©2004 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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06/20/04 |
Loving God |
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6/20/04 Loving God
I told you at the end of our time last week
that this week we would either finish our series on my life’s greatest surprises
or use the day for some Father’s Day things.
Well, we’re not going to do either
because I received some excellent questions this past week
about the things we were looking at last Sunday,
questions that made me think it would be helpful
if we took one more day to work through them together.
If you were with us last week
you will remember that I spent the morning
sharing with you my own mental pilgrimage
in discovering what I have come to recognize as my true calling in life.
The words of our Lord Himself stated it best.
MAT 22:37-39 And He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
As with nearly all truths we learn from our God,
the hardest part for me was the slow process
of getting rid of all the lies and incorrect assumptions
that prevented me from seeing the truth.
Our basic religious nature within us
clings to the assumption
that there is something we can DO
that will make us acceptable to our God,
or improve our standing with Him.
And shifting our point of focus
from performance
to relationship is no quick or easy process for us.
Clearly, when Christ made those comments about the greatest commandments,
He was offering us a basis for evaluating our lives
that was unlike anything any of us would have come up with ourselves.
He was wrenching our eyes off of our performance
and turning them onto the two central relationship issues of life -
our relationship with God,
and our relationship with our fellow man.
And then he told us
that the great measure of life
is found in the degree to which we come to understand
what it really means for us to love God and to love those He has placed into our care.
I never cease to be amazed
at the way in which the human mind
finds creative ways around the obvious.
Being performance-based creatures by nature,
our strong tendency is to hear our Lord telling us
that our greatest calling is to love our God,
and then take that statement
and say to ourselves,
“OK, what does it mean for me to love God?
Well, lets see...it means that I DO the following things.”
And then, just like the needle of a compass
that swivels back to north as soon as we take our finger off it,
we, too, revert right back to our list of religious duties
and our fear or guilt-driven efforts to “prove” our love through our performance.
The problem here
is that we tend to come at this whole thing backwards.
It is certainly true
that there is nothing else in all of human experience
that will impact our performance more
than a growing love relationship with our God.
But although our growing discovery of living in a love relationship with God will dramatically change our performance,
changing our performance can never lead us into the discovery
of what it means to live in a love relationship with God.
And this past week I was asked a question
that really does flow logically from what we were looking at last week.
I was asked how we go about loving God.
If it isn’t simply a matter of following a prescribed set of religious duties,
then what is it?
We’ve spent a considerable amount of time throughout this series
talking about what it means for God to love us.
We’ve talked about the way in which He expresses that love
by taking us right where we are,
just as we are,
and offering us forgiveness through Christ’s death in our place for our sins,
and offering us a new life,
a life built upon His placing His Spirit within us
and living His life out through us each day.
He never leaves us,
He never forsakes us,
and His Spirit is constantly seeking to pour out within our hearts
the growing knowledge of His love for us. (Rom. 5:5)
But how do we love Him,
and how do we go about responding to that love?
The more I thought about this question during the past few days,
the more convinced I have become
that there are really two distinctly different questions involved in this whole thing.
One of them involves our soul response to God,
and the other involves how we express that soul response.
And if that sounds confusing,
just stay with me for the next few minutes
and I’ll see if I can better express what I’m trying to say.
You see, as I’ve thought about this,
I’ve come to realize that,
if someone asks me the question, “How can I love God?”,
before I can answer that question
I first need to know what they mean by it.
Sometimes the person asking the question is wanting to know
how he or she can actually know a real love response to God at the feeling level,
how they can fall in love with Him,
how they can delight in Him and draw life from the awareness of His presence.
Several weeks ago Teresa Danielson was sharing with us
a huge transformation that has taken place in her life recently.
She reminded us that a year ago,
following one of my messages on the nature of God’s love for us,
she got up to the microphone and said, “OK, so God loves us, so what?”
And now she cringes as she looks back at that statement
and finds herself saying, “So God loves us, so what else is there?”
I may be reading my own interpretation into her words,
but I believe what brought about that transformation
was her entering into a deep soul response to God,
a response at the feeling level of her being,
a response in which, in our human terms, she fell in love with her Creator.
Do you recall the way in which that response given by Jesus was worded?
When asked what was the greatest commandment, quoting from Deuteronomy 6:5,
He said, ...
and 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.'
I believe those first two especially - all your heart and all your soul,
are dealing with this first question.
How can I truly delight in my God?
