God Gracious

As members of the Family of God, Christians are called to live in the Kingdom of God and that means adopting its values of Love, Compassion, Mercy, Humility and Trust in God. Sacrificial love, of the agape type, is the type of love we are called to dispense and, truly formulated, it encompasses the other values of the Kingdom of God.

Living in the Kingdom of God requires us to suppress the influence of the secular world around us. That is not an easy task as it posits the need to embrace that we are “in” the world but not “of” it.

Jesus is the bridge to the Father and Jesus is “love” [1 John 4:8]. As disciples of Jesus and, by virtue of our Baptism, we inherit roles as priest, prophet and king and those roles equip us, if we embrace sacrificial love, with the means to bring others into relationship with Jesus and thus to the Father by means of this bridge of love. Furthermore, we are asked to accompany those who we have introduced to Jesus. But first, we must experience transformation and we do that by asking the Holy Spirit to conform us closer to the image of Jesus that we might love as He does [1 John 4:7].

Transformation is a uniquely personal process, but it is birthed by the recognition that we are called to be holy, and our pursuit of holiness is wrapped in the recognition that our relationship with God is paramount. That relationship, as does any relationship, requires good communication. Our prayer life therefore is the medium of exchange with our God, and it is ever evolving if we pay it the attention that it needs. As intimacy with God grows so does our capacity to reach out to others in love.

Each of us is unique in our giftedness and in our charisms and in the invitation, we receive, to utilize that giftedness and those charisms to work in harmony with one another as members of Christ’s Body. That work should be a symphony of engagement activated by our guide, the Holy Spirit, who knows best how to utilize each of us in the orchestra of love.

Where do we Start? We start by surrendering to God to engage his will by obedience. That means cooperating with the Holy Spirit who knows much better than we know how to fit us into His orchestra of love. He knows the instrument we must play to create harmony. He knows our charisms and is anxious that we discover them.

In furtherance of our Priestly function, which is to offer sacrifice, the process of personal transformation is the first step in learning to become love. We then move into the Prophetic stage which encourages us to speak love to those around us and finally to the Kingly stage which moves us to release love to those with whom we come in contact.

Our individual charismatic giftedness will expose how we exhibit our Priestly, Prophetic and Kingly roles in expressing the love that the Kingdom of God espouses but we need to be obedient and to be risk takers in our role in accompaniment that others may also experience the bridge of love that is Jesus. Those others then become disciples themselves as they make Jesus known and loved by all. The Kingdom of God then becomes a reality in this life as we await our turn to experience what God has promised for his disciples in the next.

So where are you in the continuum of love in your ministry efforts? I think of the parable of the Sower and our engagement, as Christians, in sowing the seed of the Word of God. Love activates us to regard the path, the rocky ground and the area of thorns as temporary impediments as we seek to bring the hearts of those we accompany, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to the fertile soil where the Word will take root.

Let us intentionally participate with the Holy Spirit to mold us closer in form to the image of Jesus that we might offer to God all that we have in our life and receive as a supernatural exchange confirmation of our identity, inner healing and intimacy with God reflected in our prayer life and in the way that we love God and one another. We do that by passing out to others the Passport to Paradise, which is love.