We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Love is a Beautiful Way to Live…and Die
Hartwig HKD via Compfight
Richard Beck posted a reflection this last week called Love is the Allocation of Our Living and Dying. Greg has a regular practice of imagining his own death in order to live rightly while he’s alive. In this reflection, Richard discusses the idea of “giving our lives away” and what that really means.
From Richard’s blog:
Life is a finite resource always slipping away. Every minute that passes is a passing of life, a movement toward death. Every moment we are being expended and used up.
But we have some choices in how we are expended. We can allocate our dying. We can specify the times and places of our dying.
My point here is that, because life is a finite resource, giving ourselves to others is a very real sort of sacrifice. It’s not suicidal or dysfunctional, but it is sort of martyrological in that I am literally dying the minutes I spend with you. To be with you–to love you–is to die a little bit. A sacrificial giving of my life to you.
Category: General
Tags: Death, Kingdom Living, Richard Beck, Sacrifice
Related Reading
Does the Old Testament Justify “Just War”?
Since the time of Augustine, Christians have consistently appealed to the violent strand of the Old Testament to justify waging wars when they believed their cause was “just.” (This is Augustine’s famous “just war” theory.) Two things may be said about this. First, the appeal to the OT to justify Christians fighting in “just” wars…
How Do You Handle Feelings of Being Overwhelmed? (podcast)
Greg talks about being overwhelmed. Episode 500! http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0500.mp3
The Right to Remain Silent
A reader (Thanks Adam) sent us this reflection written by Jason Hess on how we as Christians sometimes use the freedom of speech in ways that are in opposition with our call to love. How we live is infinitely more important than what we say, and sometimes our free speech is a detriment to bringing…
How God Changes the World
All who place their trust in Jesus look forward to a day when he will return and fully establish the kingdom of God. When this happens, Scripture promises that everything will change. There will be no more sickness, death, hunger, natural disasters, violence, fear, heartaches, sin, or evil. There will be no more racism, nationalism,…
7 Ways to Join the Kingdom Revolution
In the previous post, I introduced in short form the call to participate in the kingdom revolution that Jesus began. What does this mean for us today? Let me offer seven ways we are called to the Jesus revolution: When Jesus set aside the riches of his divine prerogatives and sided with the poor and…
Shouldn’t preachers rally Christians to fight political injustice?
Question: My pastor has publicly supported your book The Myth of a Christian Nation. But he’s recently called on the church to take a stand against the injustice of our local government cutting funding for inner city recreational facilities. This seems right to me, since we’re suppose to defend the cause of the poor and oppressed.…