Daily Meditation

Learning to Love

Ligonier Ministries

Love is a popular topic, one that evokes warm feelings and a rush of spiritual adrenaline. Every year the polls indicate that the chapter of the Bible voted “most popular” is 1 Corinthians 13. This is the famous “love chapter” of the Bible. That this chapter holds such perennial appeal for Christians indicates something of the profound concern we have for the matter of love.

1 Corinthians 13 is a double-edged sword, however. It not only comforts us with an inspiring and exalted rhapsody of love, it also presents a portrait of the nature of love so clearly that it reveals the flaws and warts of our feeble exercise of love. It shows us how unloving we are. It sets the bar, presenting a norm of love that condemns us for falling so miserably short of it.

Perhaps our delight in the love chapter rests upon a superficial nod toward this biblical paean of love. Maybe we read its eloquent words as if they were merely the lyrics of a romantic ballad. But once we probe the content of the chapter, discomfort inevitably sets in.

The ultimate norm of love is God Himself. His love is utterly perfect, containing no shadow that would obscure its brilliant purity.

Coram Deo

Prayerfully study 1 Corinthians 13. How does your love measure up to these standards?

Passages for Further Study

1 Corinthians 13:1–3

Daily Meditation

Learning to Love

Ligonier Ministries

Love is a popular topic, one that evokes warm feelings and a rush of spiritual adrenaline. Every year the polls indicate that the chapter of the Bible voted “most popular” is 1 Corinthians 13. This is the famous “love chapter” of the Bible. That this chapter holds such perennial appeal for Christians indicates something of the profound concern we have for the matter of love.

1 Corinthians 13 is a double-edged sword, however. It not only comforts us with an inspiring and exalted rhapsody of love, it also presents a portrait of the nature of love so clearly that it reveals the flaws and warts of our feeble exercise of love. It shows us how unloving we are. It sets the bar, presenting a norm of love that condemns us for falling so miserably short of it.

Perhaps our delight in the love chapter rests upon a superficial nod toward this biblical paean of love. Maybe we read its eloquent words as if they were merely the lyrics of a romantic ballad. But once we probe the content of the chapter, discomfort inevitably sets in.

The ultimate norm of love is God Himself. His love is utterly perfect, containing no shadow that would obscure its brilliant purity.

Coram Deo

Prayerfully study 1 Corinthians 13. How does your love measure up to these standards?

Passages for Further Study

1 Corinthians 13:1–3

Daily Meditation

Learning To Love Our Neighbour

C. S. Lewis

The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.

There is, indeed, one exception. If you do him a good turn, not to please God and obey the law of charity, but to show him what a fine forgiving chap you are, and to put him in your debt, and then sit down to wait for his ‘gratitude’, you will probably be disappointed. (People are not fools: they have a very quick eye for anything like showing off, or patronage.) But whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less.

From Mere Christianity
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Daily Meditation

Love and Marriage, Horse and Carriage

C.S. Lewis

If the old fairy-tale ending ‘They lived happily ever after’ is taken to mean ‘They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married’, then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships?

But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense—love as distinct from ‘being in love’—is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God.

They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be ‘in love’ with someone else. ‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.

From Mere Christianity
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Daily Devotional

When Will I Be Satisfied?

“I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” (John 17:26)

John Piper

Imagine being able to enjoy what is most enjoyable with unbounded energy and passion forever.

This is not now our experience. Three things stand in the way of our complete satisfaction in this world.

• Nothing has a personal worth great enough to meet the deepest longings of our hearts.
• We lack the strength to savor the best treasures to their maximum worth.
• Our joys here come to an end. Nothing lasts.

But if the aim of Jesus in John 17:26 comes true, all this will change.

If God’s pleasure in the Son becomes our pleasure, then the object of our pleasure, Jesus, will be inexhaustible in personal worth. He will never become boring or disappointing or frustrating. No greater treasure can be conceived than the Son of God.

Moreover, our ability to savor this inexhaustible treasure will not be limited by human weaknesses. We will enjoy the Son of God with the very enjoyment of his Father.  God’s delight in his Son will be in us and it will be ours. And this will never end, because neither the Father nor the Son ever ends. Their love for each other will be our love for them and therefore our loving them will never die.

Faith, Hope, and Love

And the Greatest of These Is . . . 

