"We love because He first loved us."
1 John 4:19
Last week our church started a sermon series called #forfamily. We've had fun with the title of the series, because many in the church have not kept up with social media. As a result, some had never seen a hash tag used in the context of a title. Some of us have seen it, but still weren't exactly clear on how to use it correctly. Our pastor has done a great job explaining the use of the hash tag and many of us are now dangerously armed with just enough information to cause our children to cringe when we use it incorrectly. In spite of the trendy title, the first two sermons in the series were meaty and have given me a lot to chew on in regard to relationships, especially those within the family. The pastor has given me permission to blog about his sermon. So, some of the thoughts I will share originated with him, but kind of exploded in my mind. I encourage you to take a listen to his sermons at this link: http://www.riverlakeschurch.org/index.php/watch-and-listen/sermons That way you can identify more clearly my rambling and his well thought out sermons.
Those of us who have been in Christian circles for awhile have heard that we are created by God in His image. I have to confess that when I don't take time to really process biblical truth I don't always grasp the ramifications of some of the great truths found in God's word. One of those truths is that we are created in God's image.
To more fully understand what it means to be created in His image, I must understand some things about God. First and foremost is the fact that He is a triune God. That means He is one God who exists in three persons. Now, I accept it as truth. I totally am fascinated by the concept, but it is really beyond my comprehension to fully explain it. In a nut shell, it means that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one, yet three persons. They are one in essence which means all three have always existed and have always been in a perfect relationship. I conclude that God is a relational God and to be created in His image must mean we were created to be relational beings. That means first that we were created to have a relationship with God. Second, it means that we were created to be in relationships with other humans.
If the trinity was already in a complete, perfect relationship then we can know some things for certain about our God. He didn't create man because He was lonely, He had a completely satisfying relationship within the trinity. We know He didn't create man to meet His needs, because He is completely self-sufficient and self-sustaining. He didn't need us to survive. We can also know that He didn't create man because He needed someone to love Him, because He by His very nature love, so there was an infinite amount of love flowing between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. He didn't need my measly efforts at loving to feel loved.
He simply created us because He is a creative God and because it is in His very nature to love. He created us and then He invited us into an already existing perfect relationship--the pre-existing relationship of the trinity.
Further more, Jesus life, as portrayed in the gospels, gives us a picture of what God intended love to look like. First, it looks like initiation--John 3:16 makes it clear that it was because God loved that He sent His Son. He didn't just sit up in heaven and wait on others to love Him first. He sent His Son to demonstrate His love when we were still trapped in our sin and often unlovable--His love remained ever loving, ever inviting.
Second, through His teaching, we see that the love of God looked like self-disclosure. As Jesus walked, talked, taught privately, taught publically, and lived out His true self in front of His disciples, man was give a clear picture of the love that the with in the trinity.
Third, His love looked like service. He saw the physical needs and fed the multitudes. He saw when His disciples needed rest and He incorporated that into their busy schedule. He saw the sick and He healed them. He saw those bound by demons and He set them free. He, who was worshipped and anointed, sat down and washed His disciples feet the last night, knowing the last thing they would see of Him was that He served.
Fourth, His love was self-sacrificing. He left His heavenly home and He came to earth to rub shoulders with those He created. He gave of His time. He gave of His energy. He gave of His heart. He gave of His emotions through His expressions of anger, grief, and the passion with which He preached. He sacrificed His own life to make a way for us to return to the perfect relationship with the trinity--that relationship for which we were created.
Maybe to be created in His image means that we are to be lovers. I don't know about you, but when I look back on my life, I spent a lot of time trying to get love instead of loving. One of my earliest memories was being in a social setting with my family and a bunch of other families. I remember grabbing a microphone that was sitting there and belting out some song. Now, I am not much of a singer, but it was a way of seeking attention and love. Later on, I developed a strong tendency towards perfectionism thinking if I could just be good enough God would love me, my parents would adore me, my teachers would dote on me, and all of the kids at school would want to be my friend. Then I eventually got married thinking that the deep hunger in my heart would finally be satisfied,. but it didn't happen that way.
