For the entire first quarter of 2022 we’ve zeroed in on talking about love, particularly God’s love (which, we’ve discovered as a family, is the only love there is). It’s not too far from the topic which the main church administration prescribed to each service here in Baguio – that is, ‘Extravagant Love’.
Back in January my approach was to share different perspectives of how God’s love is, indeed, extravagant… but more than that, I wanted to sort of inspire people, not only towards learning, but actual realization and appreciation which would lead to action – in other words, I wanted to just speak on what I thought about God’s love, week after week for at least 4 weeks, and hope that by testifying on God’s necessary, personal, present and sincere love, that people would respond by way of moving in their own lives, that the people they influence would also move as well. To this day I’m not sure my words had any effect on the people who happened to listen to me at the time, so I could probably say from an impersonal and more practical perspective that my approach was ineffective. Yes, I understand that all things work together for good, and I do take comfort in this Truth, but the good that I choose to take away from January’s messages also takes form by way of learning that I could be even more effective in my delivery.
Last month was a little spontaneous in the sense that I started the month the same way, focusing on the love of God, but my approach changed a little bit – instead of sticking to perspectives on God’s love, I seem to have been brought to lead myself and those who listen to appreciating God’s love by way of His ‘love songs’ for us: From the top, in Psalm 136 we learned that no matter what we sing, or even if we don’t have the energy to sing, it’s the Holy Spirit that sings to us, ‘His love endures forever’. Christ reminds us of God’s infinite and eternal character, beyond time and space, and we are reminded therefore that there can be no loving from us unto God without God loving us first – The second song He sings to us is that ‘He loved us first’.
We kept going, and took some time to see just how far we’ve been brought by the love of God. We see this in Christ’s finished work – God gave literally everything away in order for all who would believe, not to perish, but to have eternal life. While we remember this, we should also remember that in our believing, we undergo a full and complete transformation – actually, a literal resurrection of our being, with all sin taken away from us, we have been raised from the ground up, every part of our new being laced with Christ, and therefore laced with righteousness – this righteousness leading to eternal life. We celebrate eternal life, because through Christ, ‘He calls us righteous’.
We are righteous and we enjoy eternal life, and what’s even better is that we have God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – and He has us, in this union, not just forever, but right now. What does this mean when we say right now? Well, Paul says it best – we are letters of recommendation from Christ. We are able to celebrate reconciliation with Christ, not only at the end of our physical bodies or the end of time, whichever comes first – but right now. And in our celebration, the world – or those we influence at least – would know that we aren’t just letters, but apparently, we are songs of Christ, testifying how God takes pleasure of us, and how God takes us from glory to glory.
Just remembering all this right now relieves me in a way – It amazes me, how we could go on at least 8 straight weeks talking about the love of God, learning something new along the way, never deviating from drawing our energy (no matter what form this energy takes as needed) from Christ and His finished work.
It seems to me that this March, based on the 2 messages I’ve been sharing so far, we’re stepping away a bit from appreciating God’s love, and taking notice of what we have through Christ – righteousness, to be precise. I could still connect this, I suppose, by way of saying that by God’s love, Christ became sin in order for us to be His righteousness.
We’ve talked, first on how Christ proved by healing the paralytic that He not only has the power to forgive sins, but to heal. At that same Sunday we jumped into proclaiming that God always hears us, because we have been made righteous. Our sins have been forgiven. On the other hand, we’ve been declared righteous by Christ. Therefore, we’ve been healed, and we’re always heard.
With 3 Sundays to go for this month I’m not really sure where to go from here, but what I can say is that I certainly will be devoting more time to hitting the Bible, knowing that Christ, the Word of Life, is the Life in my words… and Christ, the Living Word, is the Word in all aspects of my life. I’m pretty excited to see how I will be steered as I go back to the usual grind of reading a Psalm a day, and a Proverb a day. That’s probably why I’m finishing this post before I head upstairs.
Speaking of other regular things, I guess I should also be sharing that I will be devoting more time to content creation, working out, and adding more priority to learning. I’m sticking to my desire to develop personally, so I’m up to date on coding, data science, cybersecurity, and blockchain technology, constantly transitioning so my service, and not just me, personally, would be able to adapt to what’s coming, versus merely upholding traditional ministry.
I’m reading and learning on the concept of Society 5.0 – it’s funny that I can only see older videos about it on YouTube, but I guess in acknowledgement to this, we can also adapt and develop Ministry 5.0 as well. I don’t know, right now I’m just blabbering, but I just wanted to put that out there. It’s probably because I’ve been playing by the rules of traditional ministry for the majority of this quarter – pushing to speak from and on a mindset so static and dynamic, every Sunday, as people would perceive and therefore expect from a ‘Church’. I don’t know, I’m still trying to figure out what I want out of these thoughts I’m playing with in my head.
Point is, things are happening – mostly in the mind, but I pray that through the power of Christ alive in me, I would be able to flow, establish a solid vision, not only for my Aces but for myself (in fact it’ll have to start with myself before anything else), and create, curate, and collaborate as necessary.
Exciting times. More to come, that’s for sure.
JB's Personal Brain Defragmenter 
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