The Perfecting Church The Perfecting Church

To know Jesus is to be in an on-going, life-transforming, life-transferring relationship with radical love.  Radical Love keeps no record of our wrongs and then empowers us to keep no record of wrongs. Radical Love is not simply something to be experienced, it’s something to be accessed daily. If we don’t access radical love daily, we will be redeemed from sin and death and still be dysfunctional in our everyday lives. Radical love teaches us to keep no record of wrongs.

Sometimes we can more clearly explain what something is by explaining what it’s not. Radical love ain’t rude. Rude is ill-mannered and disagreeable towards others. But rude is more than that, it’s also ill-mannered and disagreeable towards God. Rude wants what it wants, when it wants from God and everybody else. But those who walk in radical love are yielding their rights, seeing past themselves and learning to rest knowing God is fighting for them. 

God-Yahweh Elohim the covenant making promise keeping God, made a promise to mankind in the garden of Eden over 2,000 years ago. He promised He would crush the head of the serpent by the seed of a woman. Jesus was that seed and He has indeed crushed the government of satan in the earth and given us life and life more abundantly in Him and the government of His Kingdom. This morning we celebrate…He is Risen and we are restored.  

As Jesus descends from the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem, He knows it will be the last week of His life. On Palm Sunday He faces the painful reality that His greatest impact will be through His most difficult and lonely moments in this world. The mindset of radical love is more interested in God’s plans and purposes than our own promotion and preservation. Palm Sunday teaches us that obedient faithfulness to radical Love is what takes us to places we never imagined. 

Pride is a root which the enemy sows in our hearts to choke the fruitfulness of love in our lives. In our pride-filled American culture, we are called not to conform to this world, but to be hypervigilant to recognize and eliminate the weeds of pride from our hearts so we can bring forth fruit for the glory of the Kingdom of God.

The radically patient and kind love of God frees us from the disfiguring grip of jealousy and envy. Jealousy and envy are everywhere — the constant comparison, excessive competitiveness, passive-aggressive pettiness and celebrating the failures of the popular are the flavor of our day. And jealousy and envy make us all caricatures of ourselves, trapped in a race no one wins. Radical love is the thing that makes us free. It is not jealous. It is not envious.