Teaching Freely is Love in Action

Our last TEC Thought for the Week is:

Love others as you love yourself!

Why is this our last TEC Thought for the Week? We have had much joy in bringing you our weekly TEC Thoughts over the years. And as we have grown in our TEC communications, we have kept adding to what we are sharing weekly with you.

However, we realise that you, like many of us, receive a lot of email communication each week. Our response to this potential overload is that we are going to focus on fewer areas in our TEC Connects newsletter. We trust that this helps you.

We also thought it appropriate to round out this part of our tradition with the next extract from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, which continues from those in earlier weeks:

Galatians 5:13-15 It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?

16-18 My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God’s Spirit. Then you won’t feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are contrary to each other, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don’t you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?

Peterson’s paraphrase can help us focus our teaching and working community in dramatic ways, if we are prepared to ask ourselves questions such as:

  • As Teachers, do my students see our class-times as opportunities to learn to serve others as we learn together? And
  • For all of us working in Christian Education, whether teaching or not, do I invite the Holy Spirit to protect me, and all our students, from selfishness as we learn together?

May we inspire each other as we listen to and invite the Holy Spirit to guide and direct us, working together for our student’s future faith.

Blessings,
Stephen J Fyson