Today I thought I would share my Brennan Manning devotion. It really hit my heart. It ties in with what we learned at Encounter this week and yesterday's "Last Supper" and today's "Good Friday"...
The One Jesus Loves
I believe that the night in the Upper Room was the defining moment of John's life. Some sixty years after Christ's resurrection, the apostle - like an old gold miner panning the stream of his memories - recalled all that had transpired during his three-year association with Jesus. He made pointed reference to that holy night when it all came together, and he affirmed his identity with these words: "Peter turned and saw the disciple Jesus loved following them - the one who had leaned on his breast at the supper" (John 21:20).
If John were to be asked, "What is your primary identity, your most coherent sense of yourself?" he would not reply, "I am a disciple, an apostle, an evanelist," but "I am the one Jesus loves"...
To read John 13:23-25 without faith is to read it without profit. To risk the passionate life, we must be "affected by" Jesus as John was; we must engage his experience with our lives rather than with our memories. Until I lay my head on Jesus' breast, listen to His heartbeat, and personally appropriate the Christ-experience of John's eyewitness, I have only a derivative spirituality. My cunning imposter will borrow John's moment of intimacy and attempt to convey it as if it were my own.
"Whoever loves his brother lives in the light, and there is nothing in him to make him stumble." 1 John 2:10
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