Love
All who belong to the Lord,
show how you love him. ~ Psalm 31:23a (CEV)
The religion scholar said, “A wonderful answer, Teacher! So lucid and accurate—that God is one and there is no other. And loving him with all passion and intelligence and energy, and loving others as well as you love yourself. Why, that’s better than all offerings and sacrifices put together!” ~ Mark 12:32-33 (MSG)
Lord,
THANKS: Thank you for loving us so much that you sacrificed your only Son so that we could experience forgiveness and the resurrection life. Your love defines how we live.
REGRETS: I do love you and I do love my neighbors. But my love is shallow and not very consistent. I know that you are looking for the kind of love that involves everything that I am -- my heart, my mind, and my strength.
INTERCESSION: Help me to ramp up my love. And the only way to increase the amount of love in me is to allow more of Jesus to take over my life. So, please take over my life!
PURPOSE: I want to love more today than yesterday. And I want to love more tomorrow than today.
Amen.
*ABOUT THE
DAILY TEXTS
The Daily Texts have been published by the Moravian Church since 1731. In 2015 I started posting these Bible verses for my spiritual formation students at Pacific Islands University. In the process of responding to the verses, I found the rhythm of looking for a common thread and writing a prayer based on that key idea to be helpful for my own soul. The prayers are more or less modeled on the TRIP method, which is what I ask my students to do in their journaling. ~ Brad Boydston
TRANSLATIONS
ABP = Authorized Boydston Paraphrase — my own freestyle biblical adaptation — somewhere between paraphrase, commentary, and sermon
CEB = Common English Bible (©2011, the Common English Bible)
CEV = Contemporary English Version (©1995, American Bible Society)
MSG = The Message (©1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson)
NIRV = New International Reader's Version (©1996, 1998, Biblica)
NIV = New International Version (©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011, Biblica)
NLT = New Living Translation (©1996, 2004, 2007, 2013, Tyndale House Foundation)
NRSV = New Revised Standard Version (© 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.) NTE = New Testament for Everyone (©2011 Nicolas Thomas Wright.)