Surprises on the "upside" are always welcome.  So, it came to pass, when we read the following piece in the NZ Herald.  It was written in defence of human life and the protection of the most vulnerable of all:

Diagnosed with Down Syndrome before she was born, a US woman's doctor recommended she abort her unborn child.  But Courtney Baker and her husband, despite being told their quality of life would suffer, decided to proceed with the pregnancy and gave birth to little Emersyn Faith, known fondly as Emmy, 15 months ago.

Last month Courtney wrote a letter to the doctor and together with Emmy, mailed to to him.  This is their letter:


Courtney Baker and her daughter, who was born with Down syndrome, Emmy. Photo / 

"Dear Doctor,

A friend recently told me of when her prenatal specialist would see her child during her sonograms, he would comment, 'He's perfect.' Once her son was born with Down syndrome, she visited that same doctor. He looked at her little boy and said, 'I told you.  He's perfect.'  Her story tore me apart. While I was so grateful for my friend's experience, it filled me with such sorrow because of what I should have had. I wish you would have been that doctor.

Another Pagan Dualism

How To Stop Sexualizing Everything

By D.C. McAllister
The Federalist

“Bye, I love you!” I said as I hung up the phone. My 15-year-old daughter was in the car at the time and asked who I was talking to. “My friend, Leslie, from Texas.”

“A woman?” she said. “That’s just weird, mom.”

I laughed. “No it’s not. She’s my friend and I do love her very much. Why shouldn’t I tell her that?” My daughter just shook her head and said, “It’s kinda gay, don’t you think?”

“No, it’s not gay. I have friends I kiss, too—on the lips! And I hug them and I get excited when I see them. I adore them, and I’m devoted to them. I have friends who captivate me with their beauty and intelligence. I tell them so. I tell them I think they’re beautiful and amazing. It’s nothing sexual. It’s phileo.”

“What’s phileo?” she asked.  “It’s friendship love,” I explained. “It’s passionate, but not like erotic love. It’s wonderful and stimulating. It’s probably the best kind of love when you really experience it, but so few of us do.”  She shook her head again. “Mom, you’re weird.”

I guess I am kind of weird. I confess: I’m very passionate about my friends. But am I the abnormal one, or is there something wrong with our society?

When Love Dies

The Consequences of Perverse Doctrines 

If ever the wicked underbelly of Islam is being exposed to adherents of that religion it is now.  They have witnessed decades of war between Islamic nations.  They have beheld the fanaticism and murderous acts of terrorist suicidal jihadis. More recently they have beheld the depredations of ISIS--its cruelty, bloodthirstiness, and its fervent commitment to raping and killing of innocents as a religious duty.  And now they are witnessing the cold indifference of Islamic nations to Islamic refugees.

Allah is a monistic god.  The One is ultimate.  And therefore there is only one way, one view, one perspective.  True followers of Allah cannot escape the constricts of this monism.  There are not two authorities in a family (father and mother) but one only.  There are not two equal sexes in the human race.  There is the male, who dominates all else in family life.  Male children carry more authority as they grow than mothers.

Another a consequence of monism within Islam is that theological and religious difference are intolerable.

Daily Devotional

Being In Love

C. S. Lewis

If the old fairy-tale ending ‘They lived happily ever after’ is taken to mean ‘They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married’, then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships?

But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense—love as distinct from ‘being in love’—is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be ‘in love’ with someone else.

‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.
From Mere Christianity
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Good News

Glad Tidings of Great Joy

Sometimes folk debate what love and kindness "looks like".  Here is an example of what love looks like in the spheres of community and family.  There have been at least a couple of reports [TheBlaze and TodayNews] about this incident and its backstory, and we have drawn upon both.

'All I could do was hug him' 

Grad, 18, reunites with firefighter who saved her as a baby

Last Sunday was a landmark occasion for 18-year-old Skyler James, and not just because she celebrated graduating from high school.  For the first time, she also got to meet the firefighter who, on a bitterly cold November morning in 1995, found her — a newborn baby — abandoned beneath a snow-laden pine tree in an Illinois cemetery.  “It’s so amazing to be able to know the person who saved my life,” Skyler told TODAY.com. “Without him I probably wouldn’t be here right now.”

Bonnie and Greg James of Charleston, Ill., adopted Skyler five days after firefighter Charlie Heflin discovered her under that tree. The couple told Skyler the story of how she joined their family as soon as she was old enough to understand. When Skyler was 5, Bonnie James began searching for Heflin in the phone books of nearby communities, but without any luck. . . . [TodayNews]

The Meaning of Christmas

Echoes of Calvary

It pleases the Lord from time to time to remind us what true love, what great love looks like.  This Christmas season in New Zealand He has done just that--yet again.  Here is the story, as it appeared in Stuff:

Mother makes supreme sacrifice for son

HARRY PEARL

Last updated 05:00 21/12/2013

 

Jennifer Doolabh was never meant to fall pregnant for a third time.

