Let Grace Sink In...

From the great book by Scott Sauls - Jesus Outside the Lines

Free To Love

Small Things With Great Love

Loving As We Are Loved

Loved these "Five Facts About Loving God" by Jason DeRouchie at Desiring God. He is referring to Deuteronomy 10:16-19, which reads:

Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no longerrstubborn. 17 For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords,the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. 18 He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. 19 Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.

1. Loving God with all is a heart issue (verse 16).

Moses first charges Israel to “circumcise the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn” (Deuteronomy 10:16). Israel was hardhearted, and hardhearted people cannot love God. Indeed, their hardness went deep, controlling the core of their very identities. As Moses said in the previous chapter, “You are a stubborn people. . . . From the day you came out of the land of Egypt until you came to this place, you have been rebellious against the LORD” (Deuteronomy 9:6–7). Until their hearts got fixed, love would not be evident.

2. Loving God with all is an idolatry issue (verse 17).

The reason why hardheartedness is such a problem is because God rightfully demands all our allegiance, and any hardness toward him is an idolatry problem. “For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God” (Deuteronomy 10:17). Yahweh is the only God in the pantheon of heaven (Deuteronomy 5:7;6:4), and therefore he alone holds the right to our absolute surrender (Deuteronomy 5:8–10;6:5). He alone is the preeminent savior, sovereign, and satisfier, and therefore misplaced affections are foolish and suicidal. God is to be the sun in our solar system, not one of the planets circling us. Idolatry separates us from love.

3. Loving God with all is about being like God (verses 17–18).

It is at this point in Moses’s sermon that we begin to see more clearly how intimately he tied the call to love our neighbor with the call to love God. Indeed, implied in the text is that those who have hearts of love toward God will ultimately begin to resemble God himself, who “is not partial and takes no bribe. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing” (Deuteronomy 10:17–18).

Idolatry of the heart is seen in a failure to love as God loves. Love for God is displayed in whether we are willing to love our neighbor, even those who are most difficult to love –– to sacrifice our time, treasures, and talents for the sake of those whom God loves.In my own life, I feel that only recently have I begun to understand what it means to love God in this radical neighbor-love way. Over the last five years, my family has journeyed the road of trans-racial, international adoption, seeing the curse of orphan status broken in the lives of three little treasures. By faith the saints of old “were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, . . . were tortured . . . suffered mocking . . . of whom the world was not worthy” (Hebrews 11:34–38).

Radical neighbor-love magnifies the worth of God, regardless of the cost, and displays the type of love God himself has shown. “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant . . . even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve” (Matthew 20:26,28). “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:12–13). May God help us love this way.

Love Descends

"We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbor. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbor."

    — Martin Luther On Christian Liberty (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2003), 62


HT: Of First Importance

Only Love Remains

Some wisdom from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

There will be just one thing in the end, and that is the love that was in our thoughts, worries, wishes, and hopes. Everything else ends and passes away—everything we did not think, and long for, out of love. All thoughts, all knowledge, all talk that has not love comes to an end—only love never ends.

Now if we are aware that something will come to an end, then it is probably not even worth starting. Life is too short and too serious for us to have time to waste, to spend on things that will only come to an end. Now and then we realize this for ourselves with shattering clarity. On New Year's or on our birthday, when we look back at what we have done during the past year or in the period of our lives just past, we are sometimes horrified to see that we have done nothing of lasting value. All our worries and efforts, all the things we have thought and said, have long since died away to nothing. Nothing is left—except perhaps an act of love, a loving thought, a hope for someone else, which may have occurred almost by chance, perhaps without our even being aware of it.

Where this is leading is clear: everything, all our knowledge, insight, thinking, and talking should in the end move toward and turn into love. For only what we think because of love, and in love, will remain, will never end.

Why must everything else come to an end, and why does only love never end? Because only in love does a person let go of himself or herself and give up his or her will, for the other person's benefit. Because love alone comes not from my own self but from another self, from God's self. Because it is through love alone that God acts through us—whereas in everything else it is we ourselves who are at work; it is our thoughts, our speaking, our knowledge—but it is God's love. And what is ours comes to an end, all of it—but what is of God remains. Because love is God's very self and God's will; that is why it never ends, it never doubts, it stays its course …. It goes out to enemies as well as to friends, and it never abandons anyone, even when it is abandoned by everyone. Love follows after its beloved through guilt and disgrace and loneliness, all of which are no part of it; it is simply there and never ends. And it blesses every place it enters. Everywhere it goes, it finds imperfection and bears witness to perfection.

- From, The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer


Hat Tip: Vitamin Z

In Christ and the Neighbor

The Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and the neighbor. He lives in Christ through faith and in his neighbor through love.

           –Martin Luther, Freedom of the Christian 1520.

Hat Tip: Liberate