one28 Podcast2005-06 Theme: Abounding Love
There is one thing about every person that impacts every part of their life. Every decision/choice, every attitude, every pursuit, every task, every second you are conscious depends on this one part of you.
This one part determines significant things about you. For example, this one thing will determine your happiness (or lack thereof), your relationships, your future education choices, your future employment, your future life partner, and even your eternal future–where you will spend eternity. Heaven or hell depends on this one thing.
This one things is your LOVE!
Everything you do in life depends on some love you have. In many cases it may not be a very strong love, in other cases it may be an overpowering love. But every one of us loves. And how you love, where you love, when you love, what you love, and most important–WHO you love, defines you. Your love(s) characterize you. You are marked and known by your loves.
To take one step further, love is the most important thing to God about you. In Matthew 22:34-40 we learn that love for God and love for man are the first and second greatest commandments respectively. The very first thing that God requires of us is that we love Him, and not in a weak, haphazard, half-hearted attempt. The highest-level of divine requirement relates to our love, specifically the necessity for our love of Him with all of our heart and all of our soul and all of our mind and all of our strength. That is the most important thing to God about us. And the second most significant commandment is like it, that we love our neighbors. So the second most important thing about us to God still relates to our love, how we treat and care for and love those around us.
Our loves are the most important things about us.
Yet sometimes we make life, even the Christian life, so complicated, so external, and so superficial. But we should always go back to the pivital and paramount place, we need to narrow in on the happenings of our heart. We cannot, we must not, miss for any reason the basic of love.
Jonathan Edwards had this to say about love in a book of his titled The Religious Affections:
“Love is not only one of the affections, but it is the first and chief of the affections, and the fountain of all the affections. From love arises hatred of those things which are contrary to what we love, or which oppose and thwart us in those things we delight in…. From a vigorous, affectionate, and fervent love to God will necessarily arise other religious affections; hence will an intense hatred and abhorrence of sin, fear of sin, and dread of God’s displeasure, gratitude for His goodness, … joy in God when God is graciously and sensibly present, and grief when He is absent, and a joyful hope when a future of enjoyment of God is expected, and fervent zeal for the glory of God. And in like manner, from a fervent love to men will arise all other virtuous affections towards men.”
In other words, all other affections flow from our loves–our hope, our joy, our zeal, our grief over sin, our hatred of sin, our fear and reverence for God–all of those stem from love. Everything in life comes from love.
Paul didn’t want his disciples to forget this. And so in one of his inspired, recorded prayers we see he wants us to love. Philippians 1:9-11
9 And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, 10 so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.
It is in that first part of verse 9 that we find our theme for one28 this year: ABOUNDING LOVE. I’ll be praying the rest of this year that all of us–staff and students–would have a love that is abounding still more and more.
See other themes: 2004-05 | 2005-06 | 2006-07 | 2007-08 | 2008-09
