Claiming the 'L' Word: Week Six

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. ~ 1 Corinthians 13




Read this Quote from Brian McLaren's The Great Spiritual Migration*: 

"How many of us find ourselves taking the weight of the world on our shoulders?....Before long, we collapse under the weight...we burn out. But then comes the liberating word...If enough of us are freed from the unbearable weight of doing everything and do the one little thing that's our to do now, then we can trust that God can get it done through all of us what none of us can do alone. And suddenly, it's not burdensome work. It's aliveness. It's joy. It's freedom. Instead of playing God, I'm playing with God, at play in God's good world where everything is holy." 




How is this quote informed by our passage this week? 



What burdens have you put on your shoulders that God is asking in love to take from you? 


Prayer: Show me the freedom in you love, O Lord! Amen




*Brian McLaren: The Great Spiritual Migration (New York: Convergent Books, 2016).

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