Daily Devotion, October 19, 2022

 

Devotion:

Read Matthew 24:1-14.

If your time for reading this is morning time, these verses are probably not the way you expected to begin your day. And if your reading is in the evening, it may not bring a sense of calm prior to sleep.

If it helps, for these devotional thoughts, we will focus on Jesus’ words, “the love of many will grow cold.”

And we will receive the encouraging words as The Message phrases it, “Staying with it---that’s what God requires. Stay with it to the end. You won’t be sorry, and you’ll be saved. All during this time, the good news—the Message of the kingdom—will be preached all over the world, a witness staked out in every country. And then the end will come.”

Just prior in Matthew 22, Jesus has just been asked which is the greatest commandment? “Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

In Matthew 24, the word “love” is written as a noun. This is the only time Matthew writes it this way. The phrase, “the love of many will grow cold,” creates quite a picture.

Signs. At the beginning of life and at the end of life, there are signs that help us to know to pay attention. Sunday school friends helped repair the air conditioner the evening before our daughter’s summertime birth! They still tease me about my nesting instincts of the urgency of the repair!

“They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love,” a popular Christian folk song written during the 1960’s speaks of the distinctive sign of our ways of following Christ which are----the ways of love!

Jesus is calling his disciples then and now to pay attention to the signs. When Jesus is asked for signs of the end, he speaks of wars, famines and earthquakes. He also says “the love of many will grow cold.” May we who seek to be his people never contribute to that sign.

Personal Worship Option:

May we, with the help and power of the Holy Spirit be the ones who “keep on learning Christ’s ways of love” and continue to love in the ways that Christ would have us to do so. Amen.