Talk of JESUS .com

Tag: love

  • Be My Valentine – What Love Is Not

    Be My Valentine – What Love Is Not

    Not Alone

    The Lord reminds me in solitude and in silence: we are not alone; for he is always with us and never will leave us. So much passing talk of love, yet what is love? Who loves me? Truly, who do I love?

    I may have known love, you may think. Or love has never found me, you may lament.

    Rare time of silence pours in all the questions of life, thoughts of love: lost love, unrequited love, lovers, would-be lovers so you had hoped. Love of your mom or a father not even yours as you see a man pouring out joy into the life of his child at a nearby dinner table may invade your thoughts.

    I have remembered a friend, oh so close, who once filled our days together with shared love of life. What ever happened to my best friend I see no more?

    Love defined

    Love in not just a valentineLove’s imagery in seasons such as this often paints pictures so distant from the touch of our real love life. We question what meaning love truly holds. For love is more than a mere valentine card, candy, flowers, a romantic date. Even a honeymoon to Eden would not fully satisfy love’s desires of unconditional oneness. A brief moment of life now and before may have embraced something more like love, but we can no more define love than the blurry-eyed poem of a love struck teen.

    Of course our first definition of love is eros, but eros quickly comes far short of love’s fullest meaning. [ctt title=”Truly the storyline of eros proves to be myth in our romantic lives from first love to last.” tweet=”The arrows of true love pierce a heart irreparably.” coverup=”mM232″]

    אָהַב ‘ahab – to love

    Human love for one for another includes much more than just sexual love, a true binding of souls between two living complex beings of flesh and bones… even a oneness between ‘broken hearts.’ It includes family, father and mother and dear friends. Love of another, plain and not-so-simple.

    Real life beyond the myths of love greatly challenges our sensibilities of meaningful relationships with others. Who do I trust? Who has not wounded the tenderness of my very being?

    I will love my child over all others, a parent may say. Or I will love no friend like the one who hurt me. Love, true love of another may be a many splendored thing, but to love another risks all by trusting vulnerability of my soul.

    A Higher Love

    Do you know this one?

    Deuteronomy 6:5  וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכָל־נַפְשְׁךָ וּבְכָל־מְאֹדֶֽךָ׃

    You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

    In Hebrew, the same word to love is applied first to the LORD! ‘ahab Yĕhovah ‘elohiym – You shall love the Lord your God.

    Jesus calls this the greatest Commandment” in Matthew 22:36-40. 

    [ctt title=”Love God. Love cannot exclude love of the LORD our God!” tweet=”“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart…” coverup=”1l94c”]

    The challenge of love

    Who can I love beyond my self? Who can I trust with my tender wounded heart?

    Love of God is a challenge for many. Fortunately the Lord exceeds every man and every woman in love by reaching down to our delicate depths with overflowing love, mercy, forgiveness and grace.

    Love of a parent or child or dear friend, a mentor, a confidant, a leader or teacher: all become part of the loves of our life. All fall short except the love of God.

    Yet how shall we love those we love as unsparingly as the Lord our God?

    A true love of others cannot seek to love for our own benefit only, but in humble unconditional service to one also beloved of the Lord. I cannot love as well as God, but in all humility I can try to love another in a way that is better than the selfishness of man.

    What love is not

    You may have heard love preached at an altar of bride and groom. Or you may have read on a card the great wisdom of God’s love from a letter to the church in Corinth, a city of excess worship of gods of myth and tradition.

    Yet Paul did not write the love chapter of  1 Corinthians 13 for a ceremony or only for advice to a husband and wife. This love, as we mentioned before, is so much more.

    In Greek, ἀγάπη, agapē love points upward to God’s love as we embrace other souls in this temporary place. The love chapter’s forgotten definition of love is ‘charity’”

    Aside from the definitions and niceties, however, let us briefly examine our own hearts for the leaven of what love is not:

    • love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude.

    • It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing…

    A valentine greeting

    Think of the valentine message you send to loved ones every day and consider from above what love does not do?

    • Does your heart’s greeting to God even approach His love for us?
    • Does your gospel for parent or progeny ever appear arrogant or rude? I’m convicted.
    • Do you boast to your friend or envy another?
    • Worse, at the failings of another do you also ‘rejoice in iniquity?’

    Beloved,

    Love one another as Christ Jesus loves us.

     

  • Interrupting Jesus 3 – interrupted by academia

    Interrupting Jesus 3 – interrupted by academia

    We’ve all met them: the academicians, professors, learned men of logic with indisputable researched proofs of their position; the Doctors of Divinity and PhD’s of wisdom: we’ve all met them.

    If you have not read the books of wisdom in the Bible, notably Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, you have neglected your own education by God. Of course Bibles were not printed in the days of Jesus of Nazareth and such wisdom was only to be gained from the scholars and academicians of the Temple and synagogues who had access to the scrolls of the written word. Young Jesus was not schooled by such learned men, but held his own in their eyes.

