The Omnipotence of Love Part 3

The Omnipotence of Love Part 3

May 12, 2022 | The Gospel

I quoted Jesus in my last post saying, if we’re to follow him we must take up our cross daily and follow him. That daily part tells us loving others is an ever-present challenge that requires a continual dying to ourselves. As I shared in the first post, I learned a phrase when I was introduced to Reformed theology in my mid-20s that “love is efficacious.” That, to me, is the essence of love being omnipotent: it works, and it can’t help but working with everything it encounters. It accomplishes something, and something that is beautiful and beneficial to both the lover and the loved. That is also why it is the hardest thing in the Christian life to do because it goes so against the grain of incurvatus in se, of who we are as sinners; we are beings who are curved in on ourselves. The self-obsession is who we are by sinful nature. The paradox is that the cross is the greatest enemy of the self, but also its liberator. When the self is the driving force of our lives, it is the means to the death of the true self, us as we were meant to be as God’s most magnificent creation. When we understand the sin principle in our life, that which seeks our fulfillment above all things, we will understand why it must be committed to the cross.

These are all nice sounding words, but somewhat abstract. What exactly does it mean in practice? First, I will establish that there is nothing more important than love in the Christian life. Jesus, when he was asked by an expert in the law (Matt. 22), “which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” he answered with these words:

37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

The profundity of these words could not be overestimated. Jesus is saying love is the whole deal; it’s all about love! We can boil the entirety of God’s revelation in Scripture to these words, love God with everything that you are, and your neighbor as yourself. The last time I read through the New Testament epistles, I was struck by just this, that love is the essence of the Christian ethic. This is, of course, impossible, but as Jesus also said, with God all things are possible. The reason it is possible, that it is doable to love God, ourselves, and our neighbors, is because God first loved us in Christ. He didn’t demand of us, or command of us, something he wasn’t willing and in fact did himself do for us. Jesus said love your enemies, and even while we were his enemies, he loved us!

Love in practice is revealed to us all throughout Scripture if we know how to look, but God in condescending to us as he always does, boiled love down for us through the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 13. Paul tells us we can do all kinds of amazing things, good things, religious things, spiritual things, but if we don’t have love, we’re just noise. Then he goes into the impossible possible description of what love is:

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

And to top off the apparently impossible, he ends with a statement that perfectly captures the omnipotence of love: “Love never fails.” Never. But we might reasonably reply that we’ve tried to love others, and it most definitely failed. Did we really? Are we sure of it? If we read these few verses of Paul, did we really love with this kind of other worldly love? It’s almost an impossible question to answer because doing these things is humanly speaking absolutely impossible. Keep no record of wrongs? Seriously? How exactly does that work? Do we lose our memory? No, but it is possible because God keeps no record of our wrongs, so we are compelled to keep no record of the wrongs done to us. This doesn’t mean we are stupid toward others who do wrong to us. True love is not naïve or gullible, nor is it easily taken advantage of. This requires a common biblical theme, wisdom. The Greek word for wisdom means clarity, the ability to see things as they are. The beautiful thing about Christianity is that there is no rule book, just do x and y will result. It’s much harder than that, and requires faith, which means trust in the God of love to help teach us how to love others.

I could write many more posts on the most important topic of living the Christian life, but next time you read through the letters of the New Testament, notice how the exhortation to love is everywhere. In all of the New Testament, the word love and its variations is used 261 times. That’s a lot of love! I’ll end with a verse that says it all, I Peter 4:8: “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” God loved us so much he gave his life for us in Christ, covering over the multitude of our sins, so we can realistically love others.

 

The Omnipotence of Love Part 3

The Omnipotence of Love Part 2

Apr 22, 2022 | The Gospel

ineIn my first post on the nature of love that is all powerful, I briefly touched on the phrase that God’s love is efficacious, meaning it is effective to the end for which it is intended. In a term that goes back to the hippy drug days of the 1970s, this is heavy, extremely, insanely heavy! It is difficult for us to divorce ourselves from the modern conception of equating love with romance, with which love has very little to do. The problem with romance, other than it’s a wonderfully delightful human experience, while it lasts, is that it confuses love with emotion, as if love has to do with how we feel. This isn’t to say that love has nothing to do with feelings, only that love isn’t driven by feelings. True love, rather, is a commitment to the welfare of the other regardless of our feelings, and then in due course when faithfully rendered, results in a mutual affection of the one who loves and the beloved. That is how it reveals its omnipotent reality. We go from reluctant lovers, to those who love because we truly want to love the other person. That is Miraculous!

