"This is how God showed His love among us: He sent His one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him. This is love; not that we love God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we ought to love one another." 1 John 4:9-11
Yesterday I introduced the teaching of cross-centered love: a love that is "a willing self -sacrifice for the redemptive good on another." Dr. Paul David Tripp illustrates what this love looks like in his book A BROKEN-DOWN HOUSE [-- Living Productively in a World Gone Bad (Shepherd Press)
These are practical, but POWERFUL, and down-right convicting, brothers:
1. It means not keeping yourself so busy with YOU and YOURS that you have no practical time to love others.
2. It means being committed to knowing people, because you can minister only in a very limited ways to those whom you do not know.
3. It means being willing to have your life complicated by the needs and struggles of others.
4. It means being willing to share your physical resources with others.
5. It means being willing to live with an open home.
6. It means being perseverant and patient even when the love you give is not returned.
7. It means actively looking for places where you can function as one of God's tools of love.
8. It means resisting the temptation to be judgmental, self-righteous, and critical.
9. It means overlooking minor offenses and fighting the temptation to become bitter or cynical.
10. It means making life decisions out of a recognition of this inescapable call to love.
DIGGING DEEPER: Proverbs 27; Exodus 16-18; Matthew 18:1-20
DIG THIS QUOTE: The one who falls into sin is a human; the one who grieves at sin is a saint; the one who boasts of sin is a fool.
DETERMINED DIGGING: Level 1 -- 2 Chronicles 7:14; Level 2 -- Psalm 19
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