Hope Comes from Being Loved: Love Teaches
Devotions this week based on the Message: “Hope Comes with Being Loved”.
“…everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.” (John 15:15)
Everything?
No doubt there are things Jesus knew as God (after all he was “omniscient”) that he didn’t pass on to his disciples. But what he did was important.
John wrote at the end of his Gospel: (John 20:30-31) Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
Jesus taught the things the Father wanted him to teach. He taught all the important things about the kingdom of God and what living as part of the kingdom. He taught all the important things that his followers needed to trust and believe to spend eternity with him.
He didn’t want them to miss out. He taught them because he loved them.
We teach what is important. For those that are raising children or have raised children in the past, you took time to teach your children the best you knew to set up your children for success in relationships, education, life and faith. You shared some of the mistakes you made. You shared some of the lessons you learned. You passed on the best from your parents. Why? Because you love them and want the best for them.
We teach what matters because we love those we teach.
How much more the care and effort God went through to pass on his teaching to us. We take the Bible for granted, but each word that the Spirit of God chose to preserve is a teaching that God wants us to know, believe and live because he loves us.
Each teaching he gives us is an act of love.
All of them? Yep. All of them.
Even the ones that are hard or difficult. Even the ones that seem “narrow-minded” or limits on “fun.” God teaches us these things, not because he made the mistakes and didn’t want us to fall into the same thing, but he truly knows what is best for us and wants to protect us from harm.
What happens when you begin to read the Bible as a painstaking act of love that God has given to you to read, learn, believe, and live…because he loves you?
Perhaps I begin to marvel even more at the gift of grace it is to be loved by God.
Apply: What is a tough teaching of the Bible that you find hard to believe and live? What happens when you view that passage from the perspective, “Jesus taught me this because he loves me. So what blessing does he intend for me to receive from it?”
Prayer: Father, thank you for sending Jesus to teach us everything that was important for our life and salvation. Jesus, thank you for taking time to teach us all the Father gave you and you knew was best for us. Spirit of God, thank you for preserving all this teaching to bless us today! AMEN.
Hope Comes from Being Loved: Love Models
Devotions this week based on the Message: “Hope Comes with Being Loved”.
This past Sunday we celebrated Mothers’ Day. Since the early 1900s it has been a day set aside in our country to honor and appreciate the work that mom’s do to love and care for their children.
We can’t underestimate the importance of love a mother shows. It is the first expression of love a child encounters. It also the first place a child learns how to love. A mother’s love is a pattern that a child is likely to follow through out their life time. How they were loved becomes how they love.
Usually we don’t have college courses on “How to love” (maybe it would be helpful!). Love as an emotion and an expression is more “caught than taught.” We experience love (or the lack of it). We observe what is loving. Because love becomes a model for others to follow. But the question is, who is our model of love?
The model for love originates in God the Father. Jesus said in John 15:9, “As the Father has loved me, so have I love you…”
The Father modeled love to his Son. How? We have a few examples. At Jesus’ baptism, the Father affirms publicly his love: “This is my Son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). The Father trusted his Son. Jesus said, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30) They were inseparable. At the end of his life, his Father received his soul (Luke 23:46).
This love Jesus models to his disciples. He affirmed them. He was there for them. He cared for them. He taught them. He trusted them with the message of his kingdom. He would be ready for them in heaven one day.
But it doesn’t stop there. Jesus said, (John 15:12) “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.” Jesus wants us to take the love he has shown to us and show it to others. Love as we have been loved.
So we get the opportunity to be the model of Jesus’ love to those around us. Serving selflessly. Listening carefully. Giving generously. Leading humbly. Loving our enemies and more.
Having trouble loving others…or certain people in your life? I do too. I call them “extra love opportunities.” Where I get encouragement to love, even when it’s not reciprocated and infact at times scorned is to go back to Jesus. He loved his enemies. He loved those that crucified him. He loved … me when I gave him more reasons not to love me than to love me.
With this tremendous model of love given to me…I can, with God’s help, love in the same way.
Apply: Do you have someone in your life you are struggling to love? Review Jesus’ love for you and ask the Spirit for guidance on how to love the person who is challenging to you.
Prayer: Lord Jesus, thank you for the wonderful reality and example of your love for me! AMEN.
Hope Comes with Being Loved: A Prayer for our Moms!
Devotions this week based on the Message: “Hope Comes with Being Loved”.
Happy “day-after” Mother’s Day to all the mom’s reading this devotion! We are grateful that God has put you in our lives and this week we will reflect on seven key aspects of love as we experience it from God and from our mom’s who love and follow him. For an overview, listen to this week’s message. For reflections read this week’s devotions. For this morning, would you pray this prayer we used in worship yesterday? I give credit to https://danieldarling.com/2013/05/a-prayer-for-moms-on-mothers-day/ for providing the text of the prayer. I give thanks to God for the gift of my mom and the many who faithfully embrace the calling to be a mom. God bless and keep you!
PRAYER:
Dear Father, we approach your throne on behalf of the mothers whom you have entrusted with the care of your most precious little ones. We thank you for creating each mom with a unique combination of gifts and talents. We thank you for the sacrifice of self each mom gives for her children. For the late nights spent rocking a colicky infant. For the hands calloused from washing, wiping, scrubbing, mixing, backing, stirring, hugging, patting, disciplining, holding, writing, erasing, painting, and pouring.
We thank you for the gift of time moms give for their kids, whether it’s stay-at-home moms, working moms, and moms who have some combination of the two. We thank you for the flexibility of moms, for their tirelessness, their perseverance, and their devotion.
We pray you give each mom strength. Help her to see in every mundane task the eternal, cosmic significance that you place on motherhood. Help her to understand that the most radical, world-changing events may be happening anonymously in her home. Help her to forgive those who undermine her significance.
