Love is: Kind

So I’m sure you couldn’t help but notice that I’m writing on love a lot lately.  Well, this has sort of been an unplanned series of writings.  Since I’m enjoying this topic, I figure’d I would go ahead and make an actual series of writings.  Seeing that I’ve never really done this kind of thing before, we will see how it goes.  

Earlier this week I wrote about love being patient.  This week - Love is: Kind

To be kind, or kindness means the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate.  

In short terms, I think that this quickly explains why love is kind.  I bet that typically when you think of kind people, you think of loving people.  If I were to ask you to think of someone who has been extremely kind to you in life, you could probably name them off quickly.  For some of us it would be our grandparents or parents.  Others of us its a friend or mentor.  Selfishly, I would hope that I came to mind in this exercise, but some of you may not know me so that’s ok.  

Anyway, kindness is expressed throughout the Bible.  Paul lists it as part of the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22,  in Colossians 3:12 as being part of a character that is holy, and compares it to us being like Christ in Ephesians 4:32.  Peter, one of the guys that actually walked the earth with Jesus, said that showing kindness is part of a growing christian’s life.  He also said that by not showing kindness, we are blind, short-sighted, and have forgotten the forgiveness Christ has given us freely on the cross.  

When I think of kindness, I think of all the people that have given freely to me without asking anything in return.  Recently, one of our friends at church pulled my wife and I aside and gave us all the cash he had in his wallet, and he didn’t even count it!  He told us that he remembered being young and not having a lot and wanted us to be able to go on a date, get groceries, or whatever we needed.  By doing that he was showing genuine kindness and generosity.  We were extremely humbled and gracious in that moment, because somebody decided to us some unconditional love.  

Kindness is a character trait I wish to have.  Right now I would say that most of the time I am kind.  There are times when I’m not, but most of the time I can claim this one.  I say this not to brag, but to say that if I can do it - you can do it.  I’ve been hard hearted in my life.  There were times I was racist, chauvinistic, homophobic and so on.  It’s taken work.  I believe that God has done a major work in my heart teaching me to love people.  Maybe that’s why I’m writing about it so much.  I believe in it.  

As I close I want to leave you with this question.  Something for you to ponder personally, or share with us.

Is it joyful or a chore for you to show kindness to others?

Love is: Patient

Love is a topic that is widely covered throughout the Bible.  I know I’ve done a couple of post on it in the past couple of weeks, but it’s a topic worth covering multiple times, and then some more.  It’s an extensive topic that I don’t think I will ever understand, but I’m ok with that.  I believe that God, who created the universe, everything in it and love, is a whole lot smarter than I am.  So here’s the little nugget that was revealed to me.  

• Love is being patient with others as they walk through the process of life-change.  Heart change comes before behavior change.  
• Legalism (what most of America probably thinks of when they think of christians) is expecting others to change a behavior to fit a model.  It offers no real change in the heart.  

When we show true love to someone, we are patient with them.  Patience, is one of the descriptions of love listed in 1 Corinthians 13.  In fact, it is the first description listed.  From my experience, it is also one of the hardest to live.  It is through love that we allow someone to experience a heart change, or in bible terms repentance, before we expect their behavior to change.  It is allowing God to work in their lives.  

Now, don’t get me wrong.  You are definitely there to show someone a path, to guide him, encourage her.  Disciple also has its place and love does not go without it.  Rebuking and reprimanding should not be lost, but must be done in love.  Paul described this when he said that if we don’t have love, then we are only making noise.  That is to say, without love, it’s worthless.  

When I think of love vs. legalism, I think of the American Christian.  In this context, legalism is living two lives. One six and a half days (Monday-Saturday & Sunday afternoon), and one Sunday mornings.  Thinking we have to have it all together, many of us go to church with a mask on.  We never let people see the real us.  Maybe you have a good reason for the mask, I don’t really know but there is one.  

Love on the other hand allows someone to live as him/herself.  We’re allowed to be broken or express complete joy.  We don’t need a mask to hide behind.  I think this is where the most life change happens.  It’s through love that chains are broken, wounds are healed, bondage is vanquished and so on.  

Do you show this kind of love to someone?  To let them mess-up, yet they don’t feel like they’ve completely let you down.  To walk through difficult situations even though you don’t fully know what to say or do.  Do you celebrate and cry with them? 

Or another question - do you have a person like that in your life? One that’s walking through life with you.  Always around.  Always patient when you mess up, big or small.  Willing to discipline you when you need it but also be one of your biggest cheerleaders when the chains get broken.  If you don’t, I highly encourage it.  It might be the one thing you’ve been needing.

David

Hope

What is hope? 

