May 16, 2020
John 14:15-17 … “This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.” vs. 17
Spirit-talk is almost always mysterious; it’s the language we use when we try to describe the everyday nearness of God, and that’s close to an impossible task. Some people, many people maybe, never seem to get what we’re saying and sometimes we can even confuse ourselves. John gets at that difficulty as he mentions the connection between loving Jesus and receiving the Spirit of Truth. The world, which has been created and loved by God, doesn’t get it, not because the Spirit is so far from them, but because the world can’t recognize what’s already in the world. Only when love begins to flow from within do we see and know the internal source of love that is already in us. The promise is clear. The Spirit of Truth abides in us now, and will be in us forever. There will never be a time when the Spirit is absent from us. Oh, there will be times when it feels like that, but those moments are only an aberration, and happen precisely at those times when we imagine the absence of love. The Spirit is of course Christ, the One who is Truth, Way, and Life, and who is our partner in loving—and Christ is in us always.
Thought for the Day: What does the absence of love feel like?
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