She had a new partner, sure, but the doctors told her it was rare for someone in her situation. She had undergone nearly a year of chemotherapy and radiation after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012.  But around June, while enduring another bout of radiation treatment and preparing for hormone therapy, she was delivered the news.

"It was a shock," she says, at her home in Hamilton. "We just thought I couldn't get pregnant and they were just about to suppress my ovaries. I was about to go on other treatment as well." So instead she stopped treatment, in order to give her baby a better chance of survival.

On Monday she'll finally give birth to her son Matthias - which means God's gift in Hebrew - just in time for Christmas, though she knows it could be the last one she will spend with him.  He'll be born six weeks early, but it's a wonder he will be born at all.

Meaningless Morass, Part II

Holy Discrimination

In Part I of "Meaningless Morass" we argued that the concept of social justice is meaningless because it can be expanded to embrace anything which a human being thinks is good.  Social justice, once the "good" is identified is a social or political order which delivers the good, whatever it may be.

Take, as an example, the evil of abortion.  Since some believe that a woman's "right" to her own body is axiomatic and ultimate, the rights of the unborn child are subordinate (at best), non-existent, at worst (the unborn is not human, therefore by definition cannot have human rights).  Therefore, abortion is a good thing, preserving a woman's control (or, property right) over her own body.  Consequently the cause of social justice must provide free, accessible abortion.  If not, injustice stalks the land. 

In addition, modern Nazi organizations assert they are committed to social justice for white people, which means getting for white people what they are due.  What white people are due, presumably, is their rightful position of racial supremacy.  Modern communist parties also claim they are committed to achieving social justice.  Naturally, the notion of what is just is worlds apart from Nazi ideology.  But both alike claim they represent the cause of social justice.

Christians are starting to get swept up in this errant nonsense.

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

April 25

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
OPC Website

Bible Text:
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. —John 15:13

Devotional:
"Greater love hath no man than this." Christ sometimes proclaims the greatness of his love to us, that he may more fully confirm our confidence in our salvation; but now he proceeds further, in order to inflame us by his example, to love the brethren. Yet he joins both together; for he means that we should taste by faith how inestimably delightful his goodness is, and next he allures us in this way to cultivate brotherly love.

Thus Paul writes, "Walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and sacrifice to God of a sweet-smelling savor" (Eph. 5:2). God might have redeemed us by a single word, or by a mere act of his will, if he had not thought it better to do otherwise for our own benefit, that, by not sparing his own well-beloved Son, he might testify in his person how much he cares for our salvation.

But now our hearts, if they are not softened by the inestimable sweetness of Divine love, must be harder than stone or iron. —Commentaries

---

John Calvin was the premier theologian of the Reformation, but also a pious and godly Christian pastor who endeavored throughout his life to point men and women to Christ. We are grateful to Reformation Heritage Books for permission to use John Calvin's Thine Is My Heart as our daily devotional for 2013 on the OPC Web site. You can currently obtain a printed copy of that book from Reformation Heritage Books.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Hey, This Knife Cuts in Two Directions! 

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, 07 September 2012

Suppose the point were to be made -- and it is a worthy point to make -- that being a Christian trumps being an American. This is a point with which I am in whole-hearted agreement, and which I have made in this place numerous times. A conservative Republican believer in Jesus has far more in common with a Palestinian Christian than he does with a secular representative of the state of Israel. A thousand amens. Jesus makes all the difference.

But there is a way of agreeing with this that shows one is growing up into the fundamental tenets of "mere Christendom," and there is another way of agreeing with it that shows one is just becoming a liberal. There is a way of appealing to Jesus because you find Jesus appealing, and there is a way of appealing to Jesus because you find American hegemony unappealing.

God's Masks and God's Speech

Living Holy Lives

Martin Luther had a profoundly biblical understanding of the creation.  He also had a profound understanding of the immanence of God in all He has made.  God is working in and through all things.  All things.  So declares the Bible (Romans 11:33-36).  So believed Martin Luther. 

One implication was that Luther had a deep respect for one's circumstances in life.  They were a living Bible of natural revelation.  Our circumstances, he said, were comprehensively ordained and ordered by God.  They were God's "masks".  Behind each and every circumstance was the Person of God Himself.

