Stay in Love with God

A devotion written for our church, to complement the Sunday sermon.  

Rule 3: Stay in Love with God

Deut. 30-19-20

Paul Stroble

“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob” (Deut. 30:19-20).

Putting your whole self into a loving relationship is a commitment and a process. As Pastor Jason points out, we must nurture our relationship with God so that it remains vital and growing. But we live in a noisy world that distracts us from God. We’re human, we fail, get tired, become disappointed.

Our scripture this week is well-complemented by Deut. 6:5, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Jesus paraphrases it slightly, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37). Loving God is not a one-time experience, but a choice to put our whole selves into the relationship over the long haul.

Obviously, God does not come to the door to greet us when we come home or give us a big hug to express love. We know God through God’s word, our experiences of divine guidance, the sermons of our pastor, the sharing of communion, the love expressed to us by others, and the love that we show to others.

Our love for God includes our emotional feelings, but feelings are notoriously changeable and inaccurate. For instance, we can feel distant from or even condemned by God—when, in fact, we are deeply loved!

Martin Luther once committed that when our feelings sag, we become spiritually confused and forget to trust in God’s love. “Troubled consciences are like geese. When hawks pursue them, they try to escape by flying… when the wolves threatened them, they try to escape by running.” Luther said that when our faith and feelings aren’t meshing well, we need to hold to God’s promises in God’s word and trust God’s love. (The converse is also true: we could feel smug in our faith but are actually drifting away from God.)

Both the Old and New Testaments teach that loving God is indivisible with loving others. This makes the love of God a more difficult prospect than having emotional feelings toward God. People can be difficult and hard to love!  Helping others can be difficult. (Many of us have thought to ourselves, “No good deed goes unpublished” when our desire to help someone backfired.) But the prospect of loving others gives us an excellent guide to our progress in loving God.

Like the Israelites, we struggle to “stay in love with God.” Romans 12:9-21 reminds us what an active, self-giving, covenantal love looks like: you treat your persecutors with kindness and benevolence, you try to abandon your feelings of pride and stubbornness, you refrain from cultivating vengeful feelings, you work with others without competing for praise and credit. Elsewhere in the Bible, Hebrews 13:3 teaches a kind of empathy where we put ourselves into the “shoes” of suffering people: “Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.”

But we always need God’s help to grow in love. Fortunately, as we look to God, we discover that God is always ready to help us!   

Amen.

Do Good!

My wife Beth's devotion, written for our church to complement the sermon.  

Rule 2: Do Good: Two Tiny Words That Pack Quite a Punch

By Beth Stroble

While the rubric of Wesley’s three simple rules may not have been referenced in my Lutheran upbringing, their Biblical basis is clear. Luke 6:27-36 elaborates what many call the Golden Rule, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” As Luke recounts Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount, we understand that “others” are not only friends, family, and those who are easiest to love. Jesus calls his followers to love all, to include all, to care for all, to embrace all, and to be merciful to all.

What I do recall from confirmation classes in the Evangelical Lutheran Church (then Lutheran Church in America), was Martin Luther’s explanation of the ten commandments in his Small Catechism. For each commandment, Luther described the positive actions that each commandment required.  Not only were Christians to follow Rule 1: Do No Harm, they were to express a love of others in thought, word, and deed. For example, Luther explained the fifth commandment, “You shall not murder,” to mean: “We are to fear and love God, so that we neither endanger nor harm the lives of our neighbors, but indeed help and support them to all of life’s needs.” For the eighth commandment, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor,” Luther teaches, “We are to fear and love God, so that we do not try to trick our neighbors out of their inheritance or property or try to get it for ourselves by claiming to have a legal right to it and the like, but instead be of help and service to them in keeping what is theirs.”

Growing up, I may have thought that those two commandments were the easiest to follow until I understood the active role that Rule 2 requires. It is not enough to do no harm. And if I extrapolate Luther’s line of thinking and take an expansive and honest view of the harm that we can and do cause others, then the good we are called to do is a necessary companion to Rule 1, a commitment that is the tangible expression of doing no harm.

Do good. Shorthand for think good, say good, act good. Unpacking those two words does pack a punch for each of us as individuals and for us collectively. Am I a force for good? Are we agents for good in the ways we form bonds and groups?

During today’s service, we asserted that WE ARE NOT ALONE.

That is a motivation and challenge for our good doing, that we see ourselves as members of a larger community for whom our active care and concern is shared, wanted and needed. And it is encouragement that as we seek to follow Jesus’ teaching: “This is my commandment, love one another as I have loved you,” that we have the grace and mercy of God—creator, redeemer, and spirit—as the model and source for our journey to love others as we are loved.

May all know we are Christians by our love. Amen.

Happy 200th, Rutherford Hayes

Our 19th president, Rutherford Hayes, was born 200 years ago: October 4, 1822, in Delaware, OH. This is an interesting article about him from the alum magazine of Kenyon College, his alma mater.

https://bulletin.kenyon.edu/feature/reconstructing-rutherford-b-hayes/