Leawood, Kansas, United States - The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection Daily Guide grow. pray. study. for Saturday, 27 November 2014 “God’s grace: reason for thanksgiving"

Leawood, Kansas, United States - The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection Daily Guide grow. pray. study. for Thursday, 27 November 2014 “God’s grace: reason for thanksgiving"
Today's Scripture: 1 John 4: God Is Love
7-10 My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love. This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God.
11-12 My dear, dear friends, if God loved us like this, we certainly ought to love each other. No one has seen God, ever. But if we love one another, God dwells deeply within us, and his love becomes complete in us—perfect love!
13-16 This is how we know we’re living steadily and deeply in him, and he in us: He’s given us life from his life, from his very own Spirit. Also, we’ve seen for ourselves and continue to state openly that the Father sent his Son as Savior of the world. Everyone who confesses that Jesus is God’s Son participates continuously in an intimate relationship with God. We know it so well, we’ve embraced it heart and soul, this love that comes from God.
Reflection Questions:
A joyous Thanksgiving Day to you! John’s letter reminded his readers that in Jesus, and in us, the grace of our invisible God becomes visible. That’s why it matters so much that our family, friends and other human contacts see God’s grace in and through us, even (or perhaps especially) as we share holiday time together. We have much for which to give thanks, and God’s grace heads the list.
• The apostle John emphatically did not believe that following Jesus should make a person judgmental or unloving! Methodism’s founder John Wesley quoted John’s words, urging, “Let us provoke all men, not to enmity and contention, but to love and good works; always
remembering those deep words … ‘God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him!’” In what ways has following Christ made you and your relationships more loving and grace-filled?
• “No one has ever seen God,” John observed. List the names of the people in your life who have helped to make the grace of the unseen God visible to you. If you are with any of them today, be sure to tell them about the impact they’ve had on your life. Otherwise, send
them a note or give them a call to express your gratitude. For whom are you making God’s grace visible?
Prayer: Lord God, help me make this day much more than just a prelude to Black Friday sales. Give me a heart filled with gratitude for all that I already have because of your grace and love. Amen.

Insight From Dr. Amy Oden
Dr. Amy Oden is Professor of Early Church History and Spirituality at Saint Paul School of Theology at OCU. Teaching is her calling, and she looks forward to every day with students. For 25 years, Amy has taught theology and history, pursuing scholarship in service of the church.  
“No one has ever seen God,” (1 John 4:12) but we all have pictures in our heads, whether we want them or not, about what God looks like. For many of us, the picture of God is pretty specific, an old white man with white hair and a beard, usually up in the clouds somewhere. At least that is often the picture many of us start out with as kids. Yet as we grow up, our childhood picture of God seems, well, childish. As young adults, we can’t buy any longer the idea of a God who is a kindly old man in the clouds. The world is too big, and our lives are too messy for that to make sense. But we don’t replace that picture with anything else, leaving us sort of stuck with this picture of God that doesn’t really work for our real lives. (Click here to check out the great song about this by Michael Gungor.)
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As I young adult, I struggled to find a view of God that seemed real. I had a vague idea about God, but nothing very concrete. I knew the “old man on a cloud” wasn’t it, but I didn’t know what was. It helped once I could admit this out loud to some trusted friends. These wise Christians encouraged me to experiment with lots of images – mother, father, friend, lover, creator, rock, shepherd. They also cautioned me always to remember that these images are not actually God. Words and images can give me doorways to picture God, but God is always bigger than any one image. That began a journey that has lasted my whole life.
These verses from 1 John help guide me on this journey of knowing God. The rest of verse 12 goes on to say, “If we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” Any picture of God we have in our minds, then, must be rooted in God’s love. We come to know God through the people who love us, who make God’s love real to us. So many people have loved me, becoming God’s hands and feet. God became real to me through that love. God becomes real to others through your love.
How do you picture God? Has it changed through the seasons of your life? These days, I find that I experience God most often as Presence, and while that is not exactly a concrete image, it gives a name to the One who knows me better than I know myself. “No one has seen God,” yet each of us pictures this awesome God in different ways. Even more than our picture of God, it is through our love for others – our families and strangers, our near neighbors and far neighbors– that God makes a home in us.
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