Christian Charity

Unlike Any Other

This from John Calvin:

The Lord commands us to do "good unto all men," universally, a great part of whom, estimated according to their own merits, are very undeserving; but here the Scripture assists us with an excellent rule, when it inculcates, that we must not regard the intrinsic merit of men, but must consider the image of God in them, to which we owe all possible honour and love; but that this image is most carefully to be observed in them "who are of the household of faith," inasmuch as it is renewed and restored by the spirit of Christ.  Whoever, therefore, is presented to you that needs your kind offices, you have no reason to refuse him your assistance.

Meditation on the Text of the Week

No-One Beneath One's Dignity

For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.
Mark 10:45

So long as we think of ourselves and of what is due to us from others, it will be impossible for us to minister to very many people. But where true Christian love reigns in the heart, the centre of life falls no longer inside the narrow circle of self.

Those who carefully study our Lord's life will be struck with His wonderful reverence for human life. He looks upon no one with disdain or contempt. The meanest fragment of humanity that crept into His presence, trampled, torn, stained, defiled was yet sacred in His eyes. He never despised any human being. And, further, He stood before men, not as a king, demanding attention, reverence, service, but as one who wished to serve, to help, to lift up. He said He had not come to be ministered unto, but to minister. He never thought of what was due from men to Him, but always of what He could do for them, how He could serve them.

How could it be otherwise, since He came to earth solely to save men, and since His heart was so full of love for them? Whenever a human being stood before Him, He saw one in whose heart were sorrows which needed sympathy, or one bruised by sin needing healing and restoration. Thus He was easily able to serve all. The more repulsive the life that stood before Him, the more deeply, in one sense, did it appeal to His love, because it needed His help all the more on account of its repulsiveness.

There was not one whom He thought it a degradation to serve. When the disciples were quarrelling as to which one should take the servant's place and wash the feet of others, He quietly arose and peformed the humble service. He was never more conscious of His exalted glory than He was that hour, and yet there was no reluctance in His heart. The question of their immeasurable inferiority to Him never rose in His mind. . . . When we have learned to look upon human lives as He did, it will be no painful task to minister, at whatever cost, to the lowliest and most unworthy about us.

We are willing enough to serve those whom we honour. But we are apt to hold our lives as too sacred to be spent or sacrificed for the sake of those whom we regard as beneath ourselves. . . . When we learn to measure others, not by their rank and station, but by the worth of their spiritual nature, by their immortality, by the possibilities that lie in the most ruined life, it will be no longer humiliating for us to do even the humblest service for the least of God's creatures. Then there will be nothing in us that will seem too rich or too sacred to be poured out for the sake even of the most despised. We may honour ourselves and may be conscious of all the power and dignity of our lives as God's children, and yet not think ourselves too good to minister to the smallest and the least.

We must not think of ourselves as deserving attention from others. We are not in this world to be made much of, or to be waited upon and served. . . . Rather, we are to regard ourselves as the servants of others for Jesus sake. We are to put ourselves before men as our Master did, not asking what benefit or help we can get from them, but what we can do for them. . . . Instead of being repelled by men's moral repulsiveness, our pity is stirred and our hearts go out in deep, loving longing to heal and to bless them. Instead of being offended by men's rudeness and unkindness, we bear patiently with their faults, hoping to do them good. Nothing that they may do to us turns our love to hate. We continue to seek their interest despite their slights, insults and cruelties. We are glad to spend and be spent for others even though the more abundantly we love them the less they love us. . . .

We cannot love them as we do our friends. We cannot approve their faults or commend their immoralities or make black white. We cannot make ourselves think their characters beautiful when they are full of repulsiveness, or their conduct right when it is manifestly wrong. Love plays no such tricks with our moral perceptions. It does not hoodwink us or make us colour blind. It does not make us tolerant of sin or indifferent to men's blemishes. Christ never lowered, by so much as a hair's breadth, the perfect standard of holiness by which He measured all men and all life. Nor must we. . . . We are not to look upon any sin leniently or apologetically, and yet we are to love the sinner, to pity him and have compassion upon him, and instead of turning away from him in horror and self-righteous pride we are to seek by every means to lift him up and save him.

Under all the ruin of his sin is the shattered beauty of the divine image which the gentle fingers of love may repair and restore.

Dr J R Miller, Week-Day Religion, 1897

The Truth About The Tolerant

Urban Myths About Christian Fundamentalists

If you were to be given a list of various categories of people and be asked to rank them according to least tolerant to most tolerant, and "Right-Wing Christian Fundamentalists" was one of the category groups, we suspect that most people would think that they would feature as one of the least tolerant of social or religious groups.

