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The Impossible Love List – Love Doesn’t Rejoice In Wrongdoing But In the Truth
Anti-love is at its core egocentric……. Me pursuing MY agenda. Regardless of how anti-love expresses, the undercurrent is driven by self. Love, as expressed in 1 Corinthians 13, is at its core self-less. In fact, self has absolutely nothing to do with the administering of agape love. Nothing. People who are connected to the Living God love, because God is love. When we love, we are foremost exposing people to love’s…
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The Impossible Love List – Love Doesn’t Insist On Its Own Way
All the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes but the LORD weighs the spirit. ~ Proverbs 16:2 ~ Above all the other traits (she said naively), I approach this trait with fear and trembling. I believe that at the core of nearly every deep work, is a crossroads marked “MY WAY vs. GODS”. I truly do. I believe the deepest layer of any struggle between growth…
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Because He Loves Us
The love of God is too big, too magnificent to ever comprehend, but when God peels back the curtain to reveal a fraction of what it looks like, it’s understandably breathtaking. I can’t get over the fact that God always loves, when He has never been loved adequately by humanity…. by me. I suppose I’m revealing something about my own “stuff” in that statement, but that’s ok. Clearly the passage…
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The Impossible Love List – Love Isn’t Arrogant
Only within the Triune God does love exist flawlessly. It’s merited there. Father, Son and Spirit demonstrate all of loves characteristics, all the time. And… God loves humanity. It’s always unmerited. It’s always unearned. It’s never reciprocated adequately yet that does not diminish its flow. God is always offering perfect love to flawed people. Always. Even in Heaven, He will be the reason we are able to love. Unlike now, He will have…
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The Impossible Love List – Loves Doesn’t Boast
Everyone utters lies to his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak. May the Lord cut off all flattering lips, the tongue that makes great boasts, those who say, “With our tongue we will prevail, our lips are with us; who is master over us?” ~Psalm 12:2-4~ Boast – to speak with exaggeration and excessive pride, especially about oneself. It strikes me… these anti-love traits are doing…
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The Impossible Love List – Love Doesn’t Envy
I’m wary as I consider writing about each description found in The Impossible Love List. I had no intention of doing so and still have one foot out…but I feel a familiar tug to explore here. So, I’m looking at the list of 15 characteristics, plus a powerful punch line. Seven words describe what love is. Eight describe what it is not. For the first time I stop to think about…
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The Impossible Love List – Love is Kind
I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bent down to them and fed them. ~Hosea 11:4~ I ponder the list of love traits found in 1 Corinthians 13, wondering if it might be offered because God asks broken humans to seek out relationship with other broken humans. If it were…
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The Impossible Love List – Love is Patient
patience – μακροθυμέω mak-roth-oo-meh’-o; to be long-spirited JKV = suffereth long Be patient? Ugh. Some people try my patience more than others. What does that mean? Right here at the top of the list the Apostle Paul generated for me, is a trait that exposes my heart for the temperamental, selfish thing it is. To offer patience is to practice Agape, which I am commanded by Jesus to give. I am to respond to…
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The Prize Package
O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you. ~ Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. ~ My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me. ~ As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. Part of my summer reading has been a book written by CS…
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A Path to Imprisonment – Part Four
Ingratitude ~ Idolatry ~ Immorality ~ ~Imprisonment~ ____________________ We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. ~Romans 6:6-7~ Imprisonment: captivity through habitual immorality. When God gives a person over to their sin, they are in a most desperate, dangerous place.…
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A Path to Imprisonment – Part Three
Ingratitude ~ Idolatry ~ ~Immorality~ ~ Imprisonment ____________________ Can a man carry fire next to his chest and his clothes not be burned? Or can one walk on hot coals and his feet not be scorched? ~Proverbs 6:27-28~ Immorality: non-conformity to Gods moral code. Once I have embraced ingratitude and placed myself and my desires on the throne of my heart, it’s only a matter of time before immoral behavior…
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A Path to Imprisonment – Part Two
Ingratitude ~ ~Idolatry~ ~ Immorality ~ Imprisonment Idolatry: excessive or blind adoration, reverence, or devotion I’m not sure the transition from ingratitude to idolatry needs too much fleshing out. What happens to me when I become consumed by what I don’t have, to the degree that I’m no longer grateful for what God has placed in my life? It’s really not complicated. I find that before long, determined to look…