Running a Race of Love

This was the first time I had ever been exposed to the idea that there are “degrees” of loving self, others, and God. And honestly, I was happier in my ignorance. While reading through Bernard's comments on the first degree of love, I was feeling pretty confident. I can love myself for my own sake. That's not a problem. Whew, one down. I started tearing through to the next degree of love, loving God for my own sake. Originally at a sprint, energized by how great of a self-lover I am, I dropped down to a jog and started breathing heavy as I began considering loving God for my own sake. I kept moving on, even though I was really starting to labor at the thought that I am to love someone besides myself. I started feeling pretty convicted at the fact that I am pathetically out of shape in regards to loving someone else. How often do I really stop and acknowledge the provision of my loving Father? Hoping to break through the “runner's wall”, I carried myself onward into the third degree. Here, I confess, I collapsed to my knees in exhaustion. How am I to love this God for his sake? I cannot make it all the way to that fourth degree of love. But then something startled me as I finally stopped running; I was still moving forward. I had not been loving myself, nor trying to love the Lord, by my own power at all. My exertion was not the reason I was running forward. It was the very presence of God's love that was driving me forward into more intimate love with Him. There is only one way to love like Bernard's fourth degree. Christ must carry us in His Love.

Discipleship Starts with Obedience

Matthew 5:
1. Rejoice and be glad in persecution (v.12)
2. Let your light shine through good works so that others may glorify God (v.16)
3. Uphold the law and teach others to keep it (v.19)
4. Be salt that remains useful (v. 13)
5. If any portion of your person causes you to sin, but it to death and destroy it (v.29-30)
6. Do not lust or commit adultery
7. Do not divorce your spouse on anything other than sexual infidelity
8. Do not swear oaths by the world's standards
9. Do not retaliate with evil against those who do evil to you
10. Love people


I struggle with some very humiliatingly simple commands from the Lord, on a daily basis. Reading through the list I compiled from Matthew 5, the two particular commands that stood out to me the most were very easy to spot. The first was Jesus' command to put to death any member of my body that causes me to sin. I don't like that command. Killing the sin in me requires me to kill parts of me, and I'm not typically willing to inflict such pain on myself. Yet, how am I to grow into the appearance of Christ if I'm not willing to be crushed and made anew? The second commandment that has broken me time and time again is Jesus' call for us to love people, including our enemies. As a Church, we struggle a great deal with this concept. We can articulate it, but we avoid putting it into action. Love costs me everything that I am and everything I hold dear. To love another is to choose to not seek after my own welfare. Yet, this is the greatest calling Jesus declares among his people: Love, so as to fulfill the Law. If I truly desire to be discipled into the likeness of Jesus Christ, I must deny myself and love radically, faithfully, selflessly.

The Mission of Macedonia Baptist Church

Before we started a college ministry at Macedonia Baptist, I spent each week in the Young Married Couples Sunday class on Sunday mornings. I mention that because I found something very interesting about those particular people in that class, something quite contrary to what I would most often expect anywhere else. The couples were intently interested in God's Word, and very supportive of the church financially, and very communicative in class. But none of those things were novelties. What I found surprising about these people was that their goal was not built around themselves. They understood that the Church is about service and ministry, about people and community, but most importantly, it's about the saving work of Christ on a cross on our behalf. It's about making "little Christs". Their desire was for God's Word to shape them, to challenge them, to break them, to break the people around them, and then let the love of Christ build them back again in his image. If they, as a class, were not being conformed to the image of God and therefore drawing others around them to the love of Jesus, they were not being obedient to His call and all of their work was "simply a waste of time". I was saddened at how foreign that environment felt from my previous church experience. God is about His Church, and we are to be about Him and His Glory and His Son and His people whom he loves.

Groomed and Grassy Fields

After seeing how C. S. Lewis dealt with this "natural self" of ours, I was immediately convicted of my tendency towards self-importance. Daily I find myself struggling with a strong proclivity to "be" someone and to "define who I am", but as my day draws to a close I discover that I have not changed. God requires all of me, including my very identity, my pride, my "self-made" persona. I am very much like Lewis's grass field that cannot bear but grass when I'm to be a rich and golden wheat field. I can sheer myself down with discipline, with"good works", with appearance, with eloquence, but more is required from me than a haircut. I have to be plowed up and resown. My identity has to be broken and stolen. I have to receive Christ's identity, his seed in my life, from which I can be bountiful for His name's sake. Not mine.