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.
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