Lay Down Our Lives

Nobody has asked me to die for anybody. That is the honest objection, and a command that can only be obeyed on an occasion which never arrives costs nothing and flatters everybody who hears it. We ought to lay down our lives for the brethren, said in a building where the largest sacrifice available that morning was the parking.

John answers it in the very next sentence, and the drop in altitude is deliberate. But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? Three things are in that: you have goods, you see the need, and something inside you closes. He has taken the largest act a human being can perform and reissued it in instalments payable this week.

The chapter has been building to it. This is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. Then the counter-example, and it is a killing: Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. Then a test with no comfort in it: He that loveth not his brother abideth in death. And the summary, which names the currency most of our loving is paid in: My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.

Put a figure on it this week. Work out one amount you spent on yourself last month that you would not have missed, and get it to the need you already know about, the one with a name on it, before Sunday. Say nothing about the stretch. That is the instalment, and John's test runs on whether anything shuts in you while you are looking at the person.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 313 is Enduring Mercy (Psalm 107:1).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two