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
Love Conquers All
Paul prayed in this way for the church at Ephesus: I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, [God] may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in…
Engaging the Culture
Mark McIntyre shares some thoughts here on the culture wars that often define our relationship to the world outside of the Church. We are called to be a people who are known by our love rather than our stance on this or that social issue. Are we really known this way? Mark’s words are a…
How We Are Defined
Burstein! via Compfight Zack Hunt wrote a piece called Abortion, Gay Marriage, Immigration, Gun Control, and the Church over at A Deeper Story. He points out that we have a big problem on our hands when it comes to the ways we have come to be defined by these issues. Christians are primarily defined in…
The “Kingdom Now”: Reflections on Magical American Christianity
One major problem American Christians face is that we tend to embrace a magical view of the Christian faith. We assume that if a person “prays the sinners prayer,” “surrenders their life to Christ,” and “accepts Jesus as Lord of their life,” this somehow magically “saves” them and will sooner or later magically transform them…
The Call to Suffer
Paul tells us that in all our relations, we are to “have the same attitude of mind Christ Jesus had” (Phil 2:5). Though he was “in very nature God,” he didn’t cling to this status. Rather, for our sake he set aside his divine prerogatives, took on the nature of a servant and “humbled himself…
Revolting Against the Cosmic Hitler
Greg returned last week from Europe where he was able to visit some Nazi death camps. In the following, he reflects on a story of a German teenager who actively resisted the Nazi agenda and what that might mean for us as Christians as we revolt against evil: Sophie Scholl was born in 1920…