Practice Love

What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you. (Philippians 4:9 ESV)

Via de Cristo weekends sure give me a lot of devotional material!....

On these weekends, we hear several talks given by clergy and lay people. One of the lay talks is about Apostolic Action. Apostolic actions are those intentional things we do to help bring others to Christ and/or aid in bringing God's kingdom to earth. The key word here is "intentional." I really loved a term that was used on this weekend... "apostolic accident." The speaker said "There are no apostolic accidents." I'm not sure I completely agree with that. Sometimes when we are living a life of grace, we live in a way others see and want for themselves too... and though it wasn't really intentional on our part, we win others to Christ almost by accident. However, I got the point.

We need to do and say intentional things in our lives to draw people to God. I think the best way is to do what it tells us in the scripture above... practice those things we know we should be pracicing... particularly, practice love. When we wake up in the morning, wouldn't it be great to have a specific plan to show your love to another person that day? And the best people to show this kind of love to are those who don't know this kind of love... those who are sitting on the spiritual fence or those who don't know Christ at all. Those who are going through struggles that will test their faith or those who have failed those tests and have turned their backs to God. I've heard it said that those who are the hardest to love are the ones who need it the most. That certainly is the truth. We should plan daily to show love to at least one person who is hard to love. We all know someone like that.

What is your plan for Apostolic Action today? Yes, I believe there are "apostolic accidents" and I pray we all cause some of them everyday. But we can't count on them. Make a plan to reach out to someone in love... someone who needs to feel God's love through you. Practice love.

Father,
Help us to make it a daily habit to practice love. As we go about our day today, show us someone we can share your love with. Amen.

Joys: Garden-picked lettuce; last day of work before vacation; my family