Love,Love,Love

[Jesus said] “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:36-40)

When we have genuine love – unconditional (agape) love, with no strings attached – we naturally obey God. We do what God wants not because we have to, but because we want to.

I like what St. Augustine wrote about love –





"Love and do what you like."

When we have the love that comes from above, God’s desires become our desires.

True Happiness

Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a
distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. (Luke 15:13)

Among the founding principles of our nation is “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But we need to ask the questions, “What kind of life?”, “Liberty to do what? Happiness in what sense?

The younger (prodigal) son thinks life, liberty, and happiness can be found in “wild living,” so he rushes off with reckless abandon to pursue it. But he winds up destitute – physically and spiritually. His life was nothing more than spiritual death. His liberty became slavery to sin. The relative fun he may have had was not true happiness.

St. Augustine seemed to have in mind this dilemma when he wrote –

“Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.”

True happiness is found when our liberty is governed by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, when we receive new life in him.

Believing is Seeing

Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” (John 20:29)

"To have faith is to believe what you can't see and the reward of faith is to see what you believe.” (St. Augustine)

It took not just seeing, but touching the body of the Resurrected Christ to convince Thomas to believe Jesus had been risen from the grave. What does it take us? What motivates us to believe?

In one way or another, our faith is a gift from the Holy Spirit, moving through Scripture, the fellowship of other Christians and worship within the faith community. We can’t often see it coming, but once it does – when the Spirit of Christ enters our heart, everything in life begins to take on more focus.

Seeing isn’t believing. Believing is seeing. And the ultimate benefit to believing is to see the One who sees us most clearly and has given us the means to believe.

See what I mean? Can you believe it?