REFLECTIONS

Made to Order

What is it about the Mona Lisa? How did Da Vinci paint her eyes to follow you across the room? And how can one portrait capture such an array of emotions from one pose? Da Vinci had the talent for it. He painted her just as he wanted her to be just as In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth… (Genesis 1:1)

God made them just the way He wanted them to be. But that’s not all. He created order within every part so they always worked without requiring much of his attention. Just pause in your busy day to take in all the wonders of the world God created. There are more than seven.

Then God set the world in perpetual motion, each component orderly designed to reproduce itself and multiply like He asked mankind to do. And in mysterious ways, each of those orderly designed components depend on one another for resources to work properly. In other words, God made every part of the world fit together to make one body.

God made people fit together that way too. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body — whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free — and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.

Now the body is not made up of one part but of many… But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be…  As it is, there are many parts, but one body. (1 Corinthians 12:12-14, 18, 20)

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” …But God has combined the members of the body… so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Now [we] are the body of Christ, and each one of [us] is a part of it. (1 Corinthians 12:21, 24-27)

Each of us has been made to order—just as God wanted us to be and to do what He wants us to do; but He also gave us the freedom to do as we choose. So, for us to fit together as one, He asked us to choose to love one another. Love is not love unless we chose to do it. Too often it seems we choose not to. But loving one another is not God’s first commandment.

The first is: “’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.” (Matthew 22:37-38) Yet, that’s the command we seem to most blindly neglect even though it’s the whole reason He made us.

Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. (Ecclesiastes 12:13)

“You are the light of the world,”

Richard +

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