Part 6: Incarnate The Love Of Christ

Part Six INCARNATE THE LOVE OF CHRIST The I disciplines stem from a desire to offer others a taste of God’s life-changing love. The Son of God came to earth and took on flesh (was incarnate) to show us the face of God’s love. While on earth Jesus called his followers to incarnate this show-and-tell love in their own bodies. With the love of Jesus resident within us, our capacity to love grows. Love always gives birth to more love. It is not a depletable quantity but an eternal quality of God. In Christ we are rooted into the depths of God’s love. We cannot run out of it. The incarnating disciplines open us to God’s heart. They invite us to participate in God’s kingdom agenda: his love of justice, his concern for the poor and the oppressed, the widow and the orphan. The I disciplines are ways we express our faith, hope and love in the midst of a selfish, entitlement world. Incarnation took Jesus to the last breath of self-donating love. And if we intend to follow him, we can expect that truly “loving our neighbor as ourselves” will take us to depths of self-donating love. In those depths we are in the heart of worship. “This land that gives us our food, our water; these trees that clean the air for us to breathe; all these green and growing things that bless our bodies with their beauty—these are not resources. They are fellow creatures, with their own rights and responsibilities before God. They have their own sacred duties to perform, if only we will let them.” —Barbara Brown Taylor Care of the Earth DESIRE to honor the Creator by loving, nurturing and stewarding his creation DEFINITION Caring for the earth is a way of expressing God’s delight in his very good creation. By engaging in loving care of the earth, the environment, the plants and the animals, we honor the gifts and treasures of our Creator. SCRIPTURE “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.” (Romans 8:20-21) “GOD claims Earth and everything in it. God claims World and all who live on it. He built it on Ocean foundations, laid it out on River girders.” (Psalm 24:1-2 The Message) “Then God said, ‘I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. . . . God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. . . . The LORD GOD took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” (Genesis 1:29, 31; 2:15) PRACTICE INCLUDES all actions that lead to making the earth more and more like God’s original Garden of Eden protecting the earth’s natural resources, with a concern for future generations and what they inherit working against pollution of air, water and land treating animals humanely advocating and practicing crop rotation and soil enhancement rather than land depletion using energy supplies wisely recycling not littering riding a bike or walking rather than driving a car GOD-GIVEN FRUIT keeping company with Jesus no matter what this planet undergoes honoring the Creator and celebrating his handiwork contributing to the beauty of and mending the brokenness of this planet sharing God’s earth—my yard, the harvest from my garden, my flowers, my private property—with others witnessing to Christ through wise stewardship of our ecological resources growing in the realization that all created things belong to God and not ultimately to humans

Part 6: Incarnate The Love Of Christ

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