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26th September 2024
ThursdayReflection
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'Colin Smith shares'
'Founder of 'Open the Bible''
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"Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep."
.... Romans 12:13-15
I usually look up the definitions of key words
'Generous' means - A readiness to give more of something than is strictly necessary or expected.
A generous person is one who is so motivated by love that he or she goes beyond what is required by the law.
Love always goes beyond the law.
Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. (Rom. 12:15)
If you are going to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep, you have to get close to other people.
You cannot do this from a distance.
Each of these verses points to an implicit temptation:
The temptation here is to remain aloof, to be detached from other people, to keep to yourself.
And if you do that, you cannot do what God calls us to do here.
Some of us would respond, "Well, I am a very private person."
Remember, God calls you to be a very loving person, and the only way to be a loving person is to find ways to get close enough to other people to feel their pain and to share their joy.
Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.
Whose pain are you feeling right now?
Whose joy are you sharing right now?
Think about how God models this for us right at the beginning of the bible story.
God is in heaven.
He is completely self-sufficient.
What that means is he has all that he needs in himself.
What about love?
There has always been love between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
He doesn't need us to have love.
God could have made the man and the woman and the left them to get on with life on their own.
After all, they had each other.
God could have sat in splendid isolation in heaven and watched from a distance.
But God comes down, takes a visible form, and walks with the man and the woman in the garden in the cool of the day.
God did this because God is love!
Love does more than watch from a distance.
Love comes alongside and walks with others in the joys and the sorrows of their lives.
These appearances of God in a visible form are repeated throughout the Old Testament.
They point forward to that great outpouring of love that's right at the very centre of the bible story in which God actually became a man in Jesus.
Jesus came close to us, entering our joys, and sharing our pain.
In his Gospel, John records seven miracles of Jesus.
He called them signs because they point to who Jesus is and what Jesus does.
The first of these signs was at a wedding, and the last of these was at a funeral.
Whose wedding was it, when Jesus turned water into wine at Cana of Galilee?
We don't know. They were just an ordinary couple.
We don't even know their names.
But Jesus entered the joy of their marriage.
He rejoiced with those who rejoice. Your joy is his joy.
We do know whose funeral it was that Jesus attended.
Lazarus was the deeply loved brother of Martha and Mary and a close friend of Jesus.
When our Lord heard the news that Lazarus had died, he came to Bethany.
Then, John tells us, "Jesus wept" (11:35).
Why would Jesus weep when he knew that he would soon raise Lazarus from the dead?
The answer to that question is that Jesus truly enters our sorrow.
He feels the pain of our loss.
Right now, Jesus enjoys the resurrection that one day will be ours, but he does not look down from heaven and say, "No need for tears".
Maybe you are saying, "I need to learn how to love.
I need a greater emotional capacity."
If you want to learn how to love, get close enough to some other people to share their joys and sorrows.
Ask yourself this week: "With whom can I rejoice?
With whom should I weep?"
><(((°>
This is an edited version.
The full article, and Bible references, is avaiable on request
Scroll down for the continuation of this discussion.
'Open the Bible'
We exist to open the Bible with people, help them open the Bible for themselves, and equip them to open the Bible with others so everyone everywhere can experience the transformative power of God's Word.
Founder - Colin Smith
God's Word is everlasting and never returns to Him empty.
Yet with all this power to create and sustain new life, so many Bibles remain unopened.
"We have this ministry by the mercy of God.
God in his kindness has chosen to take ordinary and unworthy people like us, and use us to proclaim the greatest good news the world has ever heard."
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Be Generous by Releasing the Gifts that God Has Given to You in Christ
Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. (Rom. 12:13)
Generosity is a readiness to give more than is necessary or expected.
Here Jesus calls us to be generous especially in relation to our homes, our time, and our possessions.
The word translated hospitality here literally means "loving strangers."
The same word is used in Hebrews 13:2,
"Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers."
Look out for people who are on their own.
Be especially generous to brothers and sisters in Christ (or saints), who don't have a circle of connections.
Paul was writing on the eve of the greatest persecution that was ever unleashed on the Christian church, and the first signs of it were beginning to erupt.
Believers who were persecuted in one town would flee to the next (Mat. 10:23), and when they arrived they would be dependent on the kindness of Christians opening their home to a brother or sister they may never have met before.
What are you going to do when you get to the next town?
You're going to depend on the hospitality of other brothers and sisters in Christ.
Nobody else would do this for Christians, so Paul says,
"Make sure that you have an especially generous heart towards the needs of your brothers and sisters in Christ."
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