My daily reading of Frederick Buechner sermons continues to do amazing things for my heart and mind. A few days ago, I read his sermon, Love, in Secrets in the Dark. His texts are Deuteronomy 6:4-7 and Matthew 27:45-46. I continue to appreciate Buechner's word-craft and creativity as he engages the life he lives and the Scripture he treasures.
In the following excerpt, I gravitate to his reading Deuteronomy 6 as not just a command, but also a promise. I haven't looked at the Hebrew text, but I have been comforted by that thought in recent days...on days that I don't feel I am loving God particularly well, perhaps I am given the promise that "Someday, Josh, you shall love me with all you've got."
"Nobody ever claimed the journey was going to be an easy one. It is not easy to love God with all your heart and soul and mind when much of the time you have all but forgotten his name. But to love God is not a goal we have to struggle toward on our own, because what at its heart the gospel is all about is that God himself moves us toward it even when we believe he has forsaken us.
The final secret, I think, is this: that the words You shall love the Lord your God becomes in the end less a command than a promise. And the promise is that, yes, on the weary feet of faith and the fragile wings of hope, we will come to love him at last as from the first he has loved us -- loved us even in the wilderness, especially in the wilderness, because he has been in the wilderness with us. He has been in the wilderness for us. He has been acquainted with our grief...
[And we will rise] out of the wilderness, every last one of us, even as out of the wilderness Christ rose before us. That is the promise, and the greatest of all promises..." (pp. 103-104)
That'll preach.
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