Practice Loving Relationships
Read Matthew 22:34-40
The scripture seems clear about what is to be our first priority:
“Love God with all your
heart, and with all your soul and with all your
mind. This is the first and greatest
commandment.”
How do we love God? Is it enough
to go to church for worship services? In
my personal beliefs, church is the place where we can go to worship God with
others. In church we give of our time,
talents and gifts, praises, thanksgivings, financial gifts and surrender our
needs into God’s care. While attending
worship can certainly elicit a sense of closeness to God, I believe that there
is more involved in loving God first and foremost in our lives. Most of us
spend more time with co-workers on any given day than we do with God. Some of us communicate more over the internet
than we do with God. Some of us are
quicker to serve our back yard birds’ needs than we are to serve God. Now I have nothing against co-workers, the
internet and back yard birds! But if we
are to love God first, we need to also spend time with God, communicate with
God, and serve God.
I believe that a relationship with God requires several things:
|
S olitude |
- |
That time alone with God where there are no
distractions such as the telephone, television, or people going in and out. |
|
S ilence |
- |
Absolute quiet is required if we are to let go of
the spinning of our minds and listen for the voice of God. |
|
I ntentionality |
- |
I am intentional about taking my son to soccer
practice. I am intentional about
planning time with my life-partner. I
am intentional about checking my email every day. In the same way, I need to be intentional
about taking time for my relationship with God. |
|
I ntimacy |
- |
I have learned that if I am intentional about taking
time for solitude and silence with God, the relationship becomes very
personal and intimate. I find myself sharing my deepest fears, deepest pain
and deepest hope in those times. I
sense God’s presence within me and all around me. It is an incredible experience! |
|
P rayer |
- |
I believe that prayer is communication with
God. I can write and speak eloquent
prayers but the ones that really communicate with God are the words that come
from my heart. When I have
intentionally spent time in solitude and silence I develop an intimacy with
God and everything in my life becomes a prayer. I see God in the flutter of a butterfly
wings, hear God’s voice in a sunset, and silently speak to God of my praises
as I watch a Scarlet Tanager bathe in our birdbath. |
Once we make time with God a priority, it opens the door to God’s
presence in the activities of daily life, such as our time with co-workers,
communication on the internet and care for the back yard birds.
“O taste and see that God is good”
Psalm 34:8a
Take a
S S I I P and know that putting God first is the ultimate blessing in life.
______________________________________________________________________
And the second priority is like it.
Love your neighbor as
yourself.
Because of this second part of this scripture taken from Matthew 22,
most people have decided that this means we are to love other people second in
our lives. Often times when I am doing a
workshop on this subject and ask people to state their life priorities they
will say:
God
Others
Self
I want to point out a part of this scripture that is often
ignored. It says that we are to love
others in the same way we love ourselves.
When I think about the opinions some of us have of ourselves, it
concerns me that we are called to love others the same way as we love ourselves,
because some of us do not love ourselves! Some of us are carrying around old
bags and baggage that have been used in negative ways to define us. Perhaps the problem with the world today is
that we DO love others the same way we love ourselves.
I believe that this scripture assumes that we already love
ourselves. However, this is not always
the case. Therefore I will be so bold as
to state that our top three life priorities, at least according to this
scripture, should be:
God
Self
Others
If we can truly love and care for ourselves, and love others in that
same way, can you imagine the impact on our world? Or even the impact on our churches? What a concept to love ourselves so that we
can then love others!
Here’s another way to look at this:
When we take good care of ourselves we can be there to help others. If you’ve ever flown in a commercial airliner
you know that the flight attendant instructs us to put the oxygen mask over our
own nose and mouth before trying to assist others. I asked a flight attendant I knew personally
about this once. He told me that when
people insist on helping others first they end up passing out from a lack of
oxygen. Then they are no good to
themselves or anyone else. If we want to
practice love, we must practice on ourselves as well!
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I must admit that in 2002 when I learned that I was expected to attend
an all day workshop on the subject of Love & Appreciation I was less than
thrilled. It’s not that I had any doubts
about the writer and facilitator of the workshop; Wendy Foxworth is an
excellent speaker and teacher. It’s just that I knew what Jesus called the
greatest two commandments like the back of my hand. What could I learn about this subject that
would take a full day? By the end of
that day I had the answer to that question: PLENTY!
It was Wendy’s workshop that helped me to see the need to build a
culture of love and appreciation in the church I was serving. We were bogged down in a culture of command
and control that stemmed from old leadership ideas, old biblical beliefs and a
group of people living in an oppressive culture in a very oppressive town. I admit that I initially came away from the
Love & Appreciation workshop with a lot of new ideas, but also
resistance. I liked my personal style of
leadership and was quite comfortable with it.
