For the People of the Kingdom - Love

Roger's Reading Quote .....

For people of the kingdom, participants in the triune fellowship, love and love alone is the bottom line. This is the only thing that gives value to anything we believe, say, or do. This is the reason the world exists, and this is the reason the church exists. Whatever music we play, sermons we preach, churches we build, people we impress, powers we display, stances we take, doctrines we teach, things we achieve—if believers are not growing in their motivation and ability to ascribe unsurpassable worth to people who have no apparent worth, we are just wasting time. We are not making true disciples.

            Indeed, we may actually be doing worse than this. For by engaging in all these wonderful activities without love—by making all this “religious noise”—we are actually providing a distracting counterfeit to the one thing that is needful. How easy it is to not notice that we are unloving when our religious activities are going so well! Our religious noise drowns out the cry of God’s heart.

            This was the chief error of the Pharisees. As we shall see in chapter 11, the Pharisees of Jesus’ day had a lot of religion but no genuine love. They carried out the law to a fault, but their obedience was not motivated by love, and it did not result in love. Jesus assessed that the “love of God” was not in them (John 5:42). They would “tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds” while “neglect[ing] justice and the love of God” (Luke 11:42). They did not ascribe unsurpassable worth to God as Creator nor to those to whom God ascribes unsurpassable worth. To no one did Jesus speak harsher words than to these loveless religious professionals.  

- 'Repenting of Religion' - Greg Boyd