More Than I Can Manage Category: Misc Thoughts Views: 193
God wants my love…no, actually the word “want” is misleading – God demands my love, he commands that I give it. And, of course, this is no ordinary command; God does not allow this one to be engulfed by the sheer weight of numbers. It is foremost, it is number one, the greatest command, the law that precedes all others, it is to the Christian the foundation upon which the quest for holiness is built. “Love God.” We encounter those words so often in Christendom; we hear them from our pulpits, read them in our literature, sing them in our songs…and why shouldn’t we? Christ Himself made it abundantly clear how vital this is.* But for most of us they bounce off our heart like a drop of water on an over-soaked sponge. “Love God” is too big, too lofty an aspiration for most of us to even seriously consider most of the time. And when we do stop and allow it to sink in, when we give the concept even a portion of the attention it deserves, we collide head on with a wall of issues that are hard to ignore, pieces of the puzzle that won’t fit the hole, and real obstacles that hit all believers like a blow to the face.
The very fact that love should be commanded is problematic, for love as most of us understand it is fundamentally un-commandable. No man has ever loved another solely because they were told they must, in fact very few would even bother issuing such an order. We would speak to the neglectful parent of responsibility; to the bigot of tolerance and acceptance, and to the spouse with a wandering heart of faithfulness. In our counsel we might even suggest that love could well be found or reclaimed by obedience to these other tenets, but to cut to the chase and command love would seem foolish to most of us. Yet God demands not our obedience, faithfulness, or devotion alone, but our love. If God had made the second most commandment number one (to love our neighbour as ourselves) and had primarily required a love for the old woman sitting, cold and pitiful, on any given park bench, that would be easier. If he commanded that we love Desmond Tutu, Hilary Clinton or Britney Spears, then at least we might have a shot…but, no, we are to love Him who we cannot see, we cannot touch and all too often cannot hear. And God’s audacity doesn’t stop there. We are to love him more than the children in our arms, more than the family that sustains us, more than the friend with whom we would trust our lives, more than the spouses in our beds. It seems God will not play second fiddle.
And then, to top it all off, God demands that we love him with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength – something that we have never achieved even with those before our senses. Both within the church and outside her gates parents mistreat their children, families fall under the weight of bitterness, friendships crumble, marriages are dissolved for lack of interest. Yet the love we are supposed to have for God is to be more tangible, more real than the attempts at love we offer to others.
And yet, in spite of these obstacles there is hope, a faint candlelight in the dark caverns of our hearts. All Christians recognize it, but I know of none who have adequately defined it except to call it “Grace”. We can love God “because He first loved us”.** The Holy Spirit of God, given as a seal to all believers (even me, even you) loves through us. The earthbound state of the human heart absolutely prohibits it, yet God overcomes, and we slowly learn to love our Father even if we happen not to feel it. Our love for Him grows when we obey. Our love for Him grows when we fight the battle though we are wounded and there is no hope of victory in sight. Our love for Him grows when we make the choice to shift our focus from the world to the One who made it. Our love for Him grows when we feel alone and forsaken yet remain where God has placed us, even though it be a cross. The feeling of love is the reward, sometimes granted, often withheld, of acting out our love; it is not love itself, at least not of the sort God requires. What the Father commands is far deeper, far more solid than emotion. (Luv is a verb…where have I heard that before?)
God also grants his children something unexpected, something that has the flavour of emotion but a different substance. It is in that fleeting, wondrous moment when the worship service ceases to be emotion-charged fluff and our heart briefly senses the Glorious Unknowable. It is in those rare snatches of time when we recognize both our depravity and our worth simultaneously. We can smell it in the pages in the pages of Lewis, Lucado, Yancey and Buechner. Scripture reeks of it. We hear it’s whisper interwoven in the chords and melodies of the music we love. We start to feel it when making love transcends the physical and enters the spiritual. We catch a glimpse of it’s shadow in the beauty and terror of nature. It is God’s echo. It is the unmistakable fingerprint of I Am. It is His voice interwoven in the world He has made. And He who commands love does so because He is love, and no other offering has any meaning.
* (Matthew 22: 36, 37)
** (1 John 4: 19)
P.S. I scrawled this blog on piece of scrap paper last night during some quiet moments at work. Just thoughts spinning around my brain. If you’ve read this it will be clear that I am no theologian, merely a fellow pilgrim who is just beginning to grapple with the greatest commandment. Any thoughts, wisdom or criticism would be truly appreciated.
September 02, 2008, 16:13PM
Great blog! I'm featuring it this week in our newsletter. Here's 10 points for the well thought out post and I hope it encourages many.
August 31, 2008, 19:25PM
I agree with you, it is harder to unstand/comprehend God's love when we cant see him. This was a good blog...it made me think, pretty deep stuff you wrote about.
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