Full Measure Advent 2024 Day 22 Rousseau-Robinson
Here is the written Advent Reading for Day 22 of Full Measure Advent Celebration 2024
Full Measure Advent Celebration 2024 Lamentation/Expectancy
Week 4: LOVE
Day 22: Sunday, 12-22-24
Reader: Michael, Leah, and Ramona Rousseau-Robinson
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13
Monee (Please, read this scripture at a fast, yet understandable pace)
The Way of Love
13 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.
2 If 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.
3-7 If 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.
Michael: (Please, read this scripture at a fast, yet understandable pace)
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.
Leah (Please read this scripture at a fast but understandable pace)
Love 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.
11 When 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.
12 We 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!
13 But 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.
The Message (MSG)
Ramona:
The King James Version of the apostle Paul’s tribute to love ends like this:
Now abideth, faith, hope and love these three, but the greatest of these is love.
Leah: Typically, this passage is read at weddings, it is meant to rehearse in the hearing of the couple, the qualities and behaviors of true, authentic, Godly love. Though read at many weddings, this passage is for us every day. Love is an action, a verb, not an adjective.
Michael: It is interesting how the apostle progresses from faith, to hope, to love,
giving love the highest ranking of the three. Scripture tells us that without faith it is impossible, did you hear me, impossible to please God. Those that come to God must believe that God is. God is the great, “I am,” and we must invest our faith in God’s is-ness.
God be, God is.
Ramona: And God rewards those who diligently seek God. What does that last part mean, exactly? It means God rewards those that inquire into God’s personhood, who demand to know, God. These are they that look for God as if they are trying to find God. Finally hope is the building block of faith.
Leah: Yes, the building block of faith is hope. The Biblical definition of faith is in fact: faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen. Hope is in fact the lynchpin upon which faith operates. In the nucleus of faith lies, the thing not yet manifested that the faith-filled person is hoping for.
Michael: Central focus of any good counselor is the instillation of hope. The counselor’s job is to assess their clients’ pain, and growth points to find the level of distress, the level of angst the client is experiencing around those pain and growth points and to instill hope that together the client and counselor can lessen or relieve distress and help the client to experience growth and well-being. And, Christ has arrived to be the Wonderful Counselor, and whose Holy Spirit is the great comforter to us now.
Monee: So, it appears that faith and hope are pretty important to those of us that follow the life, teaching and person, Jesus Christ. Right?
Leah: I should say so. Hebrews the 11th chapter is an ode to those who had great faith. It is often called the Hall of Faith. Paul opens this portion of the letter to the Hebrews saying:
The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. And that the act of faith is what made the Hebrews ancestors stand out and framed the world.
Michael:
Yeah, so why is love getting so much love from the apostle Paul here?
Monee: I think it’s because the whole Advent narrative, indeed the whole Biblical narrative is the greatest love letter, the greatest love story ever told!
Leah: Mom, I think you are absolutely right! One must have faith in the hope that Christ’s Advent in the earth inspires, yes, for sure. But the greatest message of Christ’s first advent and his second advent is LOVE!
Michael: Yeah, God so Loved the world that God gave us Jesus.
Monee So, we celebrate the love of God that is shed abroad in our hearts, because we are accepted and adopted into the beloved relationship that God has with Jesus. And because of the work that Jesus did during his advent, and on the cross, we are in a position to share the Agape, love of God with all those in our oikos, meaning our households, our spheres of influence. As we prepare our hearts to welcome Christ Advent, let’s take inventory of our hearts. Are our hearts burdened, heavy with grief, despair, the woes of the world?
Leah: Some of us are laden with grief, and loss, of marriages, loved ones, perhaps jobs, or other losses. Some of us have struggles with health challenges, addiction, financial crises, or perhaps all the above.
Michael: Yes, for sure, life can be hard; leaving us to ask, in the famous words of singers, Roberta Flack and the late Donny Hathaway, “Where is the love.”
Monee: (with humor patting Michael) Honey, I think that is a different love story.
Michael: Yeah, you are definitely right!
Monee: But it is true that in our human struggles we often forget the great love of God shown in Christ and now given to us, through the paraclete, the Holy animating Spirit of the living God, who walks not behind or before us in our challenges or tribulations, but beside us. The Holy Spirit is our comforter, our guide into truth, the one who searches the heart of God in our prayers, times with God and downloads God’s love, wisdom, revelation to us?
Leah: Wow, it is true. How easily we get consumed with the cares of the world, our own struggles, forgetting the great, love of God, who is the lover of our mind, will, and emotions---Jesus the lover of our souls. Maybe we put so much emphasis on Jesus in the past and Jesus in the future and forget, that through God’s Holy Spirit, we can experience, God’s love in the present, in the here and now! What a needed reminder.
Read this section with emphasis and at a fast pace, boom, boom-boom, one after the other but, enunciate so that each line is clearly understood.
Monee Let us reminder you of these truths
God’s Love never gives up on us.
God’s Love cares more for us than God did for God’s own self, demonstrated in God having bruising Jesus one the cross for our peace
Michael: God’s Love is lavishly, richly extravagant. God’s love is generous. God has given us every spiritual gift in heavenly places. We can ask what we will in Jesus’ name, according to God’s will and God is poised to hear us and meet our needs and desires.
God’s Love doesn’t strut. Jesus didn’t think he was robbing God of anything, by considering himself equal to God. But Jesus humbled himself, took on human form and became a servant, obedient to death.
Leah: God’s love doesn’t posture that God has a swelled head. King Jesus was born in a feed box for cattle in a cave used to shelter animals.
God’s love doesn’t force itself on others. We all have freewill to accept God’s love, investing our faith in Christ. And remember God waited for Mary’s consent before Jesus was conceived.
Evidence in Jesus’ crucifixion and Jesus’ utterance in Gethsemene, “Nevertheless not my will but, yours be done, Father God,” God’s love definitely does have “me first,” attitude or behavior.
God’s loving-kindness, yes, God’s hesed (kha-said), longsuffering and tender, new every morning mercies, demonstrates that God doesn’t fly off the handle, and doesn’t keep score of our sins.
God’s love is a potent demonstration that God doesn’t revel in us coming to God in contrition and repentance.
God in God’s deep love takes pleasure in the flowering of truth in our hearts.
God in God’s great love for us humans, remembers we are just dirt and puts up with our shenanigans
Michael: God in love trust us, fragile humans with the message of the gospel and the ministry of reconciliation. And, in agape, God has recreated us in Christ Jesus, invested us with the Holy Spirit, and empowered us to do good works, which God ordained from the beginning.
Monee: God in love looks for and by God’s Spirit, cultivates the best in us, never looking back to remind us of our worst.
Leah: There are so many things we don’t know, don’t see clearly, and, wonder why they happen. But, grow us up, mature us in your love, God, please.
Help us oh, God to know deeply that your love for us keeps going to infinity and beyond, for eternity, world without end.
Amen!
Prayer:
Michael
God we are so grateful for your kind of love. Indeed, it is a verb, action, not merely a description. God help us to focus on your agape day-by-day, moment-by-moment throughout our lives. Help us to stop looking for the great love of our lives in all the wrong places and faces and to find all the love we need in you, the people who love you whole-heartedly and in your Christ. Amen.