More than Words: Love!
It seems fitting that our final Word is LOVE! Love is the very heart of Christmas. Jesus is the love of God that took on flesh and bone. Love that gave up everything to be born with nothing.
God is love. It is something that we may have heard a thousand times before, whether in church or on the street corner, from a friend or a perfect stranger – God is love.
It is God who initiates love and we reciprocate it. We love because God first loved us. God’s love for us began before we were ever aware. God loved us first! God’s amazing love for us was willing to pay the ultimate sacrifice so that we could have a loving relationship with God, our Creator.
God is made manifest in our love toward others. The way in which we live out Love is the expression of God’s love we have towards others. When God first loved us, we were unlovely and unloving, unworthy to be loved by a holy love. The truth is, God loved us before we are God’s children, and by loving us God makes us worthy of love. Love itself transforms us. Because we are loved by God, we become children of God – the beloved.
As the beloved, our love for others should follow the same pattern as God’s love for us. Like God, we are to love the one who is unloving and unresponsive. It is easy for us to love those who love in return. But, we are commanded to love the one who is unloving, angry, and hurtful. It is only then we can see for ourselves what God-as-Love is really like. When the love of God flows through us and transforms another life, changing that unloving person into someone who also has been born anew of love, then we truly know God.
God’s love initiates. Love is the overflow of God’s delight that issues in creation. Love is the outreach of God’s mercy that enters as a baby and redeems the lost with a cry of agony. Love is the outpouring of the transforming Spirit that permeates all things, quickening them and making them holy. God’s love is first and last and utterly constant throughout the long, unmarked middle. Friends, may this be the love in which we daily abide, and the love that we extend to others.
A prayer for us today: Lord, as we celebrate Christmas may we continue to be filled with the wonder of Advent and all that it holds. May we seek to live a life of love in all we do. May we be filled with Your love as we celebrate the Christ Child. May we emulate love throughout this season and into the year ahead. May we abide in love, joy, peace and hope with every breath we breathe. Amen.
Happy Christmas!
Pastor Jenni
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is
born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.
God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.
In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.
No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.
(1 John 4:7-12)