Love

Everybody can be great.  Because anybody can serve.  You don't have to have a college degree to serve.  You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve.... You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve.  You only need a heart full of grace.  A soul generated by love.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr.


Deniz sent me this quote from Martin Luther King Jr. a few weeks ago. It captures the heart of Connections. As I began talking to God about our leadership team my mind kept returning to it. What makes a leader in God's eyes?


The world says a leader is powerful, clever, well spoken, attractive, popular, charismatic, shrewd, wealthy and influential. These are not necessarily negative attributes, but are they how God measures a leader? Jesus provides a different standard. He was not physically attractive or influential. He was common without worldly wealth, not the leader the people of his time were expecting. However, he was and is the greatest leader the world will ever know. Jesus' leadership was born through His love for the Father and for us. All other attributes flowed from that single point.


The same week I received the quote from Deniz, I was studying John's letters to the churches of Asia Minor. Through these letters it is clear the early church was grappling with the same question, "who is qualified to lead? There are many who want to lead, and many differing ideas, how do we judge authenticity?"  John directs them to the standard set by Jesus:


¹⁶ This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. ¹⁷ If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be that person? ¹⁸ Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.  1 John 3:16


Jesus led through his willingness to serve and he directs us to do the same. God can provide the gifts and talents needed to succeed, but we must choose to love. Without love all our efforts are fruitless. Through love nothing is impossible.


This week I sat at the table of our first leadership meeting. As I surveyed the room I was pleased. We are diverse; our skin color as broad a spectrum as our ages.  Men serving alongside women.  Each growing in our relationship with God; each still a work in progress.  Our talents and gifts are different but we share one attribute, love. I could not help but smile as I thought, "this is what leadership looks like from God's eyes."


 ^2-6The servant grew up before God—a scrawny seedling,
   a scrubby plant in a parched field.
There was nothing attractive about him,
   nothing to cause us to take a second look.
He was looked down on and passed over,
   a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand.
One look at him and people turned away.
   We looked down on him, thought he was scum.
But the fact is, it was our pains he carried—
   our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us.
We thought he brought it on himself,
   that God was punishing him for his own failures.
But it was our sins that did that to him,
   that ripped and tore and crushed him—our sins!
He took the punishment, and that made us whole.
   Through his bruises we get healed.
We're all like sheep who've wandered off and gotten lost.
   We've all done our own thing, gone our own way.
And God has piled all our sins, everything we've done wrong,
   on him, on him. (Isaiah 53:2-3, The Message)


³⁶ “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”
³⁷ Jesus said to him, “ ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ ³⁸ This is the first and great commandment. ³⁹ And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ⁴⁰ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:36-40, New King James Version)

 ¹ If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. ²If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. ^3-7If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.

   Love never gives up.
   Love cares more for others than for self.
   Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.
   Love doesn't strut,
   Doesn't have a swelled head,
   Doesn't force itself on others,
   Isn't always "me first,"
   Doesn't fly off the handle,
   Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,
   Doesn't revel when others grovel,
   Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
   Puts up with anything,
   Trusts God always,
   Always looks for the best,
   Never looks back,
   But keeps going to the end.
 ^8-10Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.
 ¹¹When I was an infant at my mother's breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.
 ¹²We don't yet see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!
 ¹³But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love. (1 Corinthians 13, The Message)