“The command to love God is first not simply because it’s most important but because it’s the only commandment. God is One; God is the only one; God is all. How we do anything is how we love God. How we love a neighbor, love a stranger, love an enemy, this is our love of […]
If we believe the Gospels, so much of what we pray for has been already given to us; still we continue to pray for God’s promised love and forgiveness. Why do we do that? Do we not trust the record that God has left for us? Here are a few examples of his promises to […]
When Jesus says we are to love God with all of ourselves and to love our neighbors as ourselves[Mark 12: 28-31], he is showing us the way. And when he says we are to forgive another 70 times [Matthew 18:22], he is telling us to forgive always, that there should be no limit to our […]
Jesus summed up all that the law and prophets had recorded in the Old Testament in the Two Great Commandments: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, Love your neighbor as yourself.”[Luke 10:27] We don’t need the […]
It is not the New Jerusalem. Or Zion. Or Canaan. The Land of Milk and Honey. The Promised Land. It is the kingdom of God as Jesus described it in many places in the New Testament. It is not a place, but a state of mind. We live in the kingdom of God when we […]
If you want to know how to love people, first things first—listen to them deeply. Ask about their lives, what their hopes and dreams are, what it costs them to live as they live. Ask about their faith, if they have any. And when you have a real sense of the person before you, then […]
Paul wrote of the one body, the one church of Jesus Christ.[1] He wrote that Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free are all one in Christ Jesus.[2] But the church today is splintered and divided, certainly not one body, the one church of Jesus Christ. Certainly Paul, as a Roman citizen, a […]
There is no blanket like fear to squelch creativity, love and connectedness. There is no wall like anger which holds everyone, including God, at a distance. There is no dike like anxiety to hold back the tide of life. Fear, anger and anxiety are the sirens of modern life which call us to self-absorption, isolation, […]
The kingdom is a state of heart and mind, not a place. It is embedded in the connective tissue of the universe which is Christ; it is love, as in God is love, that binds us all together. Whoever carries the kingdom in their heart and mind brings it wherever they go. The kingdom is […]
Unexpressed grief does not go away. Suppressed anger has to come out somewhere. Fear, too, and anxiety, reside in our psyches—mind, body and spirit—until we are ready to examine them and to express them, then to decide whether these emotions are to rule us or not. Each of these emotions when we […]