We especially pray for single moms, who must lean solely on you for the fathering of their children. We thank you that you’re big arms surround children who may never know their earthly father. We also pray for mothers who never had the honor of bearing children, but whose nurturing extends to the many poor and needy who cross the threshold of their lives.
We ask you to be the daily bread of tired mothers. We ask you to be their living water. We ask you to be their source of spiritual and physical strength. We pray that the same grace that flowed from Father to Son to us in salvation will flow from mothers to their children. We pray that each mother rejects perfectionism and instead embraces the goodness of the gospel. We pray the rhythms of repentance and forgiveness shape every home.
Lord, give each mother a worshipful reverence of you, the Creator and Sustainer of life. Help each mother to rest in the knowledge that they are but stewards of your children and that only your Spirit can produce change into the hearts of each boy and girl. May each mother find rest in you.
Most of all, Lord, on this day in which we honor mothers, may we love and cherish the special women who have born us, who have nurtured us, and who have prayed for our well-being. May our hearts overflow with gratitude to you, who formed and knitted each of us in a mother’s womb.
Amen.
Hope Comes with Life Purpose: Produce the Fruit of the Spirit
Devotions this week based on the Message: “Hope Comes with Life Purpose”.
There’s nothing like biting into a fresh piece of fruit picked from the tree. It’s full of all the goodness and sweetness that you’ve been waiting for. It’s the result of effort to prune, fertilize and ensure the best you can nothing threatens the ripening of the fruit.
Bad fruit is disgusting. It’s rotten, mushy, bug-infested and no one wants to eat it.
We can easily tell this when it comes to fruit that we eat.
What about the activities that we do?
The Apostle Paul in his letter to the Galatians made it very obvious for us what good and bad fruit look like:
Bad fruit…the things we do to glorify self and gratify our sinful nature:
Galatians 5:19 The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; 20 idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions 21 and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.
Good fruit…the things we do to glorify God and give evidence of the Spirit of God at work in us:
Galatians 5:22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control.
Planted in Jesus…pruned by the Father leads to the fruit of the Spirit. Jesus wants us to produce fruit…a lot of it!
John 15:8 This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.
Like a juicy piece of fresh fruit, you can just sense the difference of the sinful nature at work and the fruit of the Spirit at work. The fruit of the Spirit is delightful. It impacts people in a positive way. It gives glory to God in every way.
Notice…the fruit of the Spirit is not specifics. It doesn’t identify what we DO, it identifies the heart behind ALL we do.
The fruit of the Spirit is the transforming of our minds and hearts to be like God’s heart. The fruit of the Spirit is a reflection of the love that we have experienced in Christ. It is fruit that can only come from a close connection to Jesus Christ. It is fruit that benefits others and helps them see Jesus in a small way.
This is what our Father enjoys seeing and is delightful to all who encounter it.
So, what is our life purpose? Give glory to God by bearing much fruit. It’s not the occupation we have, the relationships that we have or the people we impact, our life purpose is to do ALL to the glory of God. When we do it WILL affect our occupation, relationships, and the people around us. All of them will be blessed by the good fruit the Spirit of God is producing in you.
Apply: What benefits have you seen when you experience the fruit of the Spirit in someone else? What blessings have you experienced as God allows you to produce that fruit in your interactions with others?
Prayer: Father, thank you for planting us in Jesus and taking the time to prune us to be more fruitful. Spirit of God work in us that we produce MUCH fruit, to the glory of our heavenly Father. AMEN.
Hope comes with Life Purpose: Pruned by the Father.
Devotions this week based on the Message: “Hope Comes with Life Purpose”.
Some of you know I like to tinker with a vegetable garden as well as try to get some fruit trees to grow and produce fruit for our family.
The hardest thing? Pruning.
Not because the physical labor is so difficult, but because the emotional angst is so great (It gets less, but is still there.)
I struggle to feel good about cutting off perfectly healthy branches. My logic says, “the more branches, the more fruit.” The “laws” of Horticulture say, “The more branches, the less fruit.” So it pains me to cut off good branches, but I have to trust that in pruning some branches, those that remain WILL be more fruitful.
John 15:1-2 Jesus says: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. 2 He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.
I’ve learned that the purpose of pruning and why it works. Pruning does three things:
- Allows more light to get throughout the tree.
- Allows more air to flow through the tree.
- Allows more nutrition to go to fruit production than leaf and branch production.
Fruit needs all three of these to form and flourish.
Often times we think of the pruning the Father does as the “hardships and difficulties of life” we endure. We focus on the “cut” of the branch that is painful and sometimes leaves scars. True enough. But could it also be possible that the Gardner, our Father, cuts off the things in our life that are preventing the fruit from forming and flourishing?
Maybe the pruning in your life is removing the ability to engage in some recreation activity because your Father knows that it will cloud out time the Light of the World. Maybe pruning in your life is your heavenly Father refocusing time to spend with the Spirit of God. Maybe pruning in your life are situations that drive you back to the nourishment of the Word of God.
The more we have the Light of the World, the Spirit of God and the Word of God at work in our hearts the more abundant and significant the fruit is we will produce.
I’m not sure how the Father “feels” about “pruning” our lives, but I am sure he does it with full conviction that removing the things in our life that hinder the production of fruit will lead to more nutrition, light and air getting to our soul and when our soul is fed, fruit WILL BE produced! Your Father, the gardener, loves you too much to do what it takes to make you more fruitful.
Apply: What might God be pruning out of your life that perhaps you are upset at, but is a way for him to refocus your heart and life more fully on him?
Prayer: Father, thank you for your tender loving care that is willing to prune our branch from the things that get in the way of producing fruit for you. Lead us to see what you are pruning so we may produce the fruit for which you are looking! AMEN.