The Killeen carnival left this week, coincidentally just in
time for Ash Wednesday. So, what does the carnival and Ash Wednesday have in
common?
Carnival comes from the word “meat” (carne) and “leave”
(Latin: levare). Historically, Roman
Catholics and other believers have said “goodbye to meat” on Ash Wednesday and
on Fridays during the season of Lent.
Whether you forego meat in the upcoming days before
Resurrection Sunday, I encourage you to add a little more “spiritual meat” from
the Word of God to your spiritual diet.
The King James version translates Heb. 5:12 this way, “Ye have need that one teach you again which
be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need
of milk, and not of strong meat.”
Too many Christians are having to be bottle-fed rather than
digesting the stronger meat of the Word of God. Twice in the Bible (see also 1
Cor. 3:1-2) Christians are told they are so spiritually malnourished that they could
not handle solid “food.”
So what should be our spiritual diet of both milk and meat,
or basic and deeper spiritual truths? To answer that, let’s do a little time
travel.
First, let’s go to the time of Moses, when the great prophet
told God’s people they should love God with all their heart, soul, mind and
might (Deut. 6:5). If we were to build a food pyramid of spiritual nourishment,
loving God would absolutely be foundational.
Go forward in time (or if you don’t have a time machine,
flip a few pages forward in your Bible) and see in Leviticus 19:18 to perhaps
the most hidden but important verses in the otherwise tedious book: “Do not
take vengeance or hold grudges against your people, but love your neighbor as
yourself.”
Yes, you know that verse, but probably not from Leviticus.
Go forward in time just a little more and see how Jesus takes that obscure
verse and turns it as well as a testy little lawyer on his ear. (Still no time
machine? Okay, turn to Luke 10:25-37.)
You know this story. Jesus deepens the law student’s diet
from milk to meat by telling him that he was not only to just love his
neighbor, that is people of the same area, nationality and race. He was also to
love those dirty filthy foreigners like the “Good Samaritan.” Twice Paul said
that loving your neighbor as yourself summarized all the commandments (Rom.
13:9 and Gal. 5:14). James 2:18 calls it the “royal law.”
But wait. There is one more time travel we must do. Go
forward to the end of the first century. John, the beloved disciple, is no
longer a young strapping fisherman, a son of thunder (Mark 3:17) ready to call
fire down from heaven on those who disagree with him (Luke 9:54). He’s now old and tired, scars on his body from
living a martyr’s life, writing down the final eyewitness gospel, telling
memories otherwise untold in the previous gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.
“My meat is to do the
will of him that sent me, and to finish his work,” John recorded Jesus as
saying in John 4:34. John strains his mind to recall anything from 60 years
earlier. Suddenly Holy Spirit seizes him. How could he and all of the disciples
forgotten that? “A New Commandment,” Jesus said!
In my time machine, I imagine the Apostle John suddenly
feeling the surge of energy of that young disciple brain-picker that he was
when Jesus called him off the boat! For more than a half a century, no one had
written down the “New Commandment” Jesus had given them on the night before his
betrayal and crucifixion.
You see, love is not just for our neighbors; that is, those
near us. Love is not even merely to love others as we love ourselves. No!
Jesus’ new commandment (surely John slapped his forehead as he remembered and
recorded it!) was even greater than loving others like the Samaritans,
Gentiles, Romans and, yes, even the Syrians.
John looks at the parchment and drops the pen. “Now this is
love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son,” he says to
himself as he dabs his moistened eyes as he reads it again, then holds those
words to his chest:
“A New Commandment I give to you, that you love one another;
as I have loved you, that you also love one another.” (John 13:34). He will
write it again in John 15:12, 1 John 2:8 and 1 John 3:16.
After penning those words which had never been recorded
before, surely John sighed with a contentment like one would have after eating
a full-course meal! Love others as He loved us.
“Beloved, if God so
loved us, we also ought to love one another,” (1 John 4:11)
Tim McKeown is the Associate Pastor of First Baptist Church
in Killeen.
