I really enjoy preaching on love. It’s upbeat, it’s hopeful, it’s positive. And I always get great responses!
But sometimes it’s hard to preach on love. It is hard to preach on love when we learn about an 18-year-old intentionally targeting African-Americans in Buffalo, killing 10 people. It’s hard to preach on love when war rages in Ukraine—thousands of dead Russians and Ukrainians in an anachronistic territorial war. It’s hard to preach on love when we are surrounded by so much hate.
But it is in times like this that we (you and I) must preach love. It is at the moment we are most tempted to give up on love that we must recommit ourselves to love.
We stick with love, not because it comes easy to us, not because we actually do it all that well. We stick with love because, through faith, we believe that love will transform the world—making us sometimes sound like the greatest fools on earth. But that is what we do as the people who follow a savior who rose from the grave.
This Sunday my sermon is entitled, “Believing Impossible Things.” Add ‘love’ to that list!
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