Fruit of the Spirit - Love

I had intended on spending time with a new daily devotional.  However, I got stuck on the Day 2 readings about Sowing the Seed in the Love chapter.  I have not finished the section at this point.  However, I plan on revisiting the book tomorrow morning.

First of all, Ms. Manning (the author of Harvesting the Fruit of the Spirit) starts the section off with a beautiful illustration of Love:

"Love is the greatest emotion known to man; it rules the world.  Love is the essence of God's Spirit, for He encompasses love." page 7

She follows that up with another lovely statement:

"Love is an action; therefore, it is always busy expressing itself." page 8

But then, on page 10, Ms. Manning brings up a movie I believe was highly overrated and borderline snuff film.

Ms. Manning states, "Jesus knew the torture depicted in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ would only be a shadow of the actual torment and humiliation that would be thrust upon him."

As a lover of language, the author's editor should have reread the above sentence.  What the sentence says is that Jesus knew of Gibson's movie and the torture scenes would be only a shadow.  Place a comma between "torture" and "depicted" and another one between "Christ" and "would" and I think Ms. Manning would have achieved what she truly meant.  Regardless, bringing up this gory movie was really a road block for me.

I understand that many of the Christian community encouraged their flocks to see (literally flock) the movie.  Not long ago I decided to watch the movie myself.  I was curious what was so moving in the motion picture that wasn't described in the Bible itself.  The movie was well acted, the costuming was lovely, and the scenery was very authentic looking.  However, the gratuitous blood, depicted in a few scenes, warranted me to push the fast forward button on the remote more than once.

The point that really disturbed me was that the author had to use The Passion to connect her readers to Jesus's horrid torture and death.  Is it necessary to bring up a movie that was obviously cinematic in nature (i.e. squirting blood from a wound after days hanging on the cross with no food or water).  But squirt Jesus did...all over on lookers.

Okay, I am done with my issue of the book.  The section ended with a word that I never knew the exact meaning before: agape.  So I looked it up.  Agape is a Greek word that has been translated to mean God's love in the Christian faith.  I love thinking of God's love on a different level than humans.  His unconditional love is something we should strive to achieve, but could never measure. 

So onto the next part of Sowing the Seed.  Hopefully I can complete the entire section tomorrow and leave the other 3 parts for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  Hopefully nothing as frustrating as The Passion will come up again.