Love One Another

PRAYER PRACTICE

Cup Prayer – This prayer will help you pour your heart out to God (Ps. 62:8). Begin with your hands folded together like an upside-down cup. Pour out before God all your fears, anxieties, guilt, sin and shame. Tell him what troubles you. Take time to be specific. When you feel like you’ve poured out your heart, flip your hands over, folding them like an open cup, ready to receive from God. Sit in silence, asking God simply to fill you with his Spirit. If your mind runs back to sin, shame, anxiety or concerns of the day, flip your hands back over and pour it out to the Lord. When you are finished praying, read today’s Scripture and listen as God shares his heart back with you.

DAILY READING

John 13:34-35

REFLECTION

How To Spot a Christian

 by Dan Kidd

“I knew she was a Christian; she’s always saying and doing things out of love for others.”

“She cannot be a Christian; she’s a cold, unloving person.” 

In your experience, is this how most people speak about Christians? Do you find that Christians are commonly identified by their love for one another? Is the absence of love an indicator that someone must not be a Christian? 

As he readied himself to die, Jesus spent his final hours of freedom in the company of his closest friends. In the seclusion of the upper room, Jesus stripped off his cloak, and kneeling to them, one after the other, after the other, he washed the day’s filth from their calloused feet. He dined with them on bread and wine. Then, after Judas had fled to join the party of Jesus’ captors, and Jesus had told them he is leaving to a place they cannot follow him, he issued a commandment. A new commandment: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” 

A new commandment that sounds like an ancient commandment; “Love your neighbors as yourself” is Levitical law. 

New how? 

New in that this love had now been modeled by the hands that had healed, held, prayed, and would be driven through with nails. How are we to love? Imitate Jesus. New also in that this is a family love. Jesus’ disciples were adopted into his family—he their brother, the Father their father. And finally, new because they were to be knit together by the transforming power of the Spirit of God. Only because of these things can this commandment be made with any hope it might be kept, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” 

But what about what follows? “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” Is that true? Is it accurate? Are disciples known for how they love each other?

How does the watching world spot Christians in the crowd? Put less comfortably, how would the watching world come to know that I was a disciple of Jesus? Even less comfortably, what if my t-shirt, my bumper sticker, my yard sign, my social media posts, or my church attendance broadcasted “CHRISTIAN,” but everybody knew me to be hateful or apathetic?

None of us will love perfectly all the time. And the enemy would be delighted to use our shame to torment and divide us. So, without shame, and empowered by the very same Spirit that rose Jesus from the grave, I pray that we would embrace the gift of salvation into a community of generous, sacrificial love. 

Lord, let it be that the world would know Christians by their love. Let it be that we would be known to be Christians because of our love. Let it be that I would love my sisters and brothers as though I was Jesus loving them—and that I would be known for that, so that you, Jesus, get the credit.