This kind of love’s enemy is the self, which looks for its own aggrandizement and to its feelings. To counter the unhealthy self-centered sinful self, Jesus said if we’re to follow him we must take up our cross daily and follow him. It is impossible living in light of 2,000 years of Christian history to understand how absurd, and offensive, this would have sounded to the people who first heard Jesus say it. The cross? You can imagine them thinking, what could a bloody horrible instrument of torture and death have to do with following him? It so happens everything. The only thing that could defeat death was the sacrifice of God himself in the person of Christ, thus showing us it is the principle of sacrifice that allows us to defeat the consequences of death in our fallen world. Jesus tells us this in John 12 when he is predicting his death:

23 Jesus replied, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24 Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. 25 Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. 26 Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.

Jesus was giving us the secret of true life when he said, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). The thief, who is the devil, works continuously to get us to believe that getting what we want is the secret to happiness, only it isn’t. I’ve learned through trial and much error as I’ve grown older, I have no idea what I want, only what I think I want; big difference. The more important question is what do I need, and only God knows that. I learned this definitively in the fifth decade of my life when I was praying through some trying circumstances, and I would pray, “Lord, it would be ideal if . . .” One day it struck me like thunder right above my head, “How in the hell would you know what ideal is, you moron!” How stupid could I be for so long? I’ve learned being stupid comes naturally to self-centered sinners, which is why God is slowly, but surely sanctifying us, to make us less so. That prayer now had changed to, “Lord, it think it would be nice if such and so happened, but Thy will be done.” That says, I trust you, not me; you know all things, I know nothing (Rom. 8:28, all things).

So, what has this to do with love? I asked that same question in my last post as I seemed to be going off track, but I wasn’t. The essence of love is sacrifice, which is why it is the hardest thing to do in the Christian life. I learned a lesson on how stupid I was back when I was 28 years old that began, and only began, to teach me the lesson of sacrifice. I worked with a woman who just rubbed me the wrong way. It wasn’t the first time I worked for or with a woman who annoyed me, and I asked God, “Why do you put me in situations with people who are so annoying?” He replied, almost audibly, “To teach you to love them, you moron!” Oh, how I did not want to hear that! That means it’s not all about me? And what I want? Nope. Again, I could almost hear him say, “You have no idea what you want, only what you think you want. I know what you need. And you need annoying people in your life to teach you how to love them!”

So, when God blessed us with children, and they would come to me complaining about people at school or work or what have you, I would ask them: Why do you think this person is in your life? And they hated my answer: To teach you to learn how to love them! They didn’t want to hear that any more than I did. I’ve said that to others who are friends and family over the years, and the response is always the same. Ugh! In the second the Elisabeth Elliott podcasts I linked to in my previous post, she tells a story of a woman who had a horrible marriage. She asked the woman if she thought her husband was her enemy, and the women said yes. Then Elliott said, you know what Jesus says about loving your enemies, right? Ugh! If you listen to that story, you’ll catch something of what the phrase, the omnipotence of love, means; how love rooted in Christ and his sacrifice for us, as we practice it toward others, is inevitably efficacious.

On to part 3.

The Omnipotence of Love Part 3

The Omnipotence of Love Part 1

Apr 9, 2022 | The Gospel

This is my first blog post on my new website! It is a blessing to have a website built by a professional, and a blessing I could afford it. Thank you, Kate, of CheekySkirt Media! And thank you God! Now back to business.

I had never heard the phrase the omnipotence of love before, until I saw a talk at The Elisabeth Elliot Podcast (and here is part 2). As soon as my eyes came upon those words, I thought it was brilliant! First, in case you have not heard of or are familiar with who Elisabeth Elliot is, she and her husband, Jim, were missionaries in Ecuador in the 1950s where he was killed by natives. The story was made famous by her book about their lives together called, Through The Gates of Splendor. I learned about it when I became a Christian in college, and it scared me because I always thought God wanted me to be a missionary in some remote jungle, and I didn’t want to do that! But Jim had a saying I learned back then I have never forgotten: He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. Indeed! I found out as my Christian life went on, I did become a missionary, but in the metaphorical jungles of our fallen world.

As I write these words, I just finished listening to part two of her talk, and she shares a miraculous story of a woman who learns to love her unlovable husband . However, it is miraculous in a way you and I do not normally understand that word. As I’ll try to explain, that makes it even more miraculous. We tend to see miracles as those happenings that transcend human experience or effort, and those of course do exist. They happened in the Bible, and they happen now, although our perspective on miracles is far too narrow and truncated. The reason is that we live by sight not by faith, and this is especially pernicious in the tyrannical secular culture of the modern world. We’ve been indoctrinated into thinking there is such a thing as the “natural” world, which is the material world we see in some way existing apart from God. Of course, we would never say that, or even think it, but it does affect how we see things.

