Today’s Scripture Readings

Gospel Reading

NRSV

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.

Most modern definitions of the word abide cast it in a generally negative tone – “to endure without yielding” or “to bear patiently.” This isn’t the way the word is used in scripture. We are told by Jesus to abide in his love as he has abided in the Father’s love. So does that mean we must wait patiently for love? How could love, which comes freely from the Triune God, be something we must wait for?

No, the truth is there is a great difference between abide FOR, wait for my love, and abide IN my love. The Father is not waiting for a more perfect future you to arrive before He makes His love available. He doesn’t dole out love like prizes for those who put in the most effort. God’s love is freely available at all times; we do not have to wait for it.

The way of Jesus, his commandments, are the means by which we enact that waiting. Perhaps Jesus’ own time of waiting patiently was in the many years working in anonymity as a carpenter.

But what would it look like in our lives if we had the patience to wait IN the Father’s love? Would it change our spiritual lives from constant peaks and troughs, highs of prayer to lows of desolation? What Jesus shows us is that a deeply abiding life is one where the love of God is an ever-present reality from which all action, thought, and being flows into peace and joy.

Today in prayer, try ‘waiting’ on God. Expectant, but patient. Make a space to do or say nothing. Wait for Him to move, speak or simply be present to you, in love and joy.

How can you open yourself more to God’s loving presence?