abiding in love

I know when I have been spending time with God. And I have to admit, so do the people around me. I am more loving. 

We are in the middle of a sermon series on God's amazing love and in a couple weeks we will be looking at the Scripture on "God is love". It seems so simple, doesn't it?

God is love. Spend time in God's presence and we will know how to love. 

However, the world has a way of getting in between us and God...love. 

And before we know it, love is not something on our heart or mind. 

It can be a big thing, it can be a little thing, it can be a little thing that we make a big thing. 

I don't know what it is for you. I don't know what it will be for me tomorrow or the day after. 

Yet, I know God says, spend time with me and you will love because I love you. 

It doesn't say, we will love because everything is going right.

It doesn't say, we will love because everyone is nice.

It doesn't say, we will love because we have gotten all the sleep and fruit and vegetables we need. 

It doesn't say, we will love because everyone we are frustrated with "gets a brain and figures out what an idiot they have been".

You get my point. 

We love because God first loved us. We love when we abide in God.

So how we love has little to do with our state of mind or heart or the world's state. It has everything to do with our state of spending time with the Lord. 

So, on my list of things to do this week. I have added, spend time with God. 

I hope you notice.

Sheets, tulips and Easter

I have just spent the last half an hour attempting to cover my plants and flowers for the upcoming 20 degree weather. I have pulled all the sheets I have out of my linen closet and sprawled across flowerbeds to cover flowers that I could replace for a couple dollars in a few weeks. Yet still my fingertips are a little numb from wandering around in the cold weather securing the Harry Potter fleece. 

Do you think the tulips thanked me? No, actually the rose bush pricked my fingertips.

However, if I was to be completely honest, I have to admit I would probably rig a heater out to the front yard to save my bleeding heart. Relax, I am not going to do it...fire hazard. 

These are my flowers. I dug around in the dirt and planted those bulbs last Fall. I replanted that bleeding heart from a friend's house. I have watched that rosebush survive three seasons of those stupid Japanese beetles and way too many of these weird April cold fronts. I would do about anything to save them...

Save them...

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable then they. Matthew 6:26

Sunday is Easter. Not a day to celebrate Cadbury chocolate eggs (though that is a blessing from God). It is more about this week, Holy week. The week that we consider the journey Christ took to the cross. What Jesus did to save us. 

The betrayal, the beatings, the blood. 

All to save humanity from ourselves, really. 

You and me, sinful fools. 

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. John 3:16-17