Devotional Series: Endless Summer Started: 6/23/2013 Devotional Discipline and Delight “Which commandment is the most important of all . . . ?” (Mark 12:28-34) That God loves me is a truth I cannot remember learning. That it was taught to me, repeatedly, is certain. But when I learned it, I cannot say. God’s love was taught in song: “Jesus loves me this I know,” and “Jesus loves the little children.” And of course, the single most recognizable verse of the Bible taught me in Elizabethan English that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.” The fact of God’s love has been a given, something always known though not fully understood. What has been harder to learn is what it means for me to love God. In this I have been a slow student. Two problems: First, I made the mistake of assuming that my religious activity was the same thing as loving God. I was constantly at church – and I still am. Doesn’t that translate into loving God? Second, during my adolescence I came to associate a genuine love for God with profound emotional experiences. I wasn’t having many of those. What was wrong with me? Somewhere along the way I began to figure out that loving religious things and ideas is not the same as loving God. Likewise, emotions are not the most reliable measuring stick for our love of God. I’m still learning. When Jesus was asked to identify the greatest of the commandments, he looked first to the words of Deuteronomy 6 and said that loving God with all that we are was at the top of the list. Right there with it was the command to love our neighbor, words taken from Leviticus 19:18. His answer makes it clear that loving God is something comprehensive. It claims emotion and will, heart and mind, believing and behaving, theological ideas and personal relationships. Said another way, loving God involves discipline and delight. And that brings us to the theme of these summer reflections. More than any time of year, summer allows us wide margins of delight. It is a time to play, to travel, to be outdoors, to enjoy long days. At poolside, surfside, and mountain top – even if only for a week or so – summer is the season of reveling in God’s good world. But after a while summer evokes within us a craving for structure. Parents of school-age kids feel this keenly. We start looking forward to the discipline of a scheduled day and the comfort that comes with a routine. Which aspect of loving God have you found most difficult to learn? Maybe you readily embrace the structures and routines of worship, the practice of spiritual disciplines, the weekly rhythm of gathering with a community and then going back into the world to serve. Your learning curve is the capacity to simply delight in God. Or perhaps you delight in God and revel in all of God’s gifts to you – but your learning curve is in the area of structure and discipline. Summer is not quite over. What will you do over the next few weeks to delight in God? What spiritual discipline or practice might you need to take up? Prayer: Gracious God, we want to love you with all that we are. With disciplined minds and actions infused with holy zeal. Teach us to love you in this way, and let that love flow to our neighbors and our world, we ask in Jesus’s name. Amen. Mark H. Crumpler Pastor for Teaching and Spiritual Formation markthis.blogspot
Posted on: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 08:21:04 +0000
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