I’ve been struggling with that question for a while now.  I’m in a season of waiting, and it seems like hope comes and hope goes.  Excitement comes when the hope of a job prospect starts to unfold and then all hope seems crushed when it falls apart.  That leads to asking the question of why? Why even hope? All it does is disappoint.  At the very least, that’s where I’ve started this journey - searching. 

So that leads to answering the question, “What is hope?”  I mean, we hear about it.  The old guy President Snow in the Hunger Games movie said, “Hope is the only thing stronger than fear.” Oprah has a section on her website about quotes that give hope.  Google found what seems to be a gazillion places where one can find more quotes on hope.  You know, those that make us feel fuzzy on the inside when we need that fuzzy warm feeling.

But all of that feels so insignificant to me.  Yea, I brought up Oprah, only because it came up quick when I typed in “Quotes about hope” in my search bar and was intrigued. I have no desire to read anymore of her feel-good philosophy.  It may work for tv, but not real life.  Anyway, digressing back to the point here, searching to answer how hope fits into real life. 

If you’ve read my blog long enough, you know I unashamedly believe that the Bible is truth.  So that’s where my search begins, in the concordance of a bible, which is really just a big word for the index.  In there we can find things about putting our hope in the Lord.  David proclaimed that his hope was in the lord.  Paul described that hope comes from the Lord, and that along with faith and love, it is one thing that will remain.  But that doesn’t really help me much, so I need to define what hope is. 

The Dictionary app on my iPhone defined hope in this way;

• A person or thing in which expectations are centered
• To look forward with desire and reasonable confidence
• To desire something with confident expectation of it’s fulfillment

Now, having a definition of hope, I can put it back in scripture to make a little more sense.  I’ll use the one that has really spoken to me Psalm 130:5. It says, “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.” Now to you that may not say a lot, but in my journey, it’s life-giving.  Grouping this together with what i’ve been learning about waiting, here’s what it’s saying to me, “I patiently anticipate the Lord, my soul stands in readiness, and in him all my expectations are centered.”

To center my expectations in the Lord means that I’m believing that his word is truth when it says he will provide for me in Matthew.  It means believing that my identity, my foundation, who I am to the core, is rooted in Jesus.  It means that I have confidence that whatever trial I face, will bring perseverance.  Perseverance produces character.  These are what he’s promised to me and there are many more I could name here but I won’t, I’ll let you figure those out for yourself because then they’ll actually mean something to you.  

I’ll leave you with my paraphrase of this scripture

“Let all that I am patiently anticipate the Lord, for my expectations are centered in his promises. He alone is my foundation, where I will not be shaken.” Psalm 62:5-6

Question: What is Love (part two)

So my last post was about answering the question, “What is love?” After talking about it a lot, I finally brought you to a list of what love is, along with one of what love is not.  This list came from breaking down the Apostle Paul’s description of love in 1 Corinthians 13.  If you haven’t read that post I suggest checking it out here.  

Today we’ll continue that subject and look at how a person can love.  Looking at all of those traits it seems like an extremely daunting task to obtain all of them.  In actuality, when I first made the list I didn’t think that I possessed any of those traits.  I fit in better with the Hate side than the Love side.  So how did I change myself?  Well, honestly I didn’t, God did.  I know cheesy answer but I’m going to take you through the practical things I found.  

First thing to do is to make sure that you know God.  Here’s what I mean.  To love like God loves, which is described in part in 1 Corinthians 13, we must know God because God is love.  I’m getting this from a letter the Apostle John wrote to several churches in the late 1^st century.  It states; 

“7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” 1 John 4:7-8

What this says is that love comes from God.  If we have been born of God, meaning we have a relationship with Him through the salvation of his son Jesus Christ, then we can love fully like God because God is in us.  Well, that was a mouthful.  Maybe it’s better said like this - Because God is love, and we are in him through his Son Jesus, you/I can learn to love like God.  

This is really the only way to love fully, is to be in him.  Yes, we can argue that those of you who don’t believe in God can love as well and a semblance of that might be true, however, I’m under the firm belief that it is through God that we can obtain a love that is immensely greater than our own.  

The second thing I had to do was transform my mind.  Paul writes in Romans 12:2, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  What this means is that for anything to change in my life, I must first change the way I think about it.  For me to view myself as a loving person, I had to change my mindset and in doing so, God transformed my heart.  

Now don’t get me wrong here, this is not easy and it is a process.  It took us nearly a year of me working at Starbucks dealing with all kinds of difficult, demanding people to come to the realization that the entire purpose of me being there had been fulfilled.  I’m not done either.  The process is continuing to this day and will continue on, but the transformation is one of the essential steps in learning to love.  

