Blog Post by Wendy KauffmanLast night we were doing our Bible Reading with the kids, We started reading in Acts. Jeff and I follow a daily Bible reading plan http://www.vervecatalysts.org/. This is a great Bible reading plan if you don't have one. We decided last night to take our kids through Acts while we were reading as well.
Acts is one of my favorite books of the Bible. Always has been! History was always my favorite subject in school and there is just something about reading about how we got started as a church and what God did through just a few men in just a short amount of time. Everytime I read Acts, something new jumps off the page at me and I learn something new.
In Acts chapter 2:verse 46 it says," Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts."
When I was reading this on Friday, one of the things that really stood out to me was the phrase "and ate together with glad and sincere hearts. So we asked our kids last night what they thought it meant to have a glad and sincere heart. They immediately jumped on defining glad because they know it means happy, but sincere was a little more difficult. As I started to explain what I thought it meant, Hannah jumped in and said that it means genuine. Exactly, that is what it means, but how does that happen?
When we moved to Miami to start a church for people who don't like church, we knew that a great number of people here did not go to church. One of the top reasons people here give about not liking church is that they are tired of people being fake.
Life is hard, things go wrong, people sin against us, we sin against other people, we get sick, we struggle with our addictions, we have to work hard for so little, so how in the middle of all of this do we come together with glad and sincere hearts?
I personally think it goes back to the words of Jesus. Mark 12: 30-31. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”
I wonder if we focused on learning all we could about God, getting to really know Him and what He thinks about us and how much He loves us, and if we started seeing other people the way we know God sees them and started loving them the way we know God loves them, if the walls would come down and we could finally come together and be happy and genuine with one another?
What do you think? What does being Sincere mean to you and how do you do that.
Thank you for, giving us so much LOVE and sincerity. This touched me the most even though I've read it many it finally hit home. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength". I'm still working on it. ps Jeff I knew you were special when I first met you.
ReplyDeleteSimple, but not so simple, when it comes to doing it.
ReplyDeletePray asking God to give you HIS heart of agape. As our love or phileo, is generally selfish, even when it seems it isn't, it still can be. If you read what it says about love written in 1 Cor. 13:2-3, which is talking about the ways to have selfish love. Then compare it to what it says written in that same chapter, written in verses 4-7, which are identical to the fruits of the Spirit, so therefore has to be what only God can provide us thru His Spirit, you can see this be true. Therefore we need to pray for Gods love to fill us up often, so that we are not doing works or things for self. It is even difficult sometimes, when you do see it, for ourselves to always tell why, once you begin to sit down and think about the difference. At least it is for me anymore.