Mission Statement: Growing in Love for God

I read a quote last week that went like this: “You’ll never make up in speed what you lack in direction.”

I started thinking about how true it is, and reflected some on teaching my daughter, Lilly, to ski. As we would begin our descent down the mountain, I’d make sure I stopped to stand at the right markers to keep my daughter going on the correct track. Almost more often than not, I would watch her sail right past me down the mountain as I was waving my arms to try and get her attention. Ultimately, I’d have to set off after her, knowing she wasn’t going to make it to the same destination as the rest of our family. No matter how brilliantly or quickly she was skiing, she still wasn’t going to end up in the place she needed to be.

The same is true with one’s spiritual direction. No amount of speed, effort, or accomplishment will help us arrive at the goal (intimacy with God) if we are going the wrong direction. Not all things, even seemingly good things, get us where we want to go.

A mission statement, as we understand it, functions as a reminder of where we want to go. Our mission statement around here is this:

Growing in love for God, growing in love for people, and inviting others on the journey.

We don’t want to be a people who are stagnant or stopped on our faith journey. We want to be a people who are actively growing in love for God. We believe that in order to grow in our love for God, we have to grow in our experience of God’s love for us. Think about it: if you don’t know that God loves you, you don’t have it in you to love God. It is a directly proportional equation: the more we’ve experienced of God’s love, the more love we can have for Him.

So the question really before us is, how do we experience, or grasp, more of the love of God?

In Ephesians 3:14-19, the apostle Paul writes this:
”I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that Paul seems to be suggesting that we can have power to grasp the love of Christ when we are rooted and established in love.

It’s interesting to reflect a bit on this idea: being rooted in love. What ideas come to mind when you hear this phrase? What does it mean for a life to be rooted in love? What is my life really rooted in? What is nurturing the direction of my life? These are helpful questions.

Another way to think about it is this: when your mind wanders, where do your thoughts go to dwell? What do you daydream about? One of my goals is to - instead of dreaming about my anxieties or current hobbies - root my thoughts in the love of God. To decide to take my thoughts captive and dwell on Christ.

If we can root our daily selves in love, we may just be able to grasp “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.” And in so doing, we might be able to be grow in our love for God and be “filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” as well.

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Lord, we want to be people on a mission. We don’t want to find ourselves going the wrong direction. Give us eyes to see what our lives are actually rooted in. And instead, establish us in Your love. We pray that You would be the place where our minds go to dwell. Amen.