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Luke 6:35 But love your enemies, and do good, and lend expecting back nothing, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Love Your Enemies # I was once an enemy of God, and even today still make choices that highlight enmity in my heart towards him. It’s what’s left-over, what will continue to persist (though I hope be minimized as much as possible) while waiting for Heaven to come to earth. Knowing and recognizing my own position - as a former enemy, makes it somewhat easy to read these words to “do good” and “expect nothing in return” from my enemies because God was good to me, and continues to be. So, I am the ungrateful and the wicked that he is kind to. How do I feel about that? Honestly, grateful but also a little ashamed. I know who I am, and sometimes I choose to be who I was before. But God still loves me and my heart is glad to be in his favor.

Mark 12:29-30 29 Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Listen, Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 And you shall love the Lord your God from your whole heart and from your whole soul and from your whole mind and from your whole strength.’ The Most Important Commandment # Deuteronomy 6:4-5 4 “Hear, Israel, Yahweh our God, Yahweh is unique. 5 And you shall love Yahweh your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with all of your might. Jesus quotes the Shema as the most important commandment - not really surprising… Yahweh’s authority and divine kingship is the most important reality to affirm. Along with recognizing the authority and Oneness of Yahweh is the command the love him. ie. Not loving him is not recognizing his authority… Again, not a surprising thing to hear a king say. So he says the most important thing is to love Yahweh Elohim (the Lord your God) with everything. This calls Paul’s words about transformation to mind - Romans 12:1-2 Therefore I…

Romans 15:13 Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. The last 3 weeks of Advent are summarized right here in verse 13. Yahweh is the God of hope, of expectation, he brings Joy through redemption, and Peace to the believer through faith. That Joy and Peace lead us to “abound in hope” ourselves, by the power of the Holy Spirit. What a dense sentence… The last several days and months have been heavy, and praise God for Christmas and Advent right now, which is daily reorienting my eyes to Jesus. I’m waking up everyday thinking about work, the next thing to do, my next project, retirement, why am I so sweaty in the morning?… But after a few deep breaths, eventually making my way to my desk with a cup of coffee and a sense of direction to start my day, I’ve been sitting down and reflecting not just on some random passage from a devotional, but through this Advent season regularly, daily, reflecting…

Matthew 5:11-12 11 Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil things against you, lying on account of me. 12 Rejoice and be glad, because your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets before you. Context # To drop some context that I’m familiar with, this is from a famous section of Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount” called “The Beatitudes”. A little unknown fact in a lot of Christian circles is that these phrases from Matthew 5:3-12 are derived from some ancient Jewish wisdom (esus didn’t come up with these on the fly). Most of these saying come from something called “The Book of Wisdom” and they had a history of being used as a way of defining who was close to God and who wasn’t. Jesus takes the ancient and perverted pseudo-wisdom here and turns it on its head. He’s not giving instructions, he’s giving correction to people who have been abused by civic and religious powers at be. Reflection # So I know Jesus is not sa…

John 15:10-11 10 If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love. 11 I have spoken these things to you in order that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be made complete. This is a beautiful couple verses about love that have only made more and more sense to me as I get older and I have become a dad. Commandments are not necessarily about control. I see this illogical line of thinking EVERYWHERE - that advocating for rules and boundaries in life can quickly get conflated with “you want to control me/them!”. I think the general population really fails to understand that the lack of boundaries doesn’t make you free, it turns you into a slave of your most powerful desire. It is literally in the human-nature. Random boundaries though are not helpful or loving… Restriction without purpose, or for the wrong reason, can put you into a situation you weren’t designed to be in. I believe humans were created according…