So, time for a self-assessment.  Are you loving like God is calling you to love? Are you being honest with yourself? 

Question: What is Love?

As a Christian, I hear about loving others, and I’ve definitely been no stranger to saying that we need to love others.  But what is love, really?  Is it what we see in movies or read about in books?  Is it what we of when we think about our high school romance?  Is it what we think our parents have towards us that keeps them from completely disowning us?  Is love that thing that holds to brothers or sisters together even though they have completely different lifestyles?  

Thinking about it in those ways, it seems as though we’ll never really know what love is, which leads to another question, if we can’t even really define love, how can we properly show it?  As a Christian, it’s easy to say that we show love by showing people Jesus.  While that does hold some legitimacy, it just seems cheesy to me, and while I really like eating cheese, I don’t like to hear it.  So if you will, let’s take a journey together through what I’ve learned about love.  

Now I’m sure most of you have heard this recited at a wedding.  “Love is patient, Love is kind…” and so forth, but really have no idea where it comes from.  Well, it comes from a letter that the Apostle Paul wrote to an ancient church in the city or Corinth.  It is in the middle of this letter that Paul gives us a beautiful description of love.  If you want to read it, grab a bible and look up 1 Corinthians 13, or click here. 

The more I read this, and the more I’ve studied Scripture, the more alive it came to me.  As God was teaching me to love people last year, this became a key passage for me, and here’s how I broke it down. 

Love is…

• Patient
• Kind
• Slow to Anger
• Keeps no record of Wrong
• Delights in Truth
• Always Protects
• Always Trust
• Always Hopes
• Always Perseveres
• Never Fails

I also came to the conclusion through this passage that the opposite of love is Hate. It looks like this;

Hate is…

• Envious
• Boastful
• Proud
• Selfish
• Easily Angered
• Keeps a vault of wrongs and constantly uses them against us
• Full of half-truths and pure evil
• Will Fail 

After looking at these two list, I’ve come to realize what love is.  I believe that it helps teach us what love can looks like.  Whatever relationships we have; romantic, brotherly, working, or friendly, they all benefit from showing love.  Whether its with my wife or a co-worker, showing love in the form of kindness, patience, or trust allows that relationship to grow far more than if I show selfishness, boastfulness, or pride.  Love is what makes relationships worth having.  Without it, everything we do is pointless.  

Later we’ll how to love a little deeper in Scripture, but I want to leave you with this question, 

Do you typically show Love or Hate in your relationships?

Question: What does waiting mean?

What does it mean to wait on God?

What does it mean to wait? 

What does wait even mean?

Right now I’m going through a part of life where I’m having to wait - A LOT, so those are the questions I’m asking.  Some of you may know, but I’ve yet to learn what it really means to wait on God.  I understand that we’re supposed too, but many times I feel like we confuse waiting with laziness, and I hate laziness, especially in myself so in turn, I really hate the idea of waiting.  In case you’re wondering, here’s some of the background.

This past summer my wife and I traveled with a great ministry called Clear Camps.  This was our second summer to travel with the organization and we absolutely wouldn’t have done anything else.  We made some great friends and got to learn a lot of what it means to be leaders.  

After the summer my wife was able to go back to her job, but I felt that the Lord wanted me to not go back to mine.  I was fine with that as I felt that it was only a job for a season.  I learned a great deal about myself.  But coming back, knowing what the Lord had called me to, I expected to find a job quickly.  

After we got back from the summer I did what most of us would do and start contacting people for opportunities and applying for jobs.  In doing this though, and without including God in the decision making process, we can easily get ourselves into all sorts of problems.  For me, it was pursuing an opportunity that I really didn’t know much about, but had heard some significant things about it from the amazing people I met within that organization. The more I got in, the more I realized how much it wasn’t for me.  

Opportunity number two didn’t pose much success either as it didn’t go past the first meeting.  I became extremely discouraged after this, as some of you can imagine.  It was here that I really began to search for what the Lord was wanting me to do, and his answer was, Wait. 

If you’re anything like me and grown up in church, then waiting on God is not a new concept as we hear it all the time.  David wrote about waiting in the Psalms.  Paul discussed waiting on Christ in his writings.  So it’s not a new thing.  

Despite that, I need a practical answer.  I need action steps.  A path to take.  Something beyond, “Wait, because it’s in the Bible.”  To me, that answer for any problem in life is useless.  It gives nothing of value, at least not to me.  Nevertheless here’s what I wound up doing, looking up the definition of wait.

Here’s what I found: Wait - to stay, to serve or attend to (like a waiter in a restaurant or nurse), to patiently anticipate, to look forward to eagerly, and to be available or in readiness. 

