Sermon #33 — Loving our Brothers and Sisters — 1 John 3:11-18


Pokeweed Berry Magenta; photo by GAC.
Pokeweed Berry Magenta; photo by GAC.

 

Love is freedom.  Love is like laying down a burden that we really can’t carry in the first place.  That burden is our own self.  Cain was a man gnawed by fear.  He was afraid that he wouldn’t get is due (as he saw it).  He lived with a desperate need to fulfill his own interests, his own desires, to assert his own “rights.”  Living as if our own self is the center of the universe is a very wearing and frightening way to live.  Living out love can free us from all that.  Love means laying all that down, not carrying it around any more.  Love means living for the well-being of others — concretely, intentionally, actively — joyously and freely.

Read Genesis 4 (the story of Cain and Abel and beyond), and 1 John 3:11-18.

Then listen to “Loving our Brothers and Sisters

©2012 Gary A. Chorpenning; all rights reserved.

 

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