Scot McKnight - 40 Days Living the Jesus Creed

AUTHOR OF THE JESUS CREED: LOVING GOD, LOVING OTHERS

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SCOT MCKNIGHT

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40 Days Living the Jesus Creed

2009 Second Printing
2008 First Printing

Copyright 2008 by Scot McKnight

ISBN: 978-1-55725-577-8

Published in association with the literary agency of Daniel Literary Group, 1701 Kingsbury Drive, Suite 100, Nashville, TN 37215.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked Todays New International Version are taken from the Holy Bible, Todays New International Version TNIV. Copyright 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked The Message are taken from THE MESSAGE. Copyright 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McKnight, Scot.
40 days living the Jesus creed / Scot McKnight.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-55725-577-8
1. Christian life--Biblical teaching. 2. Devotional literature. I. Title.
BS680.C47M35 2008
248.4--dc22 2007049368

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in an electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Paraclete Press
Brewster, Massachusetts
www.paracletepress.com
Printed in the United States of America

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Fine and faithful Christian conversationalists

Recently my wife, Kris, and I attracted hummingbirds into our backyard to feed on our assortment of feeders and flowers. Throughout a weekend marked by perfect weather, Kris and I sat on our screened porch and read and talked and visited with family and ate our meals together. We learned something that weekend about those little marvels called hummingbirds: they eat constantly. My estimation is they visit our feeders and flowers forty or fifty times a day. Instead of gobbling up an entire bottle of nectar in one sitting, hummers poke their spindly, needle-nosed beaks and extendible tongues to extract nectar from plants and feeders all day long.

Herein lies a parable for us today: many of us live as if we were designed to eat like lions, as if one big meal (Sunday) is enough to sustain us for the week. Not so. Followers of Jesus are more like hummingbirds than lions. We need a steady diet of spiritual nectar if we are to live the kind of life Jesus asks us to live. That life I summarized in a book called The Jesus Creed, an expression I use for Jesus double commandment to love God and to love others.

40 Days Living the Jesus Creed extends what we explored in The Jesus Creed into other passages in the Gospels. We then extend the ongoing life of the Jesus Creed into the rest of the New Testament to discover how the Jesus Creed undergirds the Sermon on the Mount, the Love Chapter of the apostle Paul, and the core moral teachings of James (brother of Jesus), Peter, and the apostle John. Because we need a steady diet of Jesus Creed nectar, we have in this book forty short chapters. Exploring how the Jesus Creed lives in other writers of the New Testament offers you and me ongoing reminders, daily feedings as it were, of what is most importantlearning to put into practice what it means to love God and to love others.

When I wrote The Jesus Creed, I had fond hopes that it would catch on. Yet its success continues to surprise me. Originally I included a concluding chapter to The Jesus Creed that revealed how significant the Jesus Creed was to the early Christians, but my editor thought that the book ended where it should have and that a description of the ongoing life of the Jesus Creed could wait until another time. That time is now.

We learn to love God and love others only if we dedicate ourselves to an ongoing commitment to live the Jesus Creed daily. So, my prayer is that by spreading out these two themes over forty days, with a new exploration each day, we will expose ourselves to the potent grace of Gods love sufficiently to become more loving.

One more reminder. Neither 40 Days Living the Jesus Creed nor The Jesus Creed can be as effective as they are intended to be if we do not commit ourselves to reciting the Jesus Creed in the morning, in the evening, and anytime during the day that it comes to mind. Heres why: this was the moral creed of Jesus and the earliest Christians. What was an early Christian daily recital fell away as the church moved away from Judaism. So it is our prayer that the daily recital of the Jesus Creed will find its way back into the daily practice of Christians today. Once again, here is the Jesus Creed as found in Mark 12:2931:

Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.

The Jesus Creed exhorts us to see that the
most important commandments in the
entire Bible are two: to love God and to
love others. All the other commandments
and prohibitionsand there are 611
othersderive from one of these two most
important commands.

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God,
the LORD is one.
You shall love the LORD your God
with all your heart,
and with all your soul,
and with all your might.
Deuteronomy 6:45

We need to remind ourselves daily of what is most important: our primary relationship to God is love. We love God in response to Gods great love for us. So important is it to love God, that God tells Israel that they are to remind themselves of their need to love God by developing a sacred rhythm of reciting the following words daily: Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. These words from the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy are called the Shema because the first word of these lines, Hear, is shema in Hebrew.

Notice Gods next words: Recite [these words] to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Loving God was the subject matter for an Israelites whole day. All of life was about loving God with every ounce of ones being. This was so important that they were to teach their children. So important that they were to recite the Shema when they were at home and when they were at work or on vacation. So important that they were to recite them when they got up and when they went to bed, which is the liturgical churchs catalyst for morning prayers and vespers prayers. So important that they were to write them on scraps of papyrus, roll them up, and place them in little leather pouches, and strap the pouches to the forehead and arm. So important that they were to write them on the doorways to their homes. So important that they were to write them on the portals to their cities and villages.