Saturday, May 3, 2003
Saturday, May 3, 2003
For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of
love and of self-discipline.
Marcie takes the phone and adds: "We just called to say goodbye, Charles. We are going to
miss you. We love you."
The perennial loser Charlie Brown stands by the phone with a grin on his face. One little friend
asks, "Who was that?"
He answers, "I think it was a right number."
Jesus was speaking to the church: "This I command you, to love one another."
Love was the mark of Christianity in the first two centuries. Tertullian summed it up like this,
"Look...how they love one another."
Would the casual observer say the same thing about our church today? "Look how they love
one another." Would it be possible for a hungry soul to come into our fellowship and to leave
feeling nobody cares? How well do we measure up to this commandment from Christ?
LOVE HAS AWESOME POWER. Dr. Karl Menninger, the well-known psychiatrist, claimed that
the most tragic word in society today is "unloved." "Love cures people," he said, "both the ones
that give it and the ones that receive it." And he's right! Love cures! Love heals!
LOVE HEALS HURTING BODIES. Scientific research is now confirming what many of us
suspected all along. Love can heal a hurting body.
Accept God's love in Jesus Christ into your heart and pass it on!
(2 Timothy 1.7
NRSV)
In one of the PEANUTS cartoons, a little girl calls Charlie Brown on the telephone. "Marcie and I
are about to leave for camp, Chuck," she says. "We're going to be swimming instructors."
Dear God, thank you for loving me and help me to pass it on. Amen.
