Daily Devotion for Lent 2021 - Day 4

Scripture Reading: 1 Thessalonians 4 (NRSV)

Today's chapter seems to have a lot to do with relationship.

When Paul speaks of sanctification in verse three, Wesleyans should pick up on this right away.  Our understanding is that God calls us through sanctifying grace to become more Christlike in our lives.  Specifically, here, we are being called to be more Christlike in our relationships.

How do we love God?  And how do we love our neighbor?

We relate to both through our love of ourselves.  We must respect ourselves through the understanding that we have been created in the image of God.  While the church may have gone overboard in its past use of railing against fornication, for Paul's time, there was a wider availability of sexuality in Mediterranean culture.  Some pagan temple worship included orgies or temple prostitutes.  Psychologically, there can be a sense of trying to capture immortality through our sexual expression that is tied to procreation.  Paul's theology moves us beyond this animalistic understanding to place something permanent in who we are spiritually.

We see that when he speaks of the dead in Christ rising first.  We continue on in Christ even after death which speaks to a resurrection theology.  

Sometimes it is hard to love people.
Sometimes we are those people!

Paul bids us to love our brothers and sisters more and more.  This growth of love is a disciplined
approach to love.  Sometimes we speak of love as if we either have it or we don't.  We understand through our relationships with family members that love often takes work.  You might love your parents or spouse or children or siblings through long association but there also might be times when you find bearing with them hard.  We know that in these moments, a disciplined approach to love is needed.

Fortunately, we don't believe that God abandons us to this hard work.  Rather, as we pray to God for help in this area, we find that even dormant love may be renewed.  Sometimes we must pray that we might get to a place where we even want to love to begin with!

But this speaks to that resurrection faith, doesn't it?

Prayer for the day:

Loving God, we seek to follow Jesus.  We know he commanded us to love you and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.  Help us with our work in all three of these areas.  May we find that our love of each of these spills over into the other.  We pray these things in the name of the One who First Loved Us.  Amen.

Photo by Jill Watson via Flickr.com.  Used under the Creative Commons license.

All scripture quoted is from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.