A Methodist Loves Others

•Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

On Five Marks of a Methodist by Steve Harper

Mark #5 of 5, A Methodist Loves Others

With Matthew 22:34-40 and Ephesians 4:32 – 5:2

Ephesians 4:32 – 5:2       (NRSV)       

32 and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. 5 1 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, 2 and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

• Current series on Five Marks of a Methodist by Steve Harper, based on the teachings of John Wesley. Really, Five Marks of a Disciple.

“When the lights are on, the king is in the castle.”
Five indications that God is king of your castle.

A Methodist Loves God (receives God’s love);
A Methodist Rejoices in God.
A Methodist Gives Thanks.
A Methodist Prays Continually.
The lights are on in the castle. 

Did you put yourself in a position to receive from God this week?

•Christian = “little Christ” or “Christ-like”
Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” Ephesians 5:1-2

Really, a person could spend their life by this rule.

It doesn’t happen often but sometimes I don’t like someone.
Those people and I usually clash somehow difference of opinion or maybe I feel they’re judgmental or sarcastic.
But Jesus doesn’t say like but love, and that’s interesting to wrap head around.

I might be self-serving, which is pretty un-Christ-like. Yet somehow God loves me perfectly anyway, and I sometimes glimpse the truth that if I aim to be Christ like, if I aim to love others as Christ loves me, I become closer to God’s design for me! And how does Christ love me?

Frank Burns said “It’s nice to be nice to the nice.”
Ephesians says “Love others as Christ loves us.”

•Be imitators of Christ, this is our aim, our goal, our target,
and what did Christ do but live for others, selflessness
and what is the first sin but selfishness

Therefore the Greatest Commandment is to love God with all heart soul mind and strength AND neighbor as self. Three recipients of love: God, neighbor, and self.

•“The second commandment becomes the conduit for God’s love to flow through us after it has flowed into us. It is a love, Wesley says, ‘full of love to all humankind, to every child of the Father of the spirits of all flesh.’ And lest we think he was only thinking of fellow Christians, Wesley hastens to say it extends to people we don’t know, and to people whose lives we don’t approve of.
It extends even to our enemies…”
 - p. 50 Five Marks of a Methodist, emphasis mine.

Sound radical? Yup. Regardless.

How might this apply to your political world, your view of “the other side”?

• “As with the first commandment, to love God with our whole heart, mind, and being, we are brought back to the necessity of grace if we are to love in this way. Apart from grace, we will love other people conditionally, and worse still, we will set the conditions for giving our love!”
 – p. 51 Five Marks of a Methodist, emphasis mine.

•By no means is it “love those who think like you”… you love them anyway. How about love your opponent, think charitable thoughts about them, pray for their welfare…

Loving others is the aim, the goal, the target.
We have been loved, therefore we are to let love flow through us, not to gather it and store it, for it will stagnate, but let it flow through and give life to others!

•Story of a man named Frank, whose funeral I did a few years ago: Every weekend Frank and his wife of 50 years would assemble two dozen bag lunches – sandwiches and fruit and drinks and hardboiled eggs – and go into the city and hand ’em out to hungry people, with words of Christian witness as well. What a great way to simply show thanks to the Lord and keep active and make a difference in people’s lives.

•When Jesus called the disciples, to fish for people, he was taking what they knew and understood, their ordinary lives, and saying take what you normally do, and do it for me.

& that’s discipleship, that’s receiving God’s love and letting it flow through.

• Into hymn 560 Help Us Accept Each Other