Loving God

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

To love God is “the first and greatest commandment,” so one would think that this is would be, alongside loving others, the most important priority we have in youth ministry.

But what does it actually mean?

When I met Christ, and was starting to grow in my understanding of what that actually looked like, I remember singing songs and even memorizing verses about loving God. And, frankly, I don’t remember feeling very comforted by much of it.

I wanted to love God, but I didn’t know how. I loved my parents (especially in retrospect), and I (kind of) loved my siblings. But that was sort of under the radar of the “supposed to” kind of love I was learning about in church.

What I did know is I loved my dog, I loved to play drums and basketball. I loved the feeling I got when a girl paid attention to me, or when a coach noticed that I had done something right for a change. I also loved driving fast with John Tuttle (and, truth be told, I loved my friend John, but, again, it wasn’t something I thought about… it just felt good to hang out).

But “love the Lord with all your heart, soul and mind?” Although I wasn’t that great at English, I knew that this was something it was my job to do.

As I’ve gotten older I have a little more understanding of what love is and means and looks like (I’ve been married to my only love for 31 years, and that’s been a great theological laboratory). And I also have come to recognize that my loving God is actually as organic and natural as breathing, as we seek to know and trust Jesus. It is not so much about me and us loving him, but that he has first loved me, and us. Perhaps we need to help kids to see this, and to learn what it means to rest in this truth.

I am so glad we’re talking about loving God in this issue of Youthworker Journal (coming out in January, 2012). I hope you will be, too.

SLP daily blog Day Eight

The Student Leadership Project (or SLP), the 8 year Lilly Endowment-funded partnership of Young Life and Fuller Seminary. 37 high school rising seniors from across the country, hand-picked, personally chosen and nominated for leadership gifts and calling.

Monday, Day Eight
As we look to wrap up our SLP 09 experience, our morning was filled with exploring what it means to follow Christ when we so often fail, get discouraged, and sometimes even slip away. Our search brought us into the book of Galatians, and especially the fifth chapter, where Paul reminds us that it is faith, or trust in God, that when coupled with waiting on the Spirit produces the “righteousness for which we hope.” Typically Christians focus on trying to “be righteous” by being good and worthy and consistent to the rules and norms we’ve been taught. It is so easy to live as though God were folding his arms waiting for us to “get with” the demands of the Gospel. But Paul turns that thinking upside down when we read Galatians 5:5. Our job is to trust and wait, his job is to change us into the men and women we are called to be. And the outcome? There is only one that concerns our Father: love (Galatians 5:6, “…the only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love”).

With rapt attention and personal reflection, our student leaders and staff community wrestled with the specific areas or issues where we do not, or at least struggle with, trust Christ. This now defines the journey we are all on as leaders: hearing and heeding the call of the Holy Spirit who draws our attention to whatever would steal our abandoned trust in the lion of Judah, our king. Working through what I call “regular spiritual disciplines” as followers of Christ (worship, prayer, scripture, community, giving and justice) and other “proven” historical spiritual disciplines of the people of God, like fasting, contemplation, solitude, etc., we are more readily aligned with the Spirit who is at work within us.

Heady concepts for high school rising seniors, but our student leaders really wanted to know what it could mean to learn how to lean into the kingdom of God versus wallowing in the muck of guilt from the past or the bandage of failure and discouragement in the present. Our student leaders are preparing to go home, and to enter into a whole new way of living for Jesus Christ and serving him and his kingdom. Today they’ve gotten the teaching, reflected on the scripture, and this afternoon and evening now present the opportunity to work through it all in community.

SLP daily blog Day Five

The Student Leadership Project (or SLP), the 8 year Lilly Endowment-funded partnership of Young Life and Fuller Seminary. 37 high school rising seniors from across the country, hand-picked, personally chosen and nominated for leadership gifts and calling.

Friday, Day Five
Last night we headed into the heart of Westwood, CA to attend the Los Angeles Film Festival to see a documentary of youth and community empowerment called After the Storm. John and Ed Priddy, committed Christian who are filmmakers and good friends of Fuller Seminary, were key producers of the making of this film about a New York actor and producer who wanted to make a difference for people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina by using local kids to star in an off-Broadway musical. Our student leaders met a few of the kids from the documentary and then toured a bit of Westwood (along with the throngs there for a Michael Jackson vigil). Check the film out at: http://www.priddybrothers.com/films/afterthestorm/.

Today after devotions and prayer triads we spent time teaching and discussing spiritual gifts and calling, then hit In-N-Out on the way to a secluded section of Thousand Pines Camp near Lake Arrowhead. Tonight we are playing wild games then gathering for a Young Life club meeting with testimony and message from Shelley Sadler, Special Assistant to the President of Young Life.