Recently my wife, Kris, and I attracted hummingbirds into our backyard to feed on our assortment of feeders and flowers. Throughout a weekend marked by perfect weather, Kris and I sat on our screened porch and read and talked and visited with family and ate our meals together. We learned something that weekend about those little marvels called hummingbirds: they eat constantly. My estimation is they visit our feeders and flowers forty or fifty times a day. Instead of gobbling up an entire bottle of nectar in one sitting, hummers poke their spindly, needle-nosed beaks and extendible tongues to extract nectar from plants and feeders all day long.

Herein lies a parable for us today: many of us live as if we were designed to eat like lions, as if one big meal (Sunday) is enough to sustain us for the week. Not so. Followers of Jesus are more like hummingbirds than lions. We need a steady diet of spiritual nectar if we are to live the kind of life Jesus asks us to live. That life I summarized in a book called The Jesus Creed, an expression I use for Jesus' double commandment to love God and to love others.

40 Days Living the Jesus Creed extends what we explored in The Jesus Creed into other passages in the Gospels. We then extend the ongoing life of the Jesus Creed into the rest of the New Testament to discover how the Jesus Creed undergirds the Sermon on the Mount, the Love Chapter of the apostle Paul, and the core moral teachings of James (brother of Jesus), Peter, and the apostle John. Because we need a steady diet of Jesus Creed nectar, we have in this book forty short chapters. Exploring how the Jesus Creed lives in other writers of the New Testament offers you and me ongoing reminders, daily feedings as it were, of what is most important-learning to put into practice what it means to love God and to love others.

When I wrote The Jesus Creed, I had fond hopes that it would catch on. Yet its success continues to surprise me. Originally I included a concluding chapter to The Jesus Creed that revealed how significant the Jesus Creed was to the early Christians, but my editor thought that the book ended where it should have and that a description of the ongoing life of the Jesus Creed could wait until another time. That time is now.

We learn to love God and love others only if we dedicate ourselves to an ongoing commitment to live the Jesus Creed daily. So, my prayer is that by spreading out these two themes over forty days, with a new exploration each day, we will expose ourselves to the potent grace of God's love sufficiently to become more loving.

One more reminder. Neither 40 Days Living the Jesus Creed nor The Jesus Creed can be as effective as they are intended to be if we do not commit ourselves to reciting the Jesus Creed in the morning, in the evening, and anytime during the day that it comes to mind. Here's why: this was the moral creed of Jesus and the earliest Christians. What was an early Christian daily recital fell away as the church moved away from Judaism. So it is our prayer that the daily recital of the Jesus Creed will find its way back into the daily practice of Christians today. Once again, here is the Jesus Creed as found in Mark 12:29-31:

"Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength." The second is this, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." There is no other commandment greater than these.