September 3 2024
Hi Friends,
Why is learning to love — to truly love — so darn hard? Have you found this to be true? You intend on being a loving person but you run up against people or things that seem to suck the life out of you. Next thing you know, you are responding in a less-than-loving way. You feel guilty, ashamed, even despairing (“Will I ever become better at this?”). Then — and this is the worst part of it all — you decide that it is impossible to really become like Jesus and to learn to love the way he did. After all, he was God and I am just flesh and bone.
Of course, the theological answer to the last objection is the incarnation. Jesus was fully human — and fully God. He was not a human on steroids who could overcome what other mere mortals could not. Hebrews says, “he was tempted in every way as we are, yet was without sin.” He faced the same temptation to quit that we do (if you don’t believe me, check out Luke’s account of his last night in the garden of Gethsemane). Nope, we don’t get a pass because Jesus was more godlike than human. He was, and is, just like us.
The real problem in this whole deal is our self-centred (rather than God-centred) nature. When we run up against problems too big for us, we simple decide that “we” will never be able to overcome them. The whole focus is on ourselves. Ironically, in coming to this conclusion, we actually see ourselves accurately — that is, we are not able to do this on our own, or in our own strength or mental acuity.
If you are going to be more loving, you must learn to live from the always-filled reservoir of God’s unchanging love for you and the world. You must think about him and his love. You must dwell on the implications of that love. The goal should not be to simply produce loving acts. Anybody can do that upon occasion, at least. The goal is to live as one who is truly loved, to understand how long, and deep and wide and high is the love God extends to us daily (to paraphrase Paul in Ephesians 3). We we live as people who are loved, we will also live out of that love. We will trust God, who loves us, to not only show us the loving thing to do but also to empower us to do it when it is hard and not “natural.”
So, stop focusing on yourself as a “tool” of love and start focusing on yourself as the object of a great love. Ask the Spirit to show you just how much you are loved (and forgiven, by the way). Ask him to help you to live in the love God has for you every day.
Love is a lot like generosity. When you are convinced that you have enough, you are much more willing to share with others. When you think you have to protect what you have, you will see others as a threat. I’ll close with a word from the apostle, John: “See what great love the Father has lavished on us …!”
Blessings!
Doug