The ones that caught me were “to patiently anticipate” and “to be available or in readiness.”

Now some of you may look at that and prefer the word wait. To patiently anticipate is no better of an explanation.  I get that.  It’s just a word thing for me.  There’s more action involved in anticipation for me than waiting.  I really like the action part, the one that gives some sort of movement. Let's look at this verse. 

Psalm 130:5 says, “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.”

It really is a great verse. Wait on the Lord, and put our hope in his Word. But it doesn’t say too much to me. Consider this paraphrase with me 

• I patiently anticipate the Lord, my soul stands in readiness, and in him all my expectations are centered. 

So my conclusion is this.  To wait on the Lord is to patiently anticipate his calling us to action.  It is searching for Him.  It is be ready to go when he says go and stop when he says stop.  Waiting is the antithesis of laziness and idleness.  Waiting is expecting.  

So now, when the Lord tells me to wait I know, Waiting = Patiently Anticipate in Readiness.

Book Review: Greater

I recently finished reading the book Greater by Steven Furtick. He is well known as the writer of Sun Stand Still and the lead pastor of Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

Greater: dream bigger, start smaller, ignite God’s vision for your life is a book about just that, igniting God’s vision for our lives. Throughout this entire book he shows us that God is ready to give us more, if we are willing to go for it. Furtick says, “The thing is, most believers aren’t in imminent danger of ruining their lives. They’re facing a danger that’s far greater: wasting them.”  His desire is for every Christian to find the full potential God has for them. 

Overall this book was really great to read.  Furtick bases his entire work on the life of Elisha, and how he came to be one of the greatest prophets we know of in Scripture. He is saying that God has more for each and everyone of us, just like he had for Elisha. This book sure has challenged me to look at my own faith and walk with God and see that there is much more to Christianity than living a mundane life. My kindle version is now full of highlights and notes! 

I received this e-book for free to review from Waterbrook Multnomah Publishers. If you would like your own copy I suggest Amazon. 

David

Trust

Trust. It’s something I believe all Christians struggle with from time to time. Circumstances, emotions, maybe past experiences, but most probably Satan’s lies, can all lead us to a place where we find it hard to trust others, and even God. Most of those times it’s probably logical, valid, and very understandable to think; “Where is God?” “What is he doing?”or “How can God be in this?” Or, as Andy Stanley says, what do you do when God is Inattentive, Uncooperative, or Late?

But even in those times, where we feel like God is nowhere to be found, we can have confidence in the fact that he is trustworthy. He is faithful, constant, loyal and so on. What’s intriguing for me is that he often reminds me of this before I go through a season that could lead to distrust in Him. Let’s look at some of the scripture he showed me:

Matthew 28:6 “He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay.” (NIV)
In my mind that verse reads like this - “He’s not here. He’s risen, just as he said he would. Go and look if you don’t believe me. 

Here’s what I think the take away is from this:

1. Jesus’ words were 100% fulfilled. He said that he would be killed and then rise from the dead in three days. His words can be trusted. 
2. As God speaks to us today, we can rest in knowing that He will fulfill his promises to us. 

To remind you that His word can be trusted from beginning to end, let’s go to Genesis 13:14-18; 

"14 The Lord said to Abram after Lot had parted from him, “Look around from where you are, to the north and south, to the east and west. 15 All the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever. 16 I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted. 17 Go, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I am giving it to you.”18 So Abram went to live near the great trees of Mamre at Hebron, where he pitched his tents. There he built an altar to the Lord."

This is where God first gives Abram a promise that he will make his offspring like the dust of the earth. But, it wasn’t until many years, and a few screw ups on Abram’s part that God began to fulfill this promise through Isaac.  Years later, after the birth of Isaac, I’m sure Abraham was wondering, “God, why are you asking me to sacrifice the son you have given me? How will my offspring be like the dust of the earth if you take him from me?” (Gen 22).  But at this point, we know the rest of the story. Through his obedience, God blessed Abraham, but in those first moments, I’m sure he went through many doubts and questions, wondering if God would really provide the lamb.

So what is God asking you to trust him with today? I bet some of us are where Abraham was in those moments where God asked him to sacrifice Isaac. He’s asking us to give up something. To trust Him. Others of us may be at the beginning, where God has given us a promise, but has yet to fulfill it. And some may be able to look back and see the whole story up to this point. God promised you something and fulfilled it. 

All in all, God is trustworthy. His Word shows us that from the beginning to end. We may not know exactly what he is doing, or when he’ll do it, but he will. 

What is God asking you to trust him with today, in this season of your life?