Monday, July 1, 2019
Dear friends, I am not writing a new commandment for you; rather it is an old one you have had from the very beginning. This old commandment—to love one another—is the same message you heard before. Yet it is also new. Jesus lived the truth of this commandment, and you also are living it. For the darkness is disappearing, and the true light is already shining. If anyone claims, “I am living in the light,” but hates a fellow believer, that person is still living in darkness. Anyone who loves a fellow believer is living in the light and does not cause others to stumble. But anyone who hates a fellow believer is still living and walking in darkness. Such a person does not know the way to go, having been blinded by the darkness. 1 John 2:7-11
I love
mountains. When we first moved from
“Flat Florida” to North Carolina in 2000 I could not get over how beautiful it
is here. Within a week or so we took a
drive up to the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I was hooked. My congregation suffered because of my
addiction…they had to listen to me preach a sermon series (I think 19 weeks in
all) about the View from God’s Mountaintops. (If you like mountains too, I have the
recordings.)
Truth be
told, I was hooked much earlier than coming to Carolina. My parents took us to a campground on top of
a mountain in upstate New York back in the 1950’s. The clear, crisp Autumn air in the pre-dawn,
looking down on a Revolutionary War battlefield site near Elmira, NY is a
memory that never grows old. There is
such grandeur and declaration of God’s handiwork in those hills. They seem old, eternal – unmovable and
awesome; they’re stamped with the mark of eternal hands. They are old and always new; hard to explain,
much easier to experience.
Driving to
annual conference ten days ago we came to that familiar point on I-40 where you
can first see the blue haze draped backdrop of layers of mountain shadows. I breathed deep, and sighed, hello,
old friends; it’s good to see you again. Did I tell you I love
mountains?
This
mountain-top experience is one I’ve known many times in our two decades of
living here, but each time there is a newness that rekindles my appreciation of
what beauty God creates.
And that
is the connection here, this morning (for me), in John’s beautiful passage of
the new, but old commandment to love.
This command, John says, is old, because the beginning of God’s
Scripture describes God’s loving hand in creation, and His joy in walking with
those he made in his own image. Even
when man became unloving in rebellion, God still loved, promising a redeemer to
save. And, for John, this ancient idea
of loving became the new commandment, when Jesus showed up, lived a perfect
life of love, with the ultimate loving gift of his blood for our
forgiveness.
For You Today
Take it
from a mountain-lover, there is no greater mountain-top than what happened on
Mt. Calvary.
Go to VIDEO
[1]
Title Image: Pixabay.com Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture
quotations are from The
New Living Translation©
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