We were intrigued to read the following in a book published by MatthiasMedia in Sydney on some research that has been carried out on this very question:

In a book called The Religious Factor in Australian Life, Gary Bouma analyses the results of an extensive "values survey" that was carried out in Australia in 1983.

One part of the survey dealt with "tolerance" by asking people about their attitudes to various "undesirable" groups. People were asked: "Would you object to your next door neighbours being--people with a criminal record; people of a different race; students; left-wing extremsists; never-married mothers; heavy drinkers; people with large families; right-wing extremists; emotionally unstable people; members of minority religious sects or cults; immigrants/foreign workers; unemployed persons; aborigines; homosexuals?"

The answers were analysed according to various social and religious groupings and an "index of tolerance" was calculated showing, on average, the tolerance level of different groups. In the religious category there were five groupings:

-Roman Catholic
-Anglican
-Presbyterian, Methodist, Uniting
-Right Wing Protestants
-No Religion

Can you guess which group was the most tolerant?

The survey results ranked them as follows, from most to least tolerant:

1. Right-Wing Protestants
2. Anglican
3. Presbyterian, Methodist, Uniting
4. Roman Catholic
5. No Religion

The result surprised everybody. The hardline, fundamentalist, Bible-bashing Christians turned out to be the most tolerant group by a significant margin. Those with no religion came last, also by a significant margin. We might well wonder why this is the case.

Why indeed? Here is our take on it. Bible-believing Christians have a clear view on what is right and wrong. Such things are defined by Holy Writ. Therefore, they will have convictions that such practices as abortion, homosexuality, and drunkenness are wrong and sinful. People naively assume that having such strong convictions means that Bible-believing Christians will be intolerant and uncaring of people taken in such sins.

But Bible-believing Christians also are deeply convicted over their own sinfulness and sins. Because of the gracious on-going work of the Holy Spirit in their lives they constantly see the logs in their own eyes. When face-to-face with one taken in such sinfulness, they are more likely to have a sorrow over sinfulness, rather than a haughty disgust and condemnation.

Moreover, all Bible-believing Christians hold to the redeeming love of Christ towards sinful men and that whosoever comes to Christ will be saved from their sin. Therefore, living next to notoriously sinful people or interacting with others in general tends to be framed by an over-arching desire that they, too, would come to know the Lord. Bible-believing Christians know that "there but for the grace of God, go I" and that at best they are nothing more than one beggar telling another beggar where he can find food.

Hence, while the survey results may surprise those who subscribe to the urban myths about "fundamentalist Christians", they will certainly not surprise those who walk in fields of grace.

Meditation on the Text of the Week

Signs of the Times

Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your might.
Deuteronomy 6: 4, 5

What ought to be the outstanding characteristic of the Christian and the Christian community? The answer depends to an extent on who is asking. If it is the Unbelievers in Athens who are asking, they will have all sorts of weird notions and expectations of what Christians and their communities ought to be like. Most of these notions reflect their own self-love and idolatry. "Christians," they would solemnly tell us, "ought not to be judgmental. They should defend a woman's right to abort."

If it is the Word of God which is interrogating us, the answer is plainly presented in our text. It is the last answer that Athens would ever have given. The chief characteristic of our communal and familial and individual existence must be our all-consuming love of God. It is to be the love of our whole heart, our entire soul, and all our strength.

This text became the Shema in Israel—the great and central confession of faith. In this wonderful and sacred tradition we stand. Nothing has changed with the coming of the New Covenant. Our Lord glossed this text to declare that this command was the greatest commandment of all. (Matthew 22: 37)

The all-consuming love of God. It includes our fear of God; our deep respect of God; our awe, our reverence, our service of God; our joy, boasting, faith, and hope in God; it includes our worship, praise, and adoration of our God and Father. It leads us to obey God and keep His commandments.

Our love of God is framed by two historical realities. The first is creation. The Almighty spoke and out of nothing, the heavens, earth, and man were made. The entirety of our being and existence is due to Him; therefore, it is only right that we love, honour, serve and obey Him with all our being.

The second historical reality is redemption. The grotesque sin of human kind in not loving God as we ought, and loving the creature more than the Creator, was not the end of the matter. To this wretched mistake, the Lord added His wonderful redemption. He took us out of slavery, and brought us to a wide open place where the glory of the original creation will not just be restored, but consummated.

