Holy Nights
John 15: 9-17
[Jesus said:]
As the Father has loved me,
so I have loved you – abide in my love. If you take my aims into your will,
then you will abide in my love, just as I have taken the aims of my Father into
my will and abide in His love. These words I have spoken to you that my joy may
be in you, and that your joy may be complete.
This is the task I put before
you, that you love one another as I have loved you. No man can have greater
love than this, that he offer up his life for his friends. You are my friends
if you follow the task that I give to you. No longer can I call you servants,
for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I call you friends
because I have made known to you all that I have heard from my Father. You did
not choose me, but I have chosen you and appointed you that you should go and
bear fruit and that your fruit should live on after you, so that what you ask
the Father in my name He should give it to you. This I say to you out of the
fullness of my power – love one another.
January 5, 2014
John 15: 9-17
We are fortunate here in this part of the world to have a
strong winter sun. Even when the air is cold, we can get warm by stepping out
of the shade.
The heavenly Father continuously showers His love upon us.
Outer sunlight is a physical manifestation of the light of His love. Jesus asks
us to stand and stay with Him within the spiritual sunlight of His own and Our
Father’s love. For He want to warm us and bring us joy.
The sunlight is also a manifestation of the Father’s Life;
for with the sunlight, rays of life pour down and cause all things to live.
And He sets us a task—that we transmit that inner sunlight
to others; that we be warm and objectively loving; that we give of our life
forces. Standing in the light of the Son’s love, we will never run out of life
to give; for we will have connected ourselves to the Source of Life, the Source
of Love Himself.
Fra Giovanni said in 1513: Life is
so generous a giver, but we, judging its gifts by their covering, cast them
away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you will find beneath
it a living splendour, woven of love, by wisdom, with power. Welcome it, grasp
it, and you touch the Angel’s hand that brings it to you. Everything we call a
trial, a sorrow, or a duty: believe me, that angel’s hand is there; the gift is
there, and the wonder of an overshadowing Presence. Our joys, too: be not
content with them as joys, they too conceal diviner gifts.
Life is so full of meaning and of purpose, so
full of beauty—beneath its covering—that you will find that earth but cloaks
your heaven. Courage, then to claim it: that is all! But courage you have; and
the knowledge that we are pilgrims together, wending through unknown country,
home.
And so, at this Christmas time, I greet you;
not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem, and with the
prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.[1]
www.thechristiancommunity.org
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[1] FRA
GIOVANNI, A Letter to the Most Illustrious the Contessina Allagia Dela
Aldobrandeschi, Written Christmas Eve Anno Domini 1513
