O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into my heart your greatest gift, which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue, without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you. Grant this for the sake of your only Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A worthy meditation to connect with a time of prayer with these words would be, obviously, 1 Corinthians 13:1-3.
I have noticed that with sin, theology, morality, righteousness, etc. it is always easier to stake our claims in the things that seem black and white. For example, I was reading a piece of a book by Tim Keller called "Counterfiet Gods" where he says,
“Jesus warns people far more often about greed than about sex, yet almost no one thinks they are guilty of it. Therefore we should all begin with a working hypothesis that ‘this could be a problem for me.’ If greed hides itself so deeply, no one should be confident that it is not a problem for them. How can we recognize and become free from the power of money to blind us?” (p53)
Sexual sin is easier to define and judge others over because it is perceived in black and white terms. You have either committed this one or not.
Greed, however, is much harder, like love to make clear doctrines about.
The call of the gospel seems to lead us much more towards those things are not so easily defined and controlled by our systems of thought and behavior. Love is too big to draw a line between when we have fulfilled our duty and when we have not. Yet everything hinges upon our practice of it - no matter how right we are about everything else.
Take a look at Matthew 23:23 at an example of this in Jesus' ministry.
Let us never grow content with simplified, 'controlable' systems of life and faith. Let us throw our full lives into the bigger and broader themes that define life formed by the Gospel and the Way of Jesus.
Shawn
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