    You may be familiar with this story from a parental perspective, yet take a look at this young lad through the eyes of some of the Pharisees present:

    Luke 2:

    41 Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the Feast of the Passover.42 And when he was twelve years old, they went up according to custom. 43 And when the feast was ended, as they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents did not know it…

    46 After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. 47 And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. 48 And when his parents saw him, they were astonished…

    52 And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.

    Jesus’ mission from his youth was interrupted by the trappings of everyday life.

    Again, another story so familiar for the importance of Jesus’ teachings to a teacher of Israel that we may have missed sight of the person who was the interruption in Jesus’s journeys. Nicodemus is part of the inner circle of Bible scholars. His knowledge of God’s word, Hebrew history and influence is comparable to Saul of Tarsus (Paul) who will follow in just a few years. Jesus is sitting with a VIP of the highest caliber, once again more than holding his own.

    John 3:

    Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. 2 This man came to Jesus by night.

    “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.”

     “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

    “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”

    “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

    7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

    “How can these things be?”

    10 Jesus answered him,“Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?

    11 Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. 12 If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? 13 No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

    Even unbelievers have heard Jesus’ statement to Nicodemus, the reason God our Father sent the Messiah to the world in the flesh.

    Jesus is sitting in the room with Nicodemus, a VIP Jew of Jews, who wants to do what God wants him to do. Nicodemus has come to the Son of Man at night, to where our Lord is resting. Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews, does not invite Jesus Christ to his home; rather Nicodemus interrupts him privately.

    Jesus tells the respected leader of the Temple:

    • You must be born of water and the Spirit. (Purified by repentance and receive the Holy Spirit of God as Counselor to your eternal soul.)
    • No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. (Jesus is saying to Nicodemus, ‘I AM the Messiah.’)
    • 16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

    Imagine that you think you have learned all there is to know about God from the Bible, historical books and prayer. You walk into the home of a man at night to learn more. Then Jesus tells you: I AM the Son of God, sent as the Messiah of Israel and Savior of the world! You have interrupted God Almighty the Person of the Son, who tells you:

    God loves you. Believe in the Son, Christ Jesus, and you will have eternal life.

    Nicodemus and the Pharisees believed in the resurrection. Some like him met Christ and believed.

    How old was Nicodemus when he met Jesus?

    I could speculate that as a leader of the Sanhedrin, Nicodemus may have been in his fifty’s or sixty’s, while Jesus is a relatively young man of thirty. It is not inconceivable that Nicodemus could have been one of the up and coming young men of the Temple twenty years earlier when Jesus as a boy interrupted His parent’s pilgrimage with a three-day schooling in ‘His Father’s House.’ At the very least, Nicodemus undoubtedly would have known of the encounter, not to mention the recent teachings of John the Baptizer.

    John 1:

    In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

    The Testimony of John the Baptist

    19 And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” 20 He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.”

    24 (Now they had been sent from the Pharisees.) 25 They asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?”26 John answered them, “I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, 27 even he who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.”

    Nicodemus knew the Messiah (the Christ) of God was coming and wanted to confirm His identity.

    Nicodemus may have been waiting for the Son of God to give him a command of what to do as a leader of the Temple. Rather than taking His rightful authoritative position over the Temple and Jerusalem, the Son of Man chose to humbly obey the purpose of Sacrifice for which He was sent.

    Jesus has a mission of love for those who will believe. All evidence points to the fact that Nicodemus believed.

    Faith does not dispute knowledge, but confirms truth beyond the limits of its proof.

    Nicodemus would argue that Jesus should be given a fair trial. [John 7:50-51] Nicodemus obtained permission for the crucified Christ Jesus to be buried and contributed to the costs. [John 19:38-40] Nicodemus may have even been one of the many to whom Christ appeared after His resurrection. [1 Corinthians 15:6]

    Suppose a VIP comes to you unexpectedly and asks if Jesus is the Christ. Are you prepared for that interruption?

     

     

  • The Last Supper + Communion + a Family Meal

    The Last Supper + Communion + a Family Meal

    Maundy Thursday – The Last Supper

    The following is an UPDATED post from Maundy Thursday of Holy Week in the year of our Lord 2015 about the Last Supper of Jesus and the Twelve and communion of the saints of the Church. - RH

    Even my close friend in whom I trusted,
    who ate my bread, has lifted his heel against me. 

    Psalm 41:9
    The Last Supper scene staged by Rembrandt. Actually the Twelve Apostles in customary 1st century Jewish custom were 'reclined at table.'

    Institution of the Lord’s Supper

    As a Christian you may have your own name and picture of Maundy Thursday.

