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).

Flesh

I've had some amazing conversation tonight. And a ton of stuff is in my head anyways because its finals week. But at the end of the conversation, all three of us came to the same conclusion. Flesh. Or sin. Basically that not of God. It's so easy to look to other things to satisfy when things get rough. I don't even know all of the negative things happening right now. But I know that with myself personally, I will so easily take my eyes off of Jesus and fall off the path.

This is such a fleshly world. This world longs for our soul. It longs for our attention, and a lot of the time it receives it. But, we have a God in heaven who also longs for our soul, demands our attention, and he WILL receive it. This is the battle we face every day with our sinful fleshly nature. But we are NOT of this world, for our citizenship is in heaven. Best and easiest thing to do is to get into the word and pray with God.

Here is some scripture that I hope can encourage you, especially in this time of the year.

"But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit." - Romans 7:6

Also I just wanna say that I feel like the entire book of Philippians is a goldmine. Those are kind of Tyler Ray's words after I called it cash money (could be considered world and flesh, but really it is holy and Godly cash money so no worries).

"Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.
Philippians 3:19-21

some thoughts.

Sometimes in life, things show up completely out of nowhere. Sometimes when you’re not even looking for something, it turns up on your doorstep as if you were waiting for it. You were waiting for it; but the waiting was supposed to take longer. Well, you didn’t really know how long the waiting would be but all that matters is that you’re not waiting anymore. This unexpected thing has you hooked, it makes you motivated and you become attached to it whether you try to stop it or not. This is one of those situations where all the many pieces were put in place and there’s no explanation except God’s hand placing you and this “thing” in the right place at the right time.

So you think….

But that’s where you have to make the decision…

It’s all about timing…not ours, but his.

Just some thoughts.

We need ambulance drivers

There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light. But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes through that red light, and normal traffic had better get out of its way. Or when a man is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed. There is a fire raging.....for the poor of this society. Disinherited people from all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds. They need brigades of ambulance drivers who WILL HAVE to ignore the red lights of the present system until the emergency is solved.

- Dr. Martin Luther King

(It's what we're called to do, folks.)

Taken from The Irresistable Revolution by Shane Claiborne

Ask me anything!

Ask me anything! I won't even know who you are.

This could get interesting...

http://formspring.me/kevinajohnson

the dream

The American Dream. I want that. Right? Is that okay? It's kind of a question that I have really been struggling with in the last month or so.

This book I've been reading called The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne has really been challenging me to question what our "real" dream should be. I don't know. I have a lot of thoughts about it.

Sometimes I'll be having a conversation with an old friend, one of those typical conversations "Hey, how's life?" "Oh you know, good. Just livin' the dream..." I caught myself saying it. What is the dream again?

It's not necessarily wrong in any way; I mean you grow up and you're told that you need to graduate high school with good grades and then find a decent college, graduate with some business degree or science degree or something that is going to make you a lot of money and, and in the mean time you're supposed to find a girl you want to marry then marry her before you graduate college so you can start your family before you go to grad school so you can get an even better paying job to give your family a really great life and then you have a kid and then...you know what happens. Life goes on just the same.

It's what we're supposed to do, right?

It seems so right and so normal.

And comfortable. It's all so we can be comfortable. What's comfortable again?

It's living in a nice new subdivision on the outskirts of town. And owning a "environmentally friendly" SUV to take up to the mountains. And buying a nice boat to spend weekends on the lake. And being happy. And comfortable.

I just don't know. Why do we need to be so comfortable? Whats the point in it? It makes us happy I guess. But isn't it kind of empty to just be comfortable?

They say this is the land of opportunity. It is, I'm not arguing that. But it's also the land of materialism and consumerism and hypocrisy.

It's like all we care about as a society is making more money. Or investing wisely. Or buying gold because the cost of a dollar is going down. It's just stuff like that. It seems so empty. I mean we spend our lives working our butts off to give our families a better and more comfortable life just to some day be buried in the ground. We don't get to take any of these treasures of life up to heaven with us so why do they matter so much here on earth?

Jesus told us to sell everything we had and give it to the poor. I don't know how we can't take that literally at least a little bit? Seriously... Sure, its modern day now and times have changed and so its not meant to be taken literally by us...

Americans.

Comfortable.

Take the perspective of a homeless man. He is comfortable tonight because he gets to sleep underneath the awning at the bank downtown. Oh, and he found a blanket in the dumpster. Take my perspective. I had a good dinner tonight and today was also payday. I would say I'm pretty comfortable. Now take the perspective of a millionaire living by the golf course. Is he comfortable tonight?

Writing this makes me uncomfortable just to let you know. I really have no room to talk. And I'm not trying to make anyone feel guilty, though I do. In The Irresistible Revolution, Claiborne mentions a phrase that made me think. "God comforts the disturbed, and disturbs the comfortable." It totally makes sense. I am pretty comfortable, but am I really happy?

I think that we are longing for something more of this world than our sweet little suburban homes and 8 to 5 jobs.

Lets do something.

Reach out to someone.

Touch someone's life.

What is our "real" dream?

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." - Jesus
Matt 6:19-21

life changes.

Well, Kevin Johnson has a blog. Why? I don't know.

Why do we get blogs? It's to tell people about you.

I'm not that interesting.

But I think people need community and this opens up that option. It's important to tell your story. Whatever you've been through, you have a story to tell. I don't see myself telling my story in one big post but you'll soon know my story.

God is wrecking my life.

One year ago, I thought I was a christian. I thought I had it going on. I thought playing in the worship band once a week and going to church made me a christian. I knew that I had a lot of sin in my life but I also knew that I had grace. I was right in a way, I did have grace. But from where I am at now, I do not believe I was a real christian until just very recently.

God made himself evident in my life. I felt like I had a purpose for living. It was something I had never felt before. He made me realize that I hadn't been a living like a true disciple of him and it honestly started to kill me. But this realization wasn't necessarily an overnight thing. Through the work of the spirit in conversations, life experiences, and certain people, God was moving in my life. I didn't even see it.

I was blind.

I think he finally took my blinders off. He showed me things and made me see them in a new perspective and my sight is clearer everyday.

I'm not to say my life is a cakewalk though. I am just as much a sinner now as I was a year ago, or two years ago, or ten years ago. But the cross I now follow is ten times as big as before.

That's what Jesus does to us. As we fall more and more in love with him, the cross gets bigger and bigger. Our sin becomes heavier on our hearts as we mature in our walk.

I still think I'm a baby. I have a long way to go. But he's helping grow.

This verse... it has to be shared. It changed my life.

24Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 25For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it."

-Kev