I learned this when I came across a statement from C.S. Lewis that humbled me. He has a habit of doing that to me because he makes things obvious that I am too slow to have figured out on my own. He said that all births are every bit as miraculous as Mary’s virgin birth. Duh! Although when our daughter, our first, was born I cried out, There is a God! Somehow it was still “natural” to me. You know, I figured out how babies are made, and somehow found a woman who would marry me and cooperate, and boom, there’s a baby! But how is that not utterly miraculous! A seed we call a sperm comes out of one body, goes into another and among millions of them one gets attached to what is called an egg in another person, and whadday know, a baby pops out! It’s just “natural,” don’t ya know. Breathing is a miracle, seeing is a miracle, a tree, a cat, an apple, a thought, a muscle, dirt, everything is a miracle!

So, what in the world has all this to do with love, you ask. I don’t know! I’m still writing. Actually, it is going somewhere, which I why I changed the title to Part 1; this may take several posts. Love clearly doesn’t come naturally, pun intended, to sinners; it is not natural. I don’t think I have to convince anyone of that. In fact, it is the hardest thing we are commanded to do in the Christian life. Being “moral” is a piece of cake compared with trying to love other sinners. The reason is incurvatus in se, as Luther and Augustine put it in Latin; human beings are curved in on themselves. It’s all about me! It is sin’s proclivity to make everything about us that makes loving others so hard; it is our utterly self-centered nature that makes living out I Corinthians 13, humanly speaking, impossible. That is why it takes a miracle to do it.

Which brings me to the miracle that happened 2,000 years ago when an itinerant Jewish preacher named Jesus of Nazareth died on a Roman cross in a small corner of the Roman Empire. It was the love of God in Christ displayed in that bloody corpse that defines the omnipotence of love. I’ll never forget the night back in February 1985 when I was introduced to Reformed theology. It was a Copernican revolution in every sense of that metaphor because my Christianity in an instant went from revolving around me, and what I did or didn’t do, or could and couldn’t do, to what God in Christ did for me! Steve, who would become my mentor, shared with me a phrase I’d never heard before. He said God’s love is efficacious, or effective; it accomplishes for its object what it intends, without fail. This is the miracle.

I will try to convey this in a couple blog posts (good luck!), but it’s really a simple concept. Love is transforming; wherever it goes, it transforms for the good. This has nothing to do with our modern conception of love as romance or feeling. How we feel about another person has absolutely nothing to do with love. In fact, we mostly love despite how we feel. Read I Corinthians 13: feelings are irrelevant. In fact, they get in the way because our feelings are always about us! What’s in it for me. I’ll explore this more in the next post, but listen to the second of Elisabeth Elliot’s talks, and specifically about the woman who learned how to truly love her unlovable husband. It’s amazing! It shows the miraculous, transforming power of true love rooted in Christ. Any other love is a poor substitute, and most certainly not omnipotent.

Embrace The Suck! The Gravitational Pull of Sin

Embrace The Suck! The Gravitational Pull of Sin

Mar 13, 2022 | Theology

I apologize for the semi-vulgarity, but this has become something of a favorite phrase of mine of late. I guess it’s because life can so often seem so sucky to us. Things rarely go like we think we want them to, and even when they go like we think we want them to, they never quite live up to what we think they should. I wonder why. That’s a rhetorical question because, well, we all know the answer, but so often we seem to forget. I’ll give it to you, no charge: We live in a fallen world in a fallen body among fallen people. That means, life is really hard most of the time. I’ll explain why that’s good news below, but first we have to understand why, and fully accept it. The latter part is far more difficult then the former. The reason for the former, the why part, is found in Genesis 3:

17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”

We call this the fall, but for some reason we don’t envision falling as the essence of life, as the thing we have to constantly fight against day in and day out, day out and day in. For some odd, irrational reason, we tend to think things should go smoothly, that the rough patches in life should be few and far between, or at least not be so darn often! When things go off the rails, and not at all like we think we want them to go we conclude . . . something is wrong! Well, no, nothing is wrong; that’s life lived in a fallen world in a fallen body lived among fallen people. I once heard a phrase from a pastor not too many years ago that captured so well this thing we battle against every day: The gravitational pull of sin. Oh, how it weighs us down, and in so many ways. Unfortunately, the way we fight against it is to complain and moan, or react in any number of negative ways. I’ll share a secret. It’s not the negative experiences or situations or people that is the suck; it is us!

