Faith Expressing Itself Through Love

The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. - Galatians 5:6

What if we took that verse seriously - the ONLY thing that matters - really?! And yet that’s what the early church leader wrote and what the early church embraced as God-inspired.

Of course, it’s hard to control love, measure love, succeed at love, commodify love, and utilize love. So religious traditions have been built up over the ages to do exactly what the book of Galatians was deadset against: we make new lists of checkboxes for what you need to believe or what you need to do in order to be good enough. (Read Galatians and you’ll see this VERY clearly).

Faith expressing itself through love. What a sweet, short, powerful summary.

To close our time today we reflect on the earliest surviving work in the English language by a woman (1388AD). Julian of Norwich had deep and wondrous prayer times when she experienced God over and over. She wrote about these ‘showings’ years later in her journal. Listen in, and while you do, ask yourself how you might grow in what Paul and Julian describe.

Throughout the time of my showings, I wished to know what our Beloved meant. More than fifteen years later, the answer came in a spiritual vision. This is what I heard. “Would you like to know our Lord’s meaning in all this? Know it well: love was his meaning. Who revealed this to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why did he reveal it to you? For love. Stay with this and you will know more of the same. You will never know anything but love, without end. - Julian of Norwich, Showings