The Consuming Life part two

Is the way you understand, the way you live your followship of Christ something that requires a life giving love? Perhaps Jesus’ closest friend, the one called beloved writes, "This is real love. It is not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. "1 John 4:10-11 (NLT)

John is likely writing his letter about 90 a.d., he has had time to think about what love meant to Jesus and how it should manifest itself in the life, thinking and action of those who call themselves his followers. John would be completely confused by "American Christianity" today where in a March 2007 Newsweek poll 82% of the poll’s respondents identifying themselves as such. ¹

By a.d. 90, the church, the emerging numbers of slightly organized people across the landscape who put there hope in Jesus, had already been battered by neighbor and government, experienced counterfeit, competition, division, fall out, syncretism, separatism, and elitism. There was a whole lot of great stuff too, but I want you paint a picture that is less than perfect.

By the time of John’s first epistle deceivers have duped many in the community, both for their own advantage and without demonstrating the example of love given by Jesus. So John writes, "Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world." 1 John 4:1 (KJV)

Okay cutting to the chase now, not everyone who wears the label is experiencing or living the real thing. Jesus was about love, agape love, the kind of love that shows itself in more than a feeling an emotion or in a song. John knew it. John knew first hand what laying down of life love was, and he could spot the phoney. But many others can’t, that is what the letter is for, to expose the fraud not only in other but in ourselves.

If my followship of Jesus, if my love doesn’t require me to give my life, my whole being, ambitions, recreation, decisions, my all, then my vision of being a Christian is delinquent. I have believed the false prophet, followed the wrong vision and I will not know the greater love, the greater friendship but a recurring emptiness and fraudulence.

Speaking from experience. Pastor Art

1 God’s Numbers, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17879317/site/newsweek/