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5th August 2024
MondayReflection
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'John Piper suggests'
Consider Each Other How to Stir Up Love
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23 Let us hold on firmly to the hope we profess,
because we can trust God to keep his
promise.
24 Let us be concerned for one another, to help
one another to show love and to do good.
25 Let us not give up the habit of meeting
together, as some are doing. Instead, let us
encourage one another all the more, since you
see that the Day of the Lord is coming nearer."
.... Hebrews 10.23-25
What Are You Doing with Your Life?
When you get up in the morning and you face a day, what do you say to yourself about your hopes for the day?
When you look from the beginning of the day to the end of the day, what do you want to happen because you have lived?
What difference do you want your life to make?
If you say, I don't even think like that, I just get up and do what I've got to do, then you are cutting yourself off from a basic means of grace and a source of guidance and strength and fruitfulness and joy.
It is crystal clear in the Bible, including this text, that God means for us to aim consciously at something significant in our days.
God's revealed will for you is that when you get up in the morning, you don't drift aimlessly through the day letting mere circumstances alone dictate what you do, but that you aim at something - that you focus on a certain kind of purpose.
I'm talking about children here, and teenagers, and adults - single, married, widowed, mums, and every trade.
Aimlessness is akin to lifelessness.
Dead leaves in the back garden may move around more than anything else - more than the dog, more than the children.
The wind blows this way, they go this way.
The wind blows that way, they go that way.
They tumble, they bounce, they skip, they press against a fence, but they have no aim whatsoever.
They are full of motion and empty of life.
God did not create humans in his image to be aimless, like lifeless leaves blown around in the back garden of life.
He created us to be purposeful - to have a focus and an aim for all our days.
And this is not oppressive.
It's not slavery. It's not depleting.
To find what we were made for and to do it with all God's might, is freeing and energizing.
Jesus said, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me". Food!
Aiming day by day to do what you were meant to do is like eating: it gives life and energy, rather than taking it away.
You will eventually die if you do what you were meant to do.
"The kind of love that magnifies God and not man is hope that's rooted in the faithfulness of God."
You may be young or you may be old.
That is God's choice, not yours.
But when you die doing what you were meant to do, you die well and full.
Would you consider with me what these three verses teach us about the aim and focus of our lives as Christians?
God may use them to bring crystal-clear focus to your life.
He may use them to blow away all the confusion and fog, and give a lucid, bright, crisp, spring-morning clarity to the aim of your days.
Let us hold on firmly to the hope we profess, because we can trust God to keep his promise.
Now that is not something you do with your hands or your feet.
You don't go to the kitchen to do this, or to the den or across the street or to the office or to school.
This is not done where anyone can see. This is an affair of the heart.
Embrace your hope. Hold fast to your hope.
Be a hope-filled person. Hope in God.
He keeps his word.
But that does not provide you with a sufficient focus for the day.
God did not create you to curl up under the covers and hope in God all day in bed.
><(((°>
This is an edited version.
The full article is avaiable on request
John Piper
is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary.
For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Foundations for Lifelong Learning: Education in Serious Joy.
More
Without some effect on your life, hope in God would be invisible and bring no public glory to God's power and wisdom and goodness and trustworthiness.
If the act of hoping in God were all that he created you to aim at, then verse 24 would be wasted words.
But they are not. God created you first to hope in him, and then to make that hope visible by the effect that it has on your life.
And that effect is given in verse 24, and it is to be the aim of your daily life.
This is why you get up in the morning.
Let's read Verse 24: "Let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds."
Here is the focus for your life.
Here is what you aim at from morning till night as a Christian.
Notice carefully: it is not what you might expect.
It is not: consider how to love each other and do good deeds.
That would be Biblical and right.
But it's different:
"Consider how to stimulate each other to love and good deeds."
Focus on helping others become loving people.
Aim at stirring up others to do good deeds.
And of course the implication would also be that if others need help and stirring, we do too, and so we would be aiming at what sorts of ways we can think and feel and talk and act that will stir each other up to love and to do good deeds.
The aim of our lives is not just loving and doing good deeds, but helping to stir up others to love and to good deeds.
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