    It is a celebration of the Church commemorating the LAST SUPPER of the Lord Jesus Christ with the Twelve Apostles, His friends and followers for previous three years.

    Many Christians and Messianic Jews will also recognize that these Jewish men were also celebrating the Passover meal.

    Yet this meal both commemorates a covenant of old and establishes a new covenant by the BODY & BLOOD of the Savior who serves it.

    In Paul’s letter to the CHURCH at Corinth the ‘apostle to the gentiles’ describes our commemoration of the NEW COVENENT of Communion:

    1 Corinthians 11: NKJV

    23 For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you:

    that the Lord Jesus on the same night in which He was betrayed took bread; 24 and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said,

    “Take, eat; this is My body which is broken for you; do this in remembrance of Me.”

    25 In the same manner He also took the cup after supper, saying,

    “This cup is the new covenant in My blood.

    This do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.”

    26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes.

    +

    Commemoration of the First Covenant

    Deuteronomy 12:

    7 And there you shall eat before the Lord your God, and you shall rejoice in all to which you have put your hand, you and your households, in which the Lord your God has blessed you.

    8 “You shall not at all do as we are doing here today—every man doing whatever is right in his own eyes— 9 for as yet you have not come to the rest and the inheritance which the Lord your God is giving you.

    Joshua 5:11-12

    And the day after the Passover, on that very day, they ate of the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain. And the manna ceased the day after they ate of the produce of the land. And there was no longer manna for the people of Israel, but they ate of the fruit of the land of Canaan that year.

    Communion: OUR Family Meal

    • How important is your ‘christian’ and biological family to you?
    • Is Jesus head of your family?
    • Do we not need the intimacy of the love and time together in relationship and meals?

    As WE COMMEMORATE the LAST SUPPER OF JESUS let the saints called into His CUURCH remember that Communion is NOT an Old Covenant, but a New Covenant renewed in the ever-lasting family of Christ Jesus.

    Roger@TalkofJesus.com + Thursday April 6, in the year of our Lord 2023

    We have forgotten the communion of relationship and intimacy of sharing our joy, our sorrows and our meals. We have forgotten to leave a place for the Lord at the head of our table and a time for all to partake in His righteousness and love.

    LORD, we have not even invited you and each of our loved ones to enjoy your peace, your love, your compassion, your teaching… LORD we have lost the family in our home… LORD we have lost the family in your church. Lord help us.

    Prayer of the original A.D. 2015 post. – RH

    Communion

    Holy Communion and the Passover Seder which Jesus commemorated on the night in which He was betrayed are much more than just a ritual.

    Do you realize that Jesus, our Lord and Savior said:

    “Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

    In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” – 1 Corinthians 11:25

    It was after supper. It was a toast, as we would properly identify the proclamation over the wine this close family of Jesus was about to share.

    Yes, the Twelve were Jesus’ close family.

    They shared meals — almost all meals together. They broke bread together. They prayed together. They discussed Jesus’ teaching of the day and the day’s events.

    These were regular times of communion — intimate familial community — fellowship still familiar to members of the first century church and most familiar to families.

    Yet it is a communion, a fellowship of love, even an eventful love feast; which Christians in this century and  our Christian families have sacrificed to the leaven of this world.

    • Communion is fellowship with God
    • Communion is between Christ and the church by the Spirit
    • Communion is the fellowship of believers with one another

    Ephesians 4:

    Once again, encouragement from Paul to the CHURCH in Ephesis where the apostle had by example spent much time.

    Unity in the Body of Christ

    I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, 2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3 eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

    4 There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

    The communion and fellowship of believers in your family, of your church and in the body of all faithful believers is even more than this.

    We remember by Christ’s blood that He IS and we are joined to one another in Him.

    Unbelievers have no part in this. Those separate from Christ Jesus have no LIFE of His saving Blood.

    +

    The New Life

    17 Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.

    18 They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. 19 They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.20 But that is not the way you learned Christ! +

    Do you not find this true?

    Are beloved family members even callous to your love for them and our love for Christ Jesus?

    And if like Christ we are hated by the world and even those of our own household, how much more important is communion and fellowship of His body the church.

    • How important is daily communion and fellowship in your Christian home?
    • Where is the place of Christ at your table, with husband and wife as one with Him?
    • Do our children come to commune with the Lord in our ‘christian home?’
    and here I confess that 'I am the chief of sinners.'

    At the table of the last supper sat Judas, as ALSO sits the one (maybe, if you insist) who hates Jesus and will betray you.

    At the table of the last supper sat Peter, as ALSO sit ones you may have to forgive three times (or seventy times seven) when they deny your love and Christ’s way to take up the cross and follow Him.

    Lord help us. Help us to commune with you and to love one another as You have loved us. Bring our beloved ones to your table of communion and fellowship and eternal love.

    Amen.

    To READ MORE about COMMUNION click HERE.