The Love Story
"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,
and with all your strength... You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself."
Mark 12: 30-31
Through Sacred Scripture we hear an ongoing story of the immense love of our God for God’s people, and of God's longing for a response of love from us in return. It echoes through the Prophets and transforms us through the life and words of Jesus in the Gospels. In God’s “image” we are made with a yearning, a longing for that which is God, love. We try to fill that yearning with many things and many people, but in reality, we are never fully filled until we are emptied of matters of self and of the world, and filled with the immense and unending love of our God. For this total surrender and total, passionate, mutual love, we were created. We were given the gift of freedom to choose this mutual love, and we were given the gift of God’s Son, Jesus Christ, to lead and create the Way, to find that love we seek.
Jesus embodies the pure, limitless, completely self-giving love that is the essence and the very substance of our God. We seek love as we seek unity with our God, for God is love, as John expressed in his letters (1 John 4:8,16). To become our greatest potential as a human, we must emulate He who was the most perfect of humans, He who was also most divinely perfect, our God. The deeper we unite with this, the closer we become to who we are really meant to be, the greatest of our potential as humans, in unity with our God.
The Cross
The Base of the Cross
Our yearning for God draws us upward in prayer. As we reach upward (as inward) to God, God's yearning for us descends “like a Dove” and meets us in the heart, and so the base of the Cross is built in the strength of our prayer, our surrender, our “loving God with all our soul, mind, heart and strength.” The stronger the base, the more of a Crossbar we can support. If we do not build this base and keep it strong, we cannot sustain the Cross God shares with us.
Jesus was not about comfort zone, He was about total transformation, about living your beliefs and not cowering to the distractions and demands of the world. He lived among us, shared meals, hung out on the streets with the beggars and sinners, slept in the fields and olive groves, knew how to catch fish and people, but always was about changing people’s lives through love. His hands reached out to bless, to heal, to make whole, to break bread, to pray, to forgive, and then, in the act that was our Salvation, He reached His hands out in total self-giving surrender, and through His death on the Cross, He opened the Way for us to complete unity with our God. Come follow Me, He invited us. To complete the Cross, we must not just reach up to God in prayer, but must reach out to God in our brothers and sisters, especially those in great need, the poorest of the poor, the heartbroken, the grieving, the lonely. Matthew 25 tells us this in the strongest words of the Gospels, the ones that tell us what God is measuring us by, in how well we love God. We must love God in the “least of these.” When we reach out from the Heart, we complete the Cross. Take up your Cross and follow me, He said. And so we must. Serving each other, loving each other, stepping out of our comfort zone, is when we finally put our feet on the path, in the footsteps of Jesus.
If You Love Me
Jesus said, if you love me, you will keep my commands. When we truly love someone deeply, we long to do what will please that person, and this gives us joy. Therefore, as we become disciples and fall in love with our Lord, we become not a community of rules, but a community of love and of witness. It is a joy to live as He asks, as He lived, for we desire more than anything else unity with this Lord whom we love. To grow to know Him is to grow to love Him, and to desire to be more closely united with all He desires. Keeping His commands is not an act of drudgery, but a source of joy.
To encourage this discipleship, we first learn who it is that we are being asked to follow in the sessions:
These sessions give the students the opportunity to discover Jesus in the Gospels, to discern for themselves His message, and to apply it to their lives, and the lives of people today. The Gospels come alive through discernment of the Gospel message and through various media and dramatic presentations. This is a process of self discovery in faith. Faith is something God-given, so a deep respect must be given to this process of coming to faith and owning their own faith, not just being told what to believe. Please read:
Facilitating the awakening of faith and
Beginning with these “Who do you say that I am?” sessions is beginning first with the cornerstone. This is the foundation of everything else we do. It is upon this cornerstone that we build our faith and our church. This is why I suggest beginning any program geared to teens especially with this series of sessions.