affectionate sense is involved in agape, but only as it extends from social and moral obligations.
-----And what are those? They are where truth leads love. Real obligation meets real need. And ultimately, real is determined by the Lord. So, simply, the obligations of love follow the channels of propriety comprising God’s sensibilities. And our only hope of understanding those is through seeking the truths God prescribes. That is more a process than a solution.
-----So to abide in and show God’s love is more a process of discovering the truths about the situations involving us and the goodness those truths beckon from us. We have a strong loyalty to our enemies through the truth; if they wish to meet us there enmity dissipates. The love for our enemies is our loyalty to doing them truthful good, which can even be deleterious to their chosen snares. There is something about the human heart that melts into affectionate kinship for those who it has sacrificially benefited. Our relinquishing something to fill the true need of a neighbor is indeed our investment in the neighbor. Since truth does not require the neighbor to pay dividends on the investment, the heart’s melting a bit into felt affection and kinship becomes the dividend paid. Then we begin to see that our devotion and attachment to the other six billion, dust-kicking people of the earth is simply to operate the process of love as much as we can, benefiting a few around us at least, and more importantly, inspiring some to go doing likewise.
-----In as much as our obligations to love others come from the truth, the benefit to those who would have you follow their blogs must be true before investing your attention is love. If their purpose is mere popularity, the pride of having your attention is a detriment, not a benefit. Effecting detriment is not love.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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