This week, we’re asking: How on earth can we ever manage to love the Lord, one another, and our neighbours? Living this life of Jesus-following love is a seemingly impossible task. But it can be done!
It CAN be done when we approach it as a single-minded pursuit!
Prayer before Reading:
Before you read, pray this simple prayer from Psalm 25:4-5
Show me your ways, Lord, teach me your paths.
Guide me in your truth and teach me,
for you are God my Savior,
and my hope is in you all day long.
Now spend a moment quietly getting focused on the Lord’s presence before you read.
Daily Reading
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is your true and proper worship. 2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will. (NIVUK)
A significant reason we seem to battle to live the life of love to which Jesus calls us, is that we are so “programmed” by our own selfish inclinations and the ways of the world around us. Certainly, in our day and age, the entertainment industry and social media play a massive role in this culture that idolizes the self. But, since the dawn of time, putting self at the centre rather than God, has always been humanity’s deepest problem. Humanity is, as Augustine of Hippo put it in Latin, “incurvatus in se” – curved in upon itself.
When we are “curved in upon ourselves” in this way, we cannot live in generous love and service to others, We gravitate “naturally” towards looking inward and “looking after number one”. And in that state, we find it well nigh impossible to get our focus onto loving others or God.
In Romans 12:1-2, we’re given instruction in the importance of overcoming this tendency by “offering our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.” That is such a helpful image to get us focused each and every day of our lives. As we start each day, let us focus ourselves in this profoundly outward looking direction: “My life today is not going to be lived in pursuit of my own pleasure, comfort and interests. Today I will live in single-minded pursuit of the pleasure of God!”
And this will have to be a Spirit-empowered discipline. It is a matter of intentionally focusing the mind on this “target”. It is a matter of not allowing our minds to be focused in the self-centred “pattern of this world” (i.e. on selfish interests and pleasures), but rather to be renewed – to be trained in the new focus of actively loving God and others. Again, as we start each day, let us focus ourselves in this profoundly outward looking direction with determination: “My mind today is not going to be focused on how to look after number one, it will be focused in every situation on how God wants me to be a blessing to Him and others.”
Contemplation:
Please take time to ponder this truth. Turn one or more of these statements over and over in your mind:
- My natural state is to be self-centred.
- But I am a new creation in Christ.
- So I decide today to single-mindedly pursue His pleasure.
- With the help of the Holy Spirit, I will set my mind on the target of blessing God and others.
Holy Spirit, empower me to live this life of love. Change my heart and inspire my mind with the new life of God. Amen
Dave's Diary 
Leave a comment