Back to the basics of love

Read a prayer this morning that reminded me of our ground zero space as Christ-followers:  to love God and one another and of course to love our neighbor.  This will speak so much more loudly than protests and tweets and Facebook rants.

Pray this with me today:  "Lord, you have shown us what love looks like. Help us through acts of forgiveness and reconciliation to so love one another that our neighbors know we are your disciples and know that to be good news. Amen."

God's grace

Sometimes we resist it because it seems too good to be true.  When Paul wrote his letter to the Ephesian Christians that is is indeed by grace we are saved through faith and how this is not our doing but God's gift, I tend to want to add, yeah, but I'll go ahead and (you fill in the blank).  Grace and mercy presented to sinners like me can feel threatening - as if there is some fine print involved or strings attached or a no-interest now thing.  In one of my devotionals this morning I read this prayer that stopped me in my tracks (by Robert Capon):

"Lord, please restore to us the comfort of merit and demerit.  Show us that there is at least something we can do.  Tell us that at the end of the day there will at least be one redeeming card of our very own.  Lord, if it is not to much to ask, send us to bed with a few shreds of self-respect upon which we can congratulate ourselves.  But whatever you do, do not preach grace.  Give us something to do, anything; but spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate acceptance."

Unconditionally loved is the reality for us - which, if we embrace, it releases us from the pressure and offers us forgiveness and replaces our fear with faith.  In Christ we are liberated from having to make it on our own.  Freeing right?

Lord, increase my faith to live by grace!

(the devotional I got some of this from is It Is Finished by Tullian Tchividjian, David Cook Publishing 2015)