Good morning!
Welcome to your morning coffee! May our Heavenly Father teach us again what it means to love him, to love each other, and to show that love to the world. Father, we need your help. We are so deeply set against loving as you love. Our flesh is broken. Our spirit, without your Spirit, is weak. We need you. In Jesus's name teach us to love in your way and according to your will. By your Spirit fill us up with your love, full to overflowing!
Your Morning Song: "Smellin' Coffee" by Chris Rice
Your Morning Scripture: 1 Corinthians 16:14
Let all that you do be done in love.
...
Paul, in writing to the Corinthians, finishes his letter by stringing together a few parting encouraging commands, the last of which is this verse above.
Love. But what kind? Paul is writing (or dictating) in Greek, so we have some options.
Eros? Romantic love?
Phileo? Brotherly, friendship love?
Storge? The love amongst family?
It is agape. The love that is given, not felt, to another for their good without need of return.
Church, let all you do be done in agape. How're you doing with that?
I struggle. Agape isn't something I can form my whole life around by accident. It has to be done on purpose because nothing in my flesh will instinctively agape anyone. You cannot agape God or anyone else if you are not actively denying yourself, your sin-broken flesh full of selfish pride.
One of the mistakes we often make when even attempting to form our lives around God's command to agape in all things, is to intellectually affirm the rightness of the command, but make no functional, practical changes to our daily lives.
Brennan Manning said, "The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and then walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable."
Church, let all you do be done in full submission of your whole self to Jesus's agape love for you. And as you do, ask God to go looking about in you for any place, any space, any inch where there is no agape. And beg him to fill it up unto overflowing.
And if you're anything like me, you have a decent understanding of how absolutely impossible it is to obey this command. There is no agape in me! No agape, without God's help.
And there's the answer, the trick, the punchline. Of course there is no agape in you, until God pours his love into you by his Spirit, in the name and work of his Son, and his agape in you overflows from out of you.
The only way to do all things in agape is to fully embrace and entrust yourself to God's agape love for you, and as he fills you to overflowing (Psalm 23:5), you will overflow agape love into all that you think, say, and do.
For God never commands us
without making us able to obey.
In all you do Church,
Agape! Agape! Agape!
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