Monday Munchies...Food for Thought: Love Revolution

Today’s munchies are gonna be a little different. I feel like I’m preaching and venting/ranting more than providing thought provoking questions, but hopefully this will inspire some thought in yall anyway.

Love Revolution. I am an optimist, and I believe that our world has a whole lot of things going well and right, however, there is so much in this world that is wrong and, well, evil. It is time for a love revolution. I don’t mean reform or change, I mean a revolution. We need to rethink the idea of love and how it should affect our lives.

There is so much going wrong with the world, it is hard to know where to start. Let’s start with Africa. Every three seconds a child in Africa dies either from Aids or extreme poverty. Aids is the biggest epidemic to every hit the planet, and as a whole society has done next to nothing. What is the church doing about this? Programs like “the one campaign” which tries to get the US to donate another one percent of its budget to Africa, and programs like Sojourners which involves people directly into others lives to attempt to solve social problems by relationships are both great…at least on the surface. Even so, these programs are not enough to even start to solve the world’s problems. Things like racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination as well as hate, selfishness, war, and other things that could be eliminated from our world. That’s right, I said it, our world doesn’t have to be a world of suffering. I don’t believe that God wants us to let it be. In order to change it though, we need a revolution, one that will shock the world and over throw societal expectations. We need a love revolution.

Jesus was once asked which of the commandments was most important. He responded with two commandments as an answer. He said to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, all your strength and all your soul. And the second one is like it; love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:29-31). Notice He didn’t say any of the “Thou shall not” commandments. Later He says, you have heard it said love thy neighbor and hate thy enemy, but I say to you, love your enemy as your neighbor (Matt 5:43-44). Also, He tells us to love each other like He loves us (John 15:12). What do these verses mean? First off, we have to love God. We have to love God more than anything. The main opponent to this is really the self. One must love God more than they love their self. Most people love themselves, they take care of themselves, try and make sure they are secure, have basic needs met and try to make sure they receive love from somewhere. It’s a challenging thing to love anything more than one’s self. Now it gets even a little harder, and its how we can show our love to God, is to love our neighbors as ourselves. This means that all these things we do for ourselves, we have to do for our neighbors, Yall are intelligent so I’ll let yall make these connections. Finally we have to love our enemies as our neighbors. Well, these commandments leave no one exempt from who you should love. NO ONE is exempt from whom you should love, and not only love but love in a way you love yourself. An irrational, unreasonable, lavish, wild love. A love that surpasses imagination, that can only come from God and a relationship with Him, because it’s the kind of love He has for you. This is the love we are called to show and have for the entire world. The entire world, this means sinners. We have to love people. I never remember a passage saying, that we are called to judge. We are called to love. This means if someone is a liar, don’t judge them, love them. If someone is a homosexual, don’t judge them, love them. If is someone is a murderer, don’t judge them, love them. If someone is a drug dealer, don’t judge them, love them…yall get the point? Too often I think we get tied up in worrying about not sinning or making sure others don’t sin that we forget that its not our place to take care of whats between other people and God. I’m not downing accountability or confession of sin, and I’m certainly not condoning sin, but I am downing anything that takes priority in our lives over loving God, and therefore others.

So then, The Love Revolution is this. People loving other people, one at time, personally. This is how we can change the world. This is how we can win the world for Christ. This is how we can alleviate the problems of this world we don’t have to have. These problems are all the result of choices of humanity. I am tired of these problems. I’m tired of hate, I’m tired of war, I’m tired of suffering. I chose love, and peace, and Jesus. I choose to love, no matter the cost. I choose to follow Christ. I choose to change the world. I choose a revolution. I choose Love Revolution.