Sunday February 6, 2011

First in the series: What relational people know

Romans 12: 9-18

Don’t just pretend that you love others.  Really love them. …Love each other with genuine affection and take delight in honoring each other. … Be glad for all God is planning for you.  Be patient in trouble, and always be prayerful.  When God’s children are in need, be the one to help them out.  And get into the habit of inviting guests home for dinner or, if they need lodging, for the night. …  When others are happy, be happy with them.  If they are sad, share their sorrow.  Live in harmony with each other.  Don’t try to act important, but enjoy the  company of ordinary people.  And don’t think you know it all!.. Do your part to live in peace with everyone, as much as possible.

Romans 15:7

So accept each other just as Christ has accepted you; then God will be glorified.

1 Peter 4:8

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.

1 Peter 1:22

Now you can have sincere love for each other as brothers and sisters because you were cleansed from your sins when you accepted the truth of the Good News.  So to see it that you really do love each other intensely with all your hearts.

Affection is the humblest love.  It lives with humble, private things; soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes, the thump of a sleepy dog’s tail on the kitchen floor, the sound of a sewing machine… Affection, besides being a love itself, can enter into the other loves and color them all through and become the very medium in which from day to day they operate.  They would not perhaps wear very well with out it.  To make a friend is not the same as to become affectionate.  But when your friend has become an old friend, all those things about him which originally had nothing to do with friendship become familiar and dear with familiarity.  As for erotic love, I can imaging nothing more disagreeable than to experience it for more than a very short time without this homespun clothing of affection… (where) the mere ease and ordinariness of the relationship wraps us round.  No need to talk.  No need to make love.  No needs to accept perhaps to stir the fire…  Friends and lovers feel that they were “made for one another.” The especial glory of affection is that it can unite those who most emphatically, even comically, are not; people who, if they had not found themselves put down by fate in the same household or community would have had nothing to do with each other.  If affection grows out of this, their eyes begin to open.  Growing fond of “old so and so,” at first simply because he happens to be there, I presently begin to see that there is “something in him” after all. (CS Lewis Lewis, The Four Loves, pp 34-36)

How affection seems to operate:

1) Affection celebrates who people actually are.

2) Affection extends God’s profound acceptance.

3) Affection helps us move past our sins.

Ask yourself:

1) Do I seem to help people helps us move past our sins.

How can I experience this lasting affection?

1)  THINK: How can I honor this person?

2) Say hi and introduce yourself.

3) Find an inspiring, godly group and then don’t go anywhere

4) Invite people over.

5) make lots of small gestures (like remembering birthdays and praising people in public)