so tonight i was closing my eyes to go to bed and my mind was kinda sleepy but i wanted to go to sleep thinking of something good so i thought about a verse that i am studying to teach this wednesday.
1 John 3:16 "By this we know love, the he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers"
the first phrase really got me thinking and after a hour of thinking and 600 words, i figured i would write down some of my thoughts here.
"By this we know love..." how amazing is it that we know what love is because of what the Father and the Son has done for us. just as children learn to live and love from their parents, so we learn to live and love from our heavenly Father. we are His sons, we are like Him and so we should live and love like Him. in Matthew, we learn the greatest commandment, to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strengthen, while the second greatest commandment is like it, that we should love our neighbor as ourselves.
as Christ gave up His life for us, so we should give our life to Him. if we give our life to Him, then we should live our life the way that He would want us to live it.
my mind is seriously going in a million different directions a million miles per hour because of this phrase. this verse reveals a trait of God in it's entirety and it is the trait that means that most to us because this trait is what saves us from ourselves and brings us back to God.
i'm having a hard time writing my thoughts down because of how awesome this verse is and what it means to us. we get to know and see God's love for us and we also get to know how we are to live our lives. this is what it is to be Christian, to live and love as Christ.
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This is the challenge with being a Christian parent; we can never live as Christ lived, we can never love as perfectly as He did and yet we are called to do this. So, we live it out as best we are able through His strength and He takes care of the rest. That is the awesome part- we may get to have kids who turn out great in spite of poor parenting and in spite of not living as we should live. I am proof of that. Love you Grant.
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