“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”
“All these [gifts] are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.”
1 Corinthians 12:11
Facing the Day – God empowers us to use our gifts in love for others.
“We extend the grace of the Jesus Creed when we listen to the good news that God is not a boundary-maker but a boundary-breaker.” (p 243)
Which is easier for you, making boundaries or breaking boundaries ?
McKnight names four principles of boundary-breaking love – “# 1 – Other people are listening to God; # 2 – Resistance to boundary-breaking is normal; # 3 – God is impartial; # 4 – God dwells with all who face God.” ( p 140 – 143)
How do these principles fit in your life?
Peter: “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.”
Acts 10:28
“I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”
Acts 10:34-35
Facing the Day – The Jesus Creed calls us to knock down the boundary of privilege in order to extend the grace of God to others.
“This covering-of-wrongs-love shows us why Peter uses the word ekteme, ‘strenuously,’ again. Love stretches us, but it also stretches itself over the wrongs and faults of others. Instead of accusing, resourceful love sees and understands, see and forgives, sees and stays with, and because it does all these things, it gets beyond the wrongs to a life that engulfs our faults in a forgiving, healing, embracing grace,” (p 138)
What is embracing grace for you?
“Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sin.”
1 Peter 4:8
“Finally, all of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind,”
1 Peter 3:8
Facing the Day – Love finds a way.
“We are sometimes tempted to reduce love to indescribable emotion suddenly emerging in our breast and weakening our knees. This emotion makes our hands break into a cold sweat and keeps us awake at night. Those fresh chemical responses in our body can’t be denied, but love is more than that. Love, John says, is ‘truth and action.’ Or we might say ‘active truth’ or even ‘truth in action.’ ‘To say that God is love,’ Frederick Buechner tells us, ‘is either the last straw or the ultimate truth.’ This ultimate truth invites you and me to walk with God, the God who makes that first move to end cycles of un-love.” (p 134)
How do you define love?
“Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”
1 John 4:8
“For this is the message you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another.”
1 John 3:11
Facing the Day – Join God in ending the cycles of un-love.
“Loving the enemy is the only way to stop the cycle of violence, the only way to accomplish justice and then to move beyond it. The Jesus Creed love of enemy-love is the only way to create a kingdom reality on earth.” (p 92)
“Our example is Jesus and our memoried symbols are the basin and the towel.” (p 129)
In the account McKnight relates, Dawn Husnick literally used towels and basins to give Jesus Creed footwashing love to another in need of love.
How will you share that kind of love?