Goal Setting

I woke up early this morning, 3:15 am to be exact.
I think the Lord woke me up on purpose. Geez....
I tried to go back to sleep at first, but all I could do was think about 2012.
The Lord has some seriously awesome things for 2012. I think he does every year, but I'm just excited about it more so this year. I'm just excited to move on.
I've been meaning to take some time over this break to set aside some goals for 2012 so I thought this was a good time to do that.
I ended up going to Romans 12 and I picked up some super good things.
The theme I got in this study aside from the verses in verses 1 and 2, was the theme of humbling oneself in love. 12:10 says "Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor." (ESV) The greek word for Outdo is proēgeomai which means "to go before and show the way." Dang. That will get you. 
What if we all took on that mentality? Going around and striving to outdo each other in the way we love each other? 
I quickly decided I want to theme my goals around this.
I'm not all that great at loving people sometimes. The Lord convicts me of this a lot. But this verse, calling us to humble ourselves and go away from our selfish ways by honoring our brothers is such a good place to start. It kind of reminds me of Jesus. *wink*


My goals are rather typical; read the Bible more, workout and run more, etc. But above all of that, I think my biggest goal is to Love more. I want to love Jesus more, love my brothers more, and love my enemies more. I think that if we focused on loving more, everything else is going to take care of itself. Everything flows out of love. God's love that is. 
I don't want to get into the discussion of how you define love right now, because that's an entirely different subject. For that, look at my last post. ;) 


I just want to be more like Jesus.


What are your goals for 2012?

The Semantics of Love (from Ray Andersen)

Some profound words concerning love from Ray Andersen. I am in the middle of reading his memoir The Soul of God for class and I came across this paragraph yesterday. These words are words that I have been longing to hear for awhile. I've had many recent conversations with people talking about what we know about love, and how we can evaluate love with human standards and compare them to the divine. Just go read 1 John 4 and you'll be good.

The semantics of love (that to which the term itself refers) are clear and unambiguous. "In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us. . ." (1 John 4:10). At the time I was tempted to say that if God is love, then love is God. But this is only true if we maintain the asymmetrical relation between God's love and human love. We can say that God is love, but the reverse cannot be said: love, by human standards, is not God. The reductionism of divine love to human love leads to a confusion of tongues. When the absolute demand (gift) of love is relativized to our love of the neighbor without God as the middle term, love collapses into mutual self-love. "We love God because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). At the same time, if we say that we love God but do not love others, our professed love for God is a lie (1 John 4:20).