From Death To Life

December 2, 2011 — christian perspective, death, death to life, life, love, true love

I stumbled upon an old blog entry of mine from February 2010 with a title of “From Death To Life”. It has been a while since I adopted this as my life goal, to move from Death to Life but I had completely forgotten about this entry. I wanted to post this again, as thoughts pertaining to where I have come over the course of the year and a half since its original writing.

From Death To LIfe – February 2010

Today I stumbled on the measuring system of life… As I read the words from 1 John 3:14 I was awakened by the fact that life requires love.

Let me share the verse from The Voice translation of the Bible: “We know we have crossed from death to real life because we are devoted to true love for our brothers and sisters. Anyone who does not love lives among corpses.” (1 John 3:14 TV)

Death is where we dwell when we are surrounded by things devoid of love. The more we interact with death the more we run the risk of becoming dead ourselves. Avoiding death means we have to embrace love.

Today the challenge is not only to love, but to live… What does John mean by love? John’s definition is found 2 verses latter when he writes, “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters”(1 John 3:16 ESV). In order to love we must lay down our own life.

John reminds us here that life is more than just a beating heart and breathing lungs. John’s challenge for us is to find the true value of life by giving our own lives in submission to God’s call.

This call beckons us to love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our strength and with all our mind. This first step to living involves loving our creator. The second step to living is loving our neighbor as ourselves.(Luke 10:27 ESV) When we give our love to God and our neighbors, we in turn are graced with the gift of life. But if we chose to withhold our love we attain nothing more than death.

So the questions becomes: Are you living amongst corpses? Or is today the day you choose to live, really live?

With Life,

-MJM