DECEMBER 7, 2016

“When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.” 
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

DANIEL 9-19

12Then he continued, “Do not be afraid, Daniel. Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to them. 13But the prince of the Persian kingdom resisted me twenty-one days. Then Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, because I was detained there with the king of Persia. 14Now I have come to explain to you what will happen to your people in the future, for the vision concerns a time yet to come.”(10:12-14) 

2 JOHN 

4It has given me great joy to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as the Father commanded us. 5And now, dear lady, I am not writing you a new command but one we have had from the beginning. I ask that we love one another. 6And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love.

JOURNAL 

Here it is again...the command to love. It is over and over and over again throughout the new testament. I could almost sum up the new and old testament in that the old is to obey and they new is to love. 

But isn't that how things usually work anyway...through obedience I love. Obedience comes first and then love. Once a commitment is made it is love that gives the fuel to continue in that commitment. It is love that carries that commitment to completion. That is represented in the life of Christ...his commitment unto death, sealed in love. 

5In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

6Who, being in very nature^a God,

did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;

7rather, he made himself nothing

by taking the very nature^b of a servant,

being made in human likeness.

8And being found in appearance as a man,

he humbled himself

by becoming obedient to death—

even death on a cross!

PHILIPPIANS 2:5-8