It would take a great deal of work to move from a culture of command/
control to a culture of love and appreciation.
I suspected, however, that if we could do this successfully it might
make a difference in the life of the church.
Maybe we’d even start growing.
In response I came home from that conference and set up a plan that
looked like this:
·
Gather all the
resources I can find on this subject
·
Preach a sermon
on the basics of Matthew 22:32-40
·
Develop a
workshop part I on love & appreciation and set a date to present it
·
Present the
workshop and listen closely to the written evaluations of it
·
Begin to
incorporate these concepts into worship.
One example might be, “Can we show some love and appreciation to our
choir this morning for the many ways they bless us?”
·
Develop a
workshop part II and set a date to present it
·
Present the
second workshop, look for both repeat and new attendees and listen to the
evaluations.
·
Integrate
concepts from these workshops into the newsletter, board meetings and our times
of prayer
·
Develop a
workshop part
·
Present the third
workshop, look for both repeat and new attendees and listen to the evaluations
·
Follow up with
another sermon relating to these themes
·
Develop a Love
& Appreciation team of people who bought into these concepts and realized
how critical they were to the life of our church. This team would perform skits at different
times in the life of the congregation, promote the concepts individually and as
a team, and eventually train others to be leaders in this ministry.
For those of you who might wonder what I chose to do
those three workshops on, I should tell you that I focused them on what was
needed contextually by that congregation at that point in time. In other words, I looked at the history,
culture, theology and experience of that faith community in order to determine
where to begin. Later the team would
decide what was needed and how to incorporate it.
The first workshop had three components:
·
A basic
introduction of Wendy’s workshop
·
An introduction
of Rev. Elder Lillie Brock’s The Change
Cycle
·
An initial
discussion on the history and culture of our congregation and how it influenced
us
The second workshop focused on communication:
·
Awareness of word
choice, voice inflection, body language
·
The skills needed
in order to deal with someone in a loving manner
·
Healthy ways to
demonstrate love and appreciation in our lives and in the life of our church
The third workshop centered on conflict and the need
to love unconditionally:
·
Conflict per
se/in itself is neutral, it’s what we do with it that makes it healthy or
destructive
·
Conflict can be
dealt with in effective and healthy ways
·
We are always at
choice in how we choose to act and react to people, places and situations
I then followed these workshops with a sermon on the PLATINUM
RULE. You’ve heard of the Golden
Rule? Well, this rule is similar but has
a distinct difference. I learned about
this rule while attending a Career Track workshop as a part of my research on
love and appreciation.
“Treat others the way
you want to be treated”.
The Golden Rule
“Treat others the way
they want to be treated.”
The Platinum Rule
I personally began to incorporate the Platinum Rule into every aspect
of my life. Here’s an example: While I enjoy working independently on
projects, there were those in my church who much preferred working in
teams. I began to look at more team
approaches for those people. While I’d
love it if my life-partner sent me a dozen roses, she’d much prefer I cook
dinner for her. If I wanted to take my
son to the zoo, I might learn that our plans have changed because he’d much rather
go and see a new movie. We are not all
the same; why should we assume that others want to be treated the same way we
do? It made our ministry much more
relational and much more enjoyable when we adopted the Platinum Rule.
I remember a one-frame comic, drawn by an artist named Guindon, that used to appear in a
In the video, God, Gays, and the Gospel Millennium Edition, the Rev.
Elder Troy Perry was speaking about Jesus’ greatest commandments when he said:
“When He was asked one time, ‘What’s the greatest
commandment?’ He didn’t say ‘thou
shalt not commit adultery’ or even ‘thou shalt not kill.’ He could have, but He didn’t. He said, ‘The
greatest commandment is this, and on this hangs all the law and the
prophets. The first commandment is
you’re to learn to love the Lord thy God with all your heart, your mind and
your strength. And the second is likened
to the first, you’re to learn to love your neighbor as
yourself.’ And brothers and sisters I
tell you this day, if we could learn that lesson, if we could just learn to
live by those two commandments, everything would be all right.”
Amen
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
What do you honestly see as the top three priorities in your life
today?
How might you keep God first in your life?
How might you make yourself the second priority in your life?
Do you believe that practicing the platinum rule would enhance your
relationships with others? Can you give
an example?
How do you think the implementation of the platinum rule might affect
your church? Can you give an example?
How do you deal with conflict in your personal life?
How does your church typically deal with conflict?
How does (or could) your church practice love and appreciation using
the Matthew