The Daily Word on Mondays this month will follow the Just For September small groups Bible Study of Philippians. If you are interested in joining a small group at St. Martin's, please visit bit.ly/justforsmallgroups.
An Infant’s Appetite
 
“And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what really matters, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.”
Philippians 1:9-11

This week, we kick off our “Just for September” Small Groups. Parishioners will be meeting weekly around the city for a time of fellowship and Bible study. Whether you’ve signed up for a group or not, each Monday will feature a portion of Philippians, which helps everyone connect with this Parish-wide study.

Our daughter is now nine months old. She is crawling all around the house and standing up when she has something sturdy to lean on. It is exciting for my wife and I to witness all this; it came about just in the last few weeks actually. Yet, it also means we are now always on alert. She has learned how to proudly stand, but not how to gracefully fall. Danger lurks around every corner of our house — table corners that need padding, kitchen drawers that need to stay shut and stairs that need to be closed off. It's a dangerous world out there, but it is also a world that my daughter is determined to explore.

This new season of life has taught me a lot about joy. My daughter finds joy in the simplest things; her world revolves in the here and now, after all. Everything is new, and each day brings new opportunities.

The prolific writer, G.K. Chesterton, compared how children and adults deal with the routines of daily life. Children will say over and over, “Do it again,” because they can never get enough of the present moment. Adults, on the other hand, get bored quickly, possibly because they have lost that childlike wonder. Chesterton believes God is more like a child than an adult. He says, “It may be that He [God] has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”1

I believe this also gets to the heart of what Paul tells the Philippians in our passage today. Love, God’s eternal love, should overflow in our lives. He says that we will know what really matters in our lives by the divine love that informs all things. It is a love that empowers, emboldens and, ultimately, bears fruits for the Kingdom. Joy is an evident fruit of God’s Kingdom.

And it is a great reminder that God’s love does something. It is not just for us to hold onto; it is a force that enlivens us to be the people of God. Knowledge of God’s love makes us joyful people, and joyful people can’t help but make other people joyful as well.

In that case, my prayer for you this week is that you may feel the profound sense of God’s love and joy in your life, and even dare to say to God, “Do it again!”
 
1 Chesterton, G.K., “Orthodoxy,” 1936, Doubleday.
The Rev. Wesley Arning
Associate for Young Adult and Small Group Ministry
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