Love THE Key

RADICAL, RISKY, VIOLENT LOVE

1 Cor. 8: 1.....Yes, we know that “we all have knowledge” about this issue. But while knowledge makes us feel important, it is love that strengthens the church. 2 Anyone who claims to know all the answers doesn’t really know very much. 3 But the person who loves God is the one whom God recognizes.

I would assume we all go through the same process in this journey of Christian living. We become Christians, see men and women of faith quote the sacred text, are challenged as children to memorize the scriptures and sit in amazement as teachers and preachers open the understanding of the Bible to us. We determine and are very intentional about following this path. We do all we can with our abilities (not all of us are equipped the same) to grasp this same level of 'spirituality'. We want to be a light to a dark world and it seems 'knowledge' is the answer. 

Still, no real light from our life! So we summarize it is a lack of spirituality due to sin in our life and the fact we are 'unholy'. So we set out to achieve HOLINESS.  Can you remember all the different ideas of what Holiness meant to different people? 

• Some people in my past thought it was not drinking coca-cola from a bottle, because we are to 'shun the very appearance of evil'. You drink alcohol out of bottles. 
• Some thought it was the clean vocabulary, not even saying 'shoot' because it was so close to s.....
• Some thought it was cutting my hair, taking off my 'hip hugger' jeans, once I was even asked to leave a banquet at church because I wore white shoes without socks :)

Isn't it humorous what man, the carnal church does to bring us to being a light. In the past 15 years the scripture that has driven Mission:M25 is Matthew 5:14-16, where Jesus states to be a light we do good deeds so that the Lord may be glorified. So here we go, doing good deeds! We work hard at Being A Light Not A Mouth (BALNAM). 

Here again we stumble onto another human effort to bring a hope filled God to a hopeless society. 

The text quoted above gives us all the answer we need, LOVE. If we learn all the text in the entire Bible and quote it from end to end, get all of this evil world from our life (impossible) and give our bodies to be burned and have not LOVE, it means nothing. 

One of my mentors would say to me, 'Love is a verb' it is to be lived. So true but so many people act on 'love' but it is a mask of resentment, anger, bitterness and an expression of past rejection. Love is given simply as a product of something inside. Pastor Kevin McBride spoke last Sunday that we were to have a 'river of living water flowing from us to those around us'. Have you noticed it is free flowing? Have you noticed people that seem to just ooze the love when you are around them? Have you noticed people feel comfortable being who they are, no false pretenses, no coverups for their behavior, when they feel true love coming from within side you? 

Let us not get 'puffed up' because we know, become holier than thou because we have conquered some sins in our life or become exalted because we are servants. 

May the Lord of the Harvest cause us to be a vessel for 'living water' to flow from as we walk through life, wherever we are, doing whatever we do! 

May our life flow in such portions that people 

• receive that river of living, loving water. 
• Then, the love will flush out the evil inside their life 
• and create room to 'know more' and a natural process of serving others by doing good deeds will be done with pure motives!