Yes, brothers and sisters, you and me. That is what we must embrace, that we are the problem, not our situations or others. It is that we are incurvatus in se, utterly curved in on ourselves, which determines our negative reactions to situations and others, and why we are problem. We have to get to the point where we embrace the simple fact that it is we who suck, that we are helpless sinners if left to ourselves. It is only when we get to the point of accepting and embracing the spiritual reality of our utter suckiness (pushing this suck thing too far, but hang with me), that we realize our utter unworthiness before the unapproachable holiness of God. Then we can relate to the tax collector in Jesus’ parable:

13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

It is when our heads are bowed down in a certain kind of shame of our unworthiness before God that sanctification can really take hold in our souls. At that point we finally have nothing to prove, nothing to defend, no excuses to make, and that the only thing we bring to the God in Christ on the cross is our sin. Grasping the true spiritual reality of who we are by (sinful) nature makes this passage in John 3 so powerful:

14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”

I would implore you to read the passage in Numbers 21 that explains what happened. If someone doesn’t understand something of redemptive history, this will appear absolutely absurd. God punished his people for being ingrates by sending venomous snakes among them to kill them? Seriously? What kind of God is this! Well, he’s a just God, and he’s told them, and us, from the very beginning that the wages of sin is death. Where’s the good news in all this? Jesus!

The reason the gospel is such good news, which is what the word means, is that when we are bitten by the snake, all we need to do is to look up to him and trust him, and we will live. What do we do, though? We look down at the bite! It hurts, we think, what else are we supposed to do? Look up! The pain and hurt and sorrow are what should cause us to look up to him, to trust him that he has the answer for all of it. That’s what believe means, in Greek, pisteuó-πιστεύω, trust. The reason embracing the suck is so important is so that we don’t look to ourselves, or to our circumstances to save us, to provide the answers to our problems. We are the cause of those problems! All of them. As we learn to trust him, everything falls into place, everything works, and we experience a peace that passes all understanding. Notice what Paul says allows us to have that peace. There is an entire blog post in those verses, but giving thanks is part of it, and as he says elsewhere, in all circumstances. When our knee-jerk reaction when things go south is to give thanks instead of complain, we’ll know real sanctification is happening in our souls.

Why I Love Hymns, And You Should, Too!

Why I Love Hymns, And You Should, Too!

Mar 2, 2022 | Theology

I’m one of a rare breed, those who love hymns, and will only go to a church where hymns are sung. When we were younger and moved to a new state (which has happened four times), we would go church hunting. A couple times with my wife and kids in tow we walked into a church, saw the setup for a band, and promptly turned around and walked out. Radical, I know. I’ve attended plenty of churches with modern praise music, and most of the time I find it, well, not sure of the word, annoying maybe. Grating? Painful? It sort of depends on the quality of the music and lyrics.

I have a friend who calls all of it, “Jesus is my boyfriend” music (none of it is that bad, but you get the point). Some is clearly better than others (Getty for example). I remember going to the church where one of our sons attends last year, and I turned to my wife and said, “There sure are a lot of I’s in these songs.” What I meant is that so many of the lyrics had “I” in them, as in, I will do this, and I will do that, I this, I that. Which Identifies my issue with so much modern “praise music.” The focus is often more on me than God, on what I must and should do for God, rather than on what God has done for me in Christ. In other words, it is more experiential than theological.

Why I love hymns so much is because they are theology in song. We sang four hymns in church during a recent service, and each one was more theologically rich than the next. Here are the first two verses from the first one we sang by the great 18th century pastor and hymn writer, and one time slave trader, John Newton, Glorious things of thee are spoken:

Glorious things of thee are spoken,
Holy city of our God;
He whose word cannot be broken
Formed thee for His own abode;
On the Rock of Ages founded,
What can shake thy sure repose?
With salvation’s walls surrounded,
Thou may’st smile at all thy foes.

See the streams of living waters,
Springing from eternal love,
Well supply thy blessed members,
And all fear of want remove;
Who can faint, when such a river
Ever flows their thirst t’ assuage?
Grace which, like the Lord, the giver,
Never fails from age to age.

I compare this to most modern praise music, and there is no comparison. I would joke with my family sometimes that if a hymn was written after 1850 it was too new for me. This is not to say all modern praise or hymn music is the same, not at all. I am not familiar enough with it outside of my anecdotal experience, so I can’t discount all of it. If it appeals to more people who will come into a church, and stay, because of it, I certainly don’t gainsay that. However, we need to ask what the point is of singing in church.

I think all Christians can agree the purpose of music in church is the worship of God. How come, then, so much of it is about us? It so happens last Sunday I went to church with my other son, not to our normal hymn singing church. The very first song they sang as we sat down was, “I surrender . . . .” Which of course was repeated over and over again. Now, I’m all for surrendering my life to my Savior, but I thought, it isn’t about me! I want to sing about who he is and what he’s done for me, not what I am willing to do for him. Notice that next time you’re in church if the church you attend doesn’t sing hymns. Are the songs they’re singing primarily about them and what they are willing to do for God, or what he has done for them in Christ? Big, huge, gargantuan difference. Too many Christians are under the impression that God responds to me, that the initiative in the relationship is mine, and is dependent on my will. Wrong. Christianity is about God taking the initiative, about my responding to him, about him transforming my affections so my will is his. I want to sing songs in church that affirm that, theology in music.