F, H, & L

I'm reading 1 Thessalonians these days. Probably the first letter that Paul wrote, which probably makes it the oldest book of the New Testament.

Sitting down to read it again, I was struck by verse three:

We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.

It will be many years and many miles later before Paul writes his famous "love chapter" in 1 Corinthians 13, where he summarizes faith, hope, and love as the "three things that remain." But here they are, faith, hope, and love, at the very beginning of the first words written in the New Testament.

It seems to me that for Paul the work of the gospel is always good works produced by this inner transformation. Our motives matter. What's happening on the inside produces good or bad fruit.

Paul, along with Jesus, have as much to say about the transformation of the heart and motives and attitudes and beliefs as they do about the outworkings of obedience. Both matter, the former and the latter, but the latter can only bear the good fruit intended if there's inner-life change happening as well.

I wrote last week that I'm working with the Enneagram as a sort of A.P. Myers-Briggs to help me to see myself more clearly. The goal of that is that faith, hope, and love might replace the broken motivations of anxiety, pride, and selfishness in the matrix of my motives. This won't happen over-night or even over the next two months of my sabbatical.

But I'm delighted to think that my life might be growing more and more in this direction over the next 35 years or so. That would be a life worth living.