I am Jamaica's husband, Foursquare's comm director, Personality's founder, and a catalyst for CFCC.
I'm also blogging at:
Personality™
Church Marketing Sucks
« Blow My Freakin' Bubble | My 2006 Daily Prayer »
October 26, 2005
White-Hot and Full of Service
Filed under: God, Faith & Spirituality
Richard Foster, in his book Devotional Classics, distills a few nuggets of insight from Francis de Sales, a sixteenth century prolific writer - a "master of the metaphor." Francis writes about "true devotion" and uses the idea of charity and devotion to explore how our horizontal (God) and vertical (people) relationships should be.
It is generally assumed today that devotion means a series of religious duties to add to an already overcommitted schedule. But such is simply not the case. By themselves, the externals of religion are dry, dead, dusty stuff. No, we all need the heartfelt habit that Frances calls "charity," by which he simply means the ability to do good to all people.
Foster continues:
Francis de Sales reminds us that on the vertical plane, "true devotion" means a head-over-heals, white-hot love of God. On the horizontal plane it means a strength free of guile to serve others.
I want my relationship with God to be white-hot.
I want my relationship with others to be full of service!
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.bradabare.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/202