How can I respond to Him at the soul level of my being?
How can I feel love for Him?
How can I find my spirit filled with praise and overflowing with gratitude to Him?
If that is the question being asked,
the answer I have for you will very likely not satisfy you.
And before I give my unsatisfying answer
let me first say
that the question itself is not only a good one,
it is an essential one for the child of God.
Clearly, the existence of a deep heart and soul response to God
is intended to be a part of every human being’s response to God.
Our union with our God should impact us deeply at the feeling level of our being.
Of course I’m not suggesting
that we should attempt to live our lives on the basis of our feelings,
but I am saying
that the kind of love union with God that He wants us to know
is a union that involves our total being,
including a deep feeling-level soul response to Him.
When Peter stood at the foot of the cross,
watching Jesus die,
do you think his overwhelming grief was caused simply by the intellectual loss
of the most effective teacher he’d ever known?
When, following the resurrection,
after fishing all night and catching nothing,
Peter heard his Lord call to him from the shore
and he responded by flinging himself over the side of the boat
and thrashing his way to the beach
do you think he was simply displaying a logical response to the situation,
knowing that the boat would take at least five minutes longer to reach the shore
and the sensible thing to do
was to fling himself into the water?
When Paul dropped to his knees
half way through his letter to the Ephesians
and cried
out to God, “...that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that
you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the
saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the
love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the
fulness of God... (Eph. 3:17-19)
do you think that he was simply praying
that we would have a clear intellectual grasp
of the true nature of the God/man relationship?
With Peter,
and with Paul,
and with every other example offered to us throughout Scripture,
The love union being offered to us by God
is one that goes far beyond just the intellect,
one that both can and should affect every aspect of our being,
our
heart, our soul, our mind, and our strength.
We understand this even within the context of our human love relationships.
Sandee and I have been married nearly 28 years now.
During the past 28 years
both of us have made countless conscious choices in our relationship with one another,
choices in which we have chosen faithfulness,
and respect,
and honor for one another,
choices in which we have chosen to keep one another
as the highest priority in our lives.
Those choices are vital to the health of our love relationship with one another.
But they alone do not capture what exists between us.
This past week I had to make a quick run into town
and on the way back I heard a song on a CD
that perfectly expressed my soul response to Sandee.
I pulled into the garage,
turned off the engine,
and then sat there in the car with tears streaming down my face,
so grateful that I’d been given one more day to share with my wife.
That’s the heart and soul aspect of love.
It is not all there is to love by any means,
but it is an essential ingredient of the whole.
And it is an essential ingredient of our love union with our God,
and anything less will simply not fulfill the deepest needs within us.
And now, let me offer you my unsatisfying answer
about how this aspect of our love union with God enters our lives.
It enters our lives
as the natural response of the human spirit
when we see the true nature of the love of God for us at the personal level.
1JO 4:19 We love him, because he first loved us.
It is the natural response of the human spirit
when honestly confronted with the true nature of the love of God for us.
Which means that,
if our spirits do not respond to God in this way,
then the “God” we are responding to
is not the God who really exists.
And that, of course,
is why we spent several weeks looking at those four major forces
that have the ability to blind us to the true nature of the love of God for us -
our strong natural human resistence against seeing ourselves honestly apart from the redemptive work of God,
the father concept we brought with us out of our childhood,
the force of the religious system we bring with us into our walk with God,
and a determination to continue to hold onto a performance-based understanding of God’s response to us.
Any of those have the ability
to blind us to the true nature of God’s love for us.
And that isn’t a complete list, by any means.
But it is complete enough
to make my point
which is, simply, that if our spirits have never been freed to respond in a true soul love to our God
it is very likely because the God we are trying to respond to
is not the God who really exists.
So if, when we ask the question, “How do I love God?”
what we are asking is “How can I really know a true heart and soul love response to Him,
my suggestion would be to begin with the following prayer.
“Lord, I want to love You.
I want to delight in You.
Please free me from those lies in my life
that are blinding me to who You really are
and free my spirit to see and respond to Your love for me.”
But there is a second possible meaning to that question, “How do I love God?”
We can also ask that question
when we’re honestly wondering
how we go about growing daily in a love relationship with Him.
In a practical sense,
what choices can we make
that help our love relationship with our God to grow?
And this question is much easier to answer.
Simply stated,
our love relationship with our God grows
through our conscious choices in two major areas.
The first is in our choices of trust in Him.