What did happen was that two very needy young adults got married, each of us thinking that the other would love us in a way that would fulfill a deep craving for love that we each had. We pushed and we pulled and we each tried to extract that love from the other by demanding it and manipulating each other for it. The more we tried to get the love, the emptier we both felt until we landed in a Christian counselor's office. Over time I began to really grasp that I had needs, my husband had needs, and our marriage had needs. Then I wrote a curriculum for our co-dependency support group and by the end of the curriculum I had come to a conclusion about marriage and why marriages so often fail. Maybe it is because two broken, needy people come together and begin to look to each other, to fix them, to heal past pain, to meet the deep love needs that were written on our hearts by God Himself. But in our case we were both so needy, neither one of us could fulfill what the other needed.
Then one tough week my husband went out of town. We had a water sky trip with our youth group. Then that night while we were at a pot luck at church one of the girls came up and tearfully told me her brother and his wife had just found out their baby had died in the womb and would be still born that night. Her brother was one of my son's best friends. So, when my son got to the dinner, I told him and he headed up to their house on his motorcycle. I had no sooner gotten home from the dinner when the phone rang. The girl told me that her brother and his wife had headed to the hospital and that I needed to meet her and my son at the emergency room because our son had had an accident on his motorcycle. No bones were broken, but he was so badly scraped up that they wanted to bandage him and watch him for awhile. He asked me to go check on his friends. His friend's parents had gone to get her mom so they asked me to stay with them. I did stay with them until the baby was born. We wept, then I went down stairs to take our son home and had to take him back to the hospital for bandage changes over the next few days. We also got a call that my step dad had died. I couldn't go, because I was tending to my son. Then Sunday evening came, and I left to help at a Christian camp. I remember sitting in chapel the first night and telling God I had absolutely nothing left to give. As I was praying, I was filled with an overwhelming feeling of being loved and found in that love the strength to grieve and to continue to minister to others. It ended up being one of the best weeks.
As I look back I realize there was a time in which I felt the most loved and close to my husband. Ironically it didn't have anything to do with him. It was during the time that our youth had a small group of prayer warriors that we would take up to the mountains to pray. We would pray for about three hours solo and then come back together and share what we were learning and pray as a group. During that time I not only felt close to God, but I had a deep desire to love my husband and he was more loving toward me as well. We experienced a peace in our relationship and at that time our needs were filled by God and we were able to turn our expectations and demands into desires. Through counseling we also learned to communicate what we desired, without demanding it, letting the other off the hook for our happiness. It sounds easy, but it wasn't. It took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to get there. To be perfectly honest, we are both still working on letting God be the one who fills our hearts with love so that we can love each other well.
Our pastor loves to teach about marriage and his way of putting it is that marriage is about sanctification and personal responsibility. I used to get angry when I heard him say that, but I have come to believe it whole heartedly. Because marriage is an intimate relationship it exposes our selfishness, self-centeredness, sinfulness, and brokenness and to be honest I kind of wanted to blame all of that on my spouse. But I also think that marriage exposed something more that I found terrifying at first. It exposed a deep craving for love that never felt filled. I realize it had always been there. As a child I looked to my parents for that love and then my friends and then eventually transferred that need and expectation to my mate. The exposure of that need was painful, because I feared it would never be filled. And it wouldn't be if I kept trying to extract that love from my spouse. It was a craving written on my heart by God, but it was also a craving only God could fill.
I wonder, how different our marriages, our families, out church families, and our communities would be if we empty, broken people quit trying to excise love we so desperately and legitimately need from other empty, broken people and begin to really believe and to live as ones who are already loved. Maybe we could really grasp the truth of the verse that says we to because He first loved us. In this crazy culture we will have to make time to sit before Him and let His love fill us. We will have to assume our personal responsibility to love--to initiate, to disclose, to serve and to sacrifice. So, I confess, that I am a needy person struggling to fully learn to live loved, and I am loving it!
