Serve One Another in Love

 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

Galatians 5:7-15

REFLECTION

Saved Into Love

 by Dan Kidd

In today’s passage, Paul continues his case against the Judaizers, who had well convinced this early church that the rituals and rules of the Levitical law were imperative parts to their being saved from sinfulness, death, and the devil. Just a touch of yeast from the old, tried-and-true religion had worked its way so thoroughly through the church that they were willing to cut, bleed, and wound themselves in an expired ritual for the worst of reasons: They’d come to fear that they weren’t really, truly saved just yet. They’d spent too much time turning over in their minds the curious calculus of salvation that they’d concluded that surely a holy God would not simply save someone without first demanding they get ritually clean, cut, or in good conscience. Would he?

Let’s not miss how zealous they were to dedicate themselves to the lordship of the Triune God. Nor should we miss how easily it is believed that the rules and rituals, the doctrines and decorum of religion are what save, transform, liberate, reclaim, and restore us. The Gospel professes that we are set free from wrongheaded notions that our rule-following or rituals are the cause of our redemption. 

This freedom Paul speaks of is a peculiar kind of freedom. In contrast to what we often
consider freedom to be, this is not at all the freedom to live however we see fit. Christ has set us free from the wrong-but-regular idea that the rules and rituals were themselves the point.  They were never the point. But they did serve a purpose, and the purpose remains.

What was their purpose? To fulfill the second part of an ancient, albeit timeless promise: that God’s people, beginning with Abraham, would be a blessing to every family on earth, because they first were blessed. Which is to say, Christ has saved us into a Kingdom community that will bless the nations through our love for them. The way we most effectively experience our salvation is by appreciating how soaked our hearts are in God’s love for us that it spills out onto everyone around us. When we don’t participate in loving our neighbor as ourselves, we rob ourselves of one of the most incredible gifts we’ve been saved into. And Paul is careful to emphasize the cost of a church that is not committed to the tireless work of loving one other: “If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.”

Holy Spirit, lead us to walk in your step. Show me where I am prone to bite at my sisters and brothers and teach me to seek and share in harmony. Thank you for saving me into the gift of loving one another.