Love One Another
Sheree Morris
I was thinking about Maggie’s sermon yesterday when she spoke about the parable of the Wheat and the Weeds (Matthew 13: 24-30), and how the Sower tells his servants to wait, letting the weeds in effect grow up alongside the wheat until the harvest, and I was challenged as to how we can successfully do this.
It sometimes it feels like it is so difficult, as our natural desire can sometimes be to judge too quickly, to want to pull up the weeds. We can often understand what God is directing us to do (by letting the weeds grow up alongside us because what we judge to be a weed may, through the transforming grace of God, turn out to be wheat), but in practice it can be much harder to carry this out.
When we see people who are making poor life choices, who are clearly doing wrong and who are hurting others? How do we truly love, accept and welcome them into the Kingdom, into our homes and into our church home?
It’s easy to love and accept those similar to us, those who are kind to us and do good to us, those who reciprocate our love - but what about the others?
There is only one answer really: I know that, as much as I think I can, it is only in His strength that I can succeed. It is only when we love as God loves us that we can do this.
I remember many years ago, my father-in-law frequently used to say ‘love covers a multitude of sins’ (1 Peter 4:8). I didn’t realise until I became a Christian myself that this was in fact a bible verse, I just thought it sounded a nice thing to say and think!
I found a really good description of the meaning of this verse recently:
‘Letting love cover a multitude of sins is not approving of the sin, or enabling the sin, but not allowing the sin to cause me to do evil. Love allows me to still be good to them, to serve them, love them for how God sees them. It gives me a choice to actively bless their lives’.
Michelle du Toit
I really like that description of ‘not allowing their sin to cause me to sin’.
If I don’t love as God directs me to, then I am in sin as God‘s command is for us to ‘love one another’ (John 13:34).
I think this is a challenge for all of us to work through, and to continue to work through, in our daily lives. But it’s a great comfort to me to know that this is God’s heart for me, and that He will give me the continued strength to do this in every opportunity which I come across.