To more fully understand what it means to be created in His image, I must understand some things about God. First and foremost is the fact that He is a triune God. That means He is one God who exists in three persons. Now, I accept it as truth. I totally am fascinated by the concept, but it is really beyond my comprehension to fully explain it. In a nut shell, it means that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one, yet three persons. They are one in essence which means all three have always existed and have always been in a perfect relationship. I conclude that God is a relational God and to be created in His image must mean we were created to be relational beings. That means first that we were created to have a relationship with God. Second, it means that we were created to be in relationships with other humans.
If the trinity was already in a complete, perfect relationship then we can know some things for certain about our God. He didn't create man because He was lonely, He had a completely satisfying relationship within the trinity. We know He didn't create man to meet His needs, because He is completely self-sufficient and self-sustaining. He didn't need us to survive. We can also know that He didn't create man because He needed someone to love Him, because He by His very nature love, so there was an infinite amount of love flowing between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. He didn't need my measly efforts at loving to feel loved.
He simply created us because He is a creative God and because it is in His very nature to love. He created us and then He invited us into an already existing perfect relationship--the pre-existing relationship of the trinity.
Further more, Jesus life, as portrayed in the gospels, gives us a picture of what God intended love to look like. First, it looks like initiation--John 3:16 makes it clear that it was because God loved that He sent His Son. He didn't just sit up in heaven and wait on others to love Him first. He sent His Son to demonstrate His love when we were still trapped in our sin and often unlovable--His love remained ever loving, ever inviting.
Second, through His teaching, we see that the love of God looked like self-disclosure. As Jesus walked, talked, taught privately, taught publically, and lived out His true self in front of His disciples, man was give a clear picture of the love that the with in the trinity.
Third, His love looked like service. He saw the physical needs and fed the multitudes. He saw when His disciples needed rest and He incorporated that into their busy schedule. He saw the sick and He healed them. He saw those bound by demons and He set them free. He, who was worshipped and anointed, sat down and washed His disciples feet the last night, knowing the last thing they would see of Him was that He served.
Fourth, His love was self-sacrificing. He left His heavenly home and He came to earth to rub shoulders with those He created. He gave of His time. He gave of His energy. He gave of His heart. He gave of His emotions through His expressions of anger, grief, and the passion with which He preached. He sacrificed His own life to make a way for us to return to the perfect relationship with the trinity--that relationship for which we were created.
Maybe to be created in His image means that we are to be lovers. I don't know about you, but when I look back on my life, I spent a lot of time trying to get love instead of loving. One of my earliest memories was being in a social setting with my family and a bunch of other families. I remember grabbing a microphone that was sitting there and belting out some song. Now, I am not much of a singer, but it was a way of seeking attention and love. Later on, I developed a strong tendency towards perfectionism thinking if I could just be good enough God would love me, my parents would adore me, my teachers would dote on me, and all of the kids at school would want to be my friend. Then I eventually got married thinking that the deep hunger in my heart would finally be satisfied,. but it didn't happen that way.
What did happen was that two very needy young adults got married, each of us thinking that the other would love us in a way that would fulfill a deep craving for love that we each had. We pushed and we pulled and we each tried to extract that love from the other by demanding it and manipulating each other for it. The more we tried to get the love, the emptier we both felt until we landed in a Christian counselor's office. Over time I began to really grasp that I had needs, my husband had needs, and our marriage had needs. Then I wrote a curriculum for our co-dependency support group and by the end of the curriculum I had come to a conclusion about marriage and why marriages so often fail. Maybe it is because two broken, needy people come together and begin to look to each other, to fix them, to heal past pain, to meet the deep love needs that were written on our hearts by God Himself. But in our case we were both so needy, neither one of us could fulfill what the other needed.
Then one tough week my husband went out of town. We