Good morning!
Welcome to your morning coffee! May our Heavenly Father help us to love as He does and to be faithful as He is. Father, we cannot even breathe without your help. Not once has any of our hearts ever beaten without your will to sustain us. As we go throughout our day to day living, please keep on giving us what we need to love as you love, and to be faithful as you are faithful. Make us sure and steady, and may we be trustworthy and sincere as we imitate you. In the powerful name of Jesus, and by the Spirit's guiding comfort, help us be holy as you are holy. Amen.
Your Morning Song: "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" by Reawaken Hymns
Your Morning Scripture: Proverbs 3:3-4
Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you;
bind them around your neck;
write them on the tablet of your heart.
So you will find favor and good success
in the sight of God and man.
...
Like our reflection in a pond, caught between ripples and flashes of the sun, so too do we see ourselves in our children. I occasionally laugh like my father. My daughter has my wife's nose. My son has his mother's dimples, which belonged first to her father.
As God's children, we are asked and made able to be like our Heavenly Father. His love is sure and steady and lasting. He is faithful in all things, never abandoning or betraying or neglecting.
Here in these verses, we are called to imitate our Father.
The way we love should be modeled after His, steady, lasting, trustworthy, consistent, eager, urgent, patient, (see 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 for a practical breakdown and Luke 15:11-32 for a useful example).
The way we are faithful should be modeled after our Heavenly Father's faithfulness. As He is, so should we be faithful in all things, never abandoning, or betraying, or neglecting, (see Hosea 2 for a very vivid, raw display of God's faithfulness).
Not only are we to love and faithful in this way, but it cannot be a box we check on a list. It cannot be a shallow, Sunday-morning-only sort of thing. It cannot be surface, lip service that we do as the mood takes.
We must love and faithful like our Father down to our very bones. This kind of love and faithfulness must be written on our hearts, not in pencil, not in pen, but carved as with a chisel on a tablet of stone. No erasing. No white-out. But permanent. With eternal-minded purpose.
And if we love like our Father, if we are faithful like our Father, then our Father will delight in us and share His joy at us, with us. And other people also delight in us and share their delight in us, with us.
In short, loving like our Father and being faithful like our Father, is the best way to live this life that we have been given. It is why we were made. It is our purpose in life. To be like our Father, with our Father, until we are reunited in wholeness and completeness with our Father, who will someday by the Son and with the Spirit, make all things new. Including His loving, faithful children.
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