If they gave out Oscars for pretend love there’d be a lot of nominees because unfortunately we all can be pretty good at pretending we love other people when we don’t. We have had so much training at being fake we can do it at moment’s notice. If I called your house and you were screaming at your kids, how would you answer? Hello, how are you, great, great… I rest my case. Since we’ve had so much practice at pretending, we easily master the skill of saying the right things and looking like we care about other people when … Continue reading Sincere Love

I’m reminded how well God knows me every time I open the Bible. Studying, it becomes obvious that the Bible isn’t simply a book written about people long ago, it’s a book God uses to speak to me, today. I’ve been reminded of that as we’ve thought about the ways the Bible says we justify ourselves. We’ve seen that even though we know we are supposed to love other people, we sometimes, o.k., often don’t, and yet we don’t feel convicted about it because we justify our behavior. So far, we’ve looked at three ways we do that – we … Continue reading Adventures in Self-Justification part two

I don’t know if you read many “blogs.” There are a whole lot of good ones out there. There are also a lot of bad ones. Some of the bad ones are pretty sad ones, because it doesn’t take much time reading many of those blogs, and we’re talking about “Christian” blogs, to discover that sometimes people who know a whole lot about the Bible can be mean. Obviously that shouldn’t surprise us. It shouldn’t surprise us that people who know a whole lot about the Bible can act in mean ways, because for one thing, we know ourselves. We … Continue reading Adventures in Self-Justification…

We’ve seen that people who know they should be loving often aren’t. We’ve also seen it is sometimes amazing the mean things people will do, who know better. What is even more amazing is when they don’t feel bad about it. The question I want us to think about today: Why is that? The Bible reveals one of the primary ways we shield ourselves from really being challenged by all the calls to love. (You might say this is one of the ways we wriggle out of conviction…) It’s found in Luke 10. Whether you know it or not, you … Continue reading Love…Who Me?

The Bible doesn’t only tell us that supposedly spiritual people are often mean, it also provides us with all kinds of specific examples of how supposedly spiritual people fail to love their neighbor. Take Cain to begin with. He becomes jealous and then goes out and actually gets physically violent with his own brother. Jealousy is a pretty big problem for spiritual people. That was one of Saul’s main issues. You remember how Saul started hating David when David started getting popular with his fellow Israelites. After that, Saul started strategizing to bring David down, got angry with his own … Continue reading Where’s the love? Part two…

The Bible is filled with examples of people who were very “spiritual” and at the same time very mean. You can start all the way back at the beginning. Think about Adam’s boy, Cain. It’d probably be too much to say Cain was a very religious person because we don’t know that. We can say though that the first time we meet him he is ‘worshiping.’ Genesis 4 tells us that Cain became very angry and that he became angry, this is what is so fascinating, after doing what? Presenting his offering to God. Immediately after supposedly going to worship … Continue reading Where’s the Love?

My friend Matt Waymeyer writes, “In John Steinbeck’s book East of Eden, there’s a scene in which Cyrus is taking a walk with his son Adam, who is about to go off to fight in World War I. Cyrus is telling him about what it means to be a soldier, and at one point he says this: From the day of a child’s birth he is taught by every circumstance, by every law and rule and right, to protect his own life. He starts with that great instinct, and everything confirms it. And then he [becomes] a soldier and he … Continue reading Loving…