Posts Tagged: binding good and bad
“Love Binds. But is that Good?”
Years ago, my sponsor encouraged me to craft and live out daily affirmations. This practice remains a transformative habit in my day-to-day recovery and life. Today’s affirmation led to an interesting exchange with my sponsor. Here is the affirmation:
“Today, by God’s grace, I am welcoming love and also aiding its flow to others. I will choose to be madly in love with everything and everyone. This will be great sanity for me.”
My sponsor replied, “Love binds us all.”
I thought about his aphorism for a few moments, and then emailed him back, “Yes, it does. False ‘love’ binds us in chains. True love binds us in a freeing embrace.”
In other words, binding can be a good thing—except when it is not. There is a kind of binding that is done in the name of love that is not at all an expression of love. There is a binding that is an expression of fear, anger, and the desire to be in control. This kind of “love” is a very common form of human evil. Sometimes, it leads to terribly evil forms of bondage, but I suspect that we all participate in this kind of bondage in less dramatic ways. Less dramatic forms of evil are evil still.
But there is also the kind of love that binds us all in our common humanity. This is a freeing kind of love, not bondage. Paul encourages this kind of freeing binding in Colossians 3:12-14.
“Col. 3:12 Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, 13 bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” (English Standard Version)
Paul encourages his original readers, and us, with some difficult things: compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, putting up with one another, and forgiving. Who is up to these things?! But then, as if that were not enough, he adds one more thing that binds all these other virtues together: love.
The God who loved the whole world so much that he gave his only son (John 3:16) calls on us to also love. God bound himself to the entire world in love in order to free us from our bondage to sin. Can we strive to do anything less than this?
DOWN TO EARTH BELIEVER
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