Thus, the command to love the Lord our God with all our beings is given to Israel as a loved, redeemed, and restored people. Israel is given these commandments so that they may keep them in the land which God was about to give them—even as He had promised their fathers, a land flowing with milk and honey. (Deuteronomy 6: 1—4) Their sin was to be, and ours has been, atoned and covered in the life and death of our Lord.

Now, our fathers could, and we can, love God freely without condemnation. Without the removal of the condemnation of our sins, we could never even begin to keep God's commandments again. Our love would ever have been a servile and crass attempt to manipulate God Himself.

Because our love of God is to be all consuming, worship is as important as service. Setting apart the Sabbath is as important as the six days of labour. Prayer is as important as good works. Joy is as important as mourning. Fear and reverence is as important as laughter and exuberance. Feasting is as important as self-denial.

About these things Athens knows nothing. It can only look from afar. But it can only look askance, with a niggardly glance. Nevertheless our joyous and reverent love of God is to he the hall mark of our lives and Christian community.

Of course it lead inextricably to the second great commandment: that we should love our neighbour as ourselves. This second great commandment (which sums up the fifth to the tenth commandments) is an outworking of the first and greatest commandment to love God with all our being. By this we testify before the watching world that we belong to God and are disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Regardless of what spurious notions and expectations Unbelievers might have of Christians and the covenant community, we, the redeemed of the Lord know what we are about. In a word--we are about Him.

Meditation on the Text of the Week

The Light of His Countenance

For His anger is but for a moment; His favour is for a lifetime;
Weeping may last for the night, but a shout of joy comes in the morning
Psalm 30:5

Our text portrays the inequality of God's wrath and favour. His anger is temporary, short-lived, soon over. His favour, however, is constant, abiding, and life-long. This means that for His people, the wrath of God occurs only within the context of an already established love and faithfulness. The love and faithfulness of God is the “deeper magic” of life.

The perfect analogy is the love of parents for a child. A parent's love is both faithful and constant. It undergirds the entire relationship with the child. It shapes the way the household operates. It sets the household schedules, its preoccupations, the meals, the budgets, and the activities. It is the love of parents for children which shapes the household as a child-centred environment. A parent's love for a child lasts the entire lifetime of the child—as long as the parent lives on the earth. Age does not diminish the love, it only changes its modes of expression.

It is interesting to find that as we have grown older and our children have become adults and parents in their own right, our thoughts and cares and concerns for our children (and now their spouses) have not lessened one wit. We find that our thoughts are constantly bent toward them, daily.

The favour of parents toward a child is for a lifetime. Consequently, the anger of parents towards their children is brief and fleeting. We refer here, of course, to the righteous anger of parents when they must chasten and discipline their children for their wrong doing. The ignominy of bad behaviour provokes the anger; faithfulness leads them to discipline the child. In this context, even the wrath becomes an expression of loyalty, love, and faithfulness.

But these realities of parental love are but a pale reflection of the intensity and the constancy of the love of our Father in heaven toward us. If we being evil are able to love our children in this way, how much more our Father, the Lord of glory.

This is why the people of God are characterised by a perpetual, irrepressible happiness. Clearly God's people suffer—often terribly so—in this life. Sometimes our suffering is due to our own stupid actions. We bear painful consequences of foolish behaviour. But it passes. God's people return again to have the light of God's countenance lifted up upon them.

As our text says, in the most moving of images: weeping may last for the night, but with the morning comes the shout of joy. Most of us have spent more than a few harrowing nights. We have experienced the truth of the proverb that it is darkest just before the dawn. But as the dawn has broken and the sun has risen, the pains and anxieties lessen, and one knows yet again that underneath are the everlasting arms. We know that God will again turn our mourning into dancing and our sackcloth into gladness (verse 11).

The opposite is too fearsome to contemplate. To sense that the entire cosmos is against you and lives in sleepless malice towards you is too great to bear. But that is the essence of the circumstance in which all Unbelievers live. Suppressing the truth about God, they have carelessly sought to give Him the flick. The Bible describes the condition of life of the Unbeliever as one upon whom the wrath of God abides. (John 3:36) Therefore all experiences of love and joy are fleeting, temporary and chimerical. Children will end up hating parents. Parents come to despise and detest their children. Hell is the state where each hates all and all hate each. The implacable wrath of the entire cosmos is known and experienced without end.

This is what our Saviour experienced on the Cross in His descent into Hell. It is from this that our Saviour came to deliver us. While there is still time, while it is still today, we call upon all men to repent and turn from their evil ways, and believe upon Him, for, as the apostle declared, He is the only Name on earth, given by God, amongst men, by which we must be saved.