Good in Life's Repetition

Often it is easy to feel bogged down in the necessary repetition of tasks in life.

I heard a person mention this once and then say God created the sun to do the repeated task of coming up each day and how that's beautiful. It's at least an example of how repetition of a task is not bad, or how we're very grateful when others preform these daily tasks.

These repeated tasks or needs allow us to help others. Every single day we have a chance to help others by the daily, repeated tasks we do each day. We certainly know how to do them because we do them each day, so it makes it really easy to help others.

When we eat and sleep, we gain energy that may help others. When we cook, we may likely create a way to enjoy the gift of food with others.

When we go to work and find we do a similar thing every single day, we are helping the community that receives the product we help produce and we also have a chance to really help our coworkers in their work and feel loved by truly trying to do work well. We may be building trust by delivering what we promise the same time each week.

God wants us to love him and love our neighbor, and in loving our neighbor we honor him. Repeated tasks give us chances to honor him. And as we've noticed at times when we give to or help others, we sometimes have a sense of happiness or fulfillment when we do it.

6 Posts on Loving Others

Post by
Michelle Dowell, Contributor

The topic of loving others includes some of the most important things in life: family, friends, and evangelism. Here are six posts describing what loving others looks like:

1. Love Is Active. Love compels us to act.

2. Love for Others. "Love for others includes caring about what they care about."

3. How To Help a Friend in Need. I write about the best way to show love to others when they are in a time of need.

4. Love as the Apologetic. "One of the few truly interesting apologetics Christians have is love. Love in the Christian sense is interesting because it is so counter cultural to the world."

5. True Love is Unconditional. "True love is unconditional. Often we find in the world and church love which has a condition."

6. Liberty in the Christian Life. "... Love also does not insist on its own way. We might prefer certain things in the the church be this way or that way, but we cannot insist on preference or infringe upon the liberty of others because certain things displease us."

Watch for more posts on this topic in the future.

Law following verse law fulfilling

A lot of scholars are hard on Jesus' criticism of the Pharisees. He is too hard on them they say. They cannot be that bad.

You see the biggest issue is that the law is spiritual and can only be fulfilled by the heart. The law is summed in:

"Love the Lord your God with all you heart mind soul and strength and love your neighbor as yourself."

You see the many apparently external requirements of the law are in reality internal.

We find it often in questions of if we are are required to do this or that by God. Often we find ethical discussions have reluctance built into the discussion. Can we not act and be law following?

The whole issue is that we often ask the wrong question. We ask "what is permissible" and not "what is the will of God." We ask "is this forbidden" and not "is God glorified."

Jesus tries to make this explicit when he says the inside of the bowl needs to be cleaned not simply the outside.

You see a commandments of God always have an internal aspect in nature. There is often an external or action aspect but they law always goes to a heart issue.

You see this is why there are is so much dead faith in the world which Jesus warns of. We can do all the right things and say all the right things but true faith comes down to an internal heart state of where our love for God begins to overflow into the rest of live.

Two Commands and Their Implications

Two commands and their implications:

Love the lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul and love your neighbor as yourself are two central commands in the bible.  Jesus as the one who must fulfill the law perfectly on our behalf fulfilled both of these.  The interesting thing about the first command is that ALL our love is commanded from God and yet more is still required.  This must mean in fact that loving God with all our heart mind and soul is not in contradiction with loving ourselves and our neighbor.  There must be a type of love that not only places love in our neighbor but also is in fullness a love of God.  If this is true one may well expect the enjoyment of a good game of hockey in heaven.  We may take delight in it while at the same time placing our full love on God.  It would seem unreasonable to assume that if we can have compatible love with humans that we cannot have it with other things.  In fact we would be forced to say that Jesus had no love for anything but God and man if we said that.  But clearly God delighted in his creation before man came so clearly we may love anything in creation and still fully love God.  (I am not saying that we can fulfill this now but it would be possible were it not for sin)  The implications of this would be that loving the Lord with all our heart in heaven need not mean that we may love nothing else in heaven.  Heaven, contrary to some views would not be a place of constant worship of God.  It would be in a sense in that all activities would become worship but it implies that there will be worship and climbing mountains and enjoying sunsets that all place our full enjoyment on God.  If this doesn’t sound possible to you, you should consider if our Lord and savior Jesus Christ has not already fulfilled it.  It would seem he must have.  He had a love that was for man and yet gave all his love to God thus fulfilling the whole of the law.  Jesus is one in will with the father so when the father declared his delight over his creation it is Jesus as well who delighted in it. (And God doesn’t change (And unlike the philosophical giants would like us to think that is a VERY good thing))  So Jesus on earth delighted in his fellow humans (he is fully human and fully God) and in creation all the while giving all his love to God.  If these presuppositions and logic have truth to them there will be great Hockey games, epic D&D adventures (well I'm not positive about that one as I don't know how much fun fighting evil in a world where there is no evil is (but at least in that there will be great stories and thus roleplaying systems)), and stunningly deep Go games in heaven all of which are enjoyed while God is given all the love.