This is what Jesus was talking about
with those last two items
in His description of how we are to love.
... and 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.
With all your mind,
and with all your strength...
The mind is referring to our logical reasoning processes -
the way we think through the daily issues of life.
And the strength is referring to our strength of will,
our decision-making ability.
Simply stated,
He is talking about our ability to reason through the events taking place in our lives at any given moment,
to evaluate those events on the basis of what He has said to us in His Word,
and then to make conscious choices of trust in Him.
Every time we choose to trust what our God is saying to us
it is an active choice of our love for Him.
And before I go any farther here
I want to make a crucial destinction.
What God seeks from us is not obedience,
it is trust.
And there is a world of difference between the two.
People can obey what God says for all sorts of reasons,
most of which do not deepen
and may even hinder the growth of a true love relationship between us and Him.
The most common human motivation for obedience is probably fear of judgment
or fear of consequences.
Fear can drive people to extreme actions of obedience,
but they are not choices that deepen our love bond with our God.
In fact, they can and often do generate a growing resentment against Him
because we feel as though our God is forcing us to do something
or to not do something
that will result in our missing out on some good thing in life
or our being forced to go through life with some need unmet.
The key statement in Scripture contrasting love and fear is 1 John 4:18.
There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.
What a remarkable statement!
There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear.
Fear may drive us to obey,
but it can never bring about a love response within us toward our God.
Fear of getting a ticket may cause us to drive the speed limit,
but it will never fill us with a love for the policeman.
But choices of obedience
that come not out of our fear of punishment
but rather out of our willingness to trust our God’s love for us
affect us completely differently.
It deepens our relationship with Him
and allows us to go through the situation with Him
rather than trying to do it for Him.
Another common substitute to trust is religious duty.
It may create the external appearance of a highly productive life,
but it, too, is powerless to produce a true love relationship with God.
On the contrary,
it will usually produce an inner spirit of resentment against God.
You remember the elder brother in the parable of the prodigal son, don’t you.
LUK 15:29
"But he answered and said to his father, 'Look! For so many years I
have been serving you and I have never neglected a command of yours; and yet
you have never given me a young goat, so that I might celebrate with my
friends;
Welcome to the end result of a life driven by religious duty.
There is no spirit overflowing with gratitude to the Love our life.
In the end it nearly always produces
a deep resentment against a God whom we believe demanded the best we had to give,
robed us of the things that would have made our lives truly fulfilling,
and failed to come through for us
at the times when we needed Him most.
But choices of trust are all different.
Choices of trust
are the way we love the Lord our God with all our mind and all our strength.
They are choices we make
that grow out of our conscious choices to believe
that our God is truly good
and that it is His intention to be good to us in everything He has said to us.
Simply put,
we love God through choosing to trust Him,
and each choice we make on that basis
deepens our love relationship with Him.
At the most basic level
that trust will bring about our obedience to His moral commandments.
If you love Me, you will keep My commandments. (John
14:15)
But it goes far beyond that.
It extends to our choosing to trust His wisdom
in the circumstances He has selected for our lives,
and in our being willing to trust His promise
that He really is living within us
and that He has already made us adequate as servants of His Spirit. (2 Cor. 3:6)
He can and He will live His life out through us,
whether we are consciously aware of Him doing so or not.
We love God by choosing to trust Him,
especially at those times
when every other voice around us
is telling us that He isn’t there,
or doesn’t care,
or doesn’t really understand what’s going on inside us.
And then, 2nd, we love God by loving one another.
John says it perfectly in his first letter.
1JO 4:20 If someone says, "I love God," and
hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom
he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.
1JO 4:21 And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also.
All true love for God
will express itself
through our reaching out in love to those around us.
In fact, this is the clearest,
most easily visible test we will ever have
for the difference between religion and true life with Christ.
Religion builds walls between people,
walls built upon self-righteous pride
and a spirit of condemnation and judgement of others.
The true life of Christ within us
is forever seeking to build bridges,
and bring healing,
and reach out to those around us in kindness,
and compassion,
and encouragemnt.
JOH 21:15-17 ... do you love Me? ...Tend My lambs...
do you love?
...Shepherd My sheep...
do you
love Me? ...Tend My sheep.
So, how do we love God?
By seeing Him the way He really is,
and by choosing to trust Him,
to trust what He says,
and to trust His life within us
one day, one issue, one step at a time,
and then by loving those
that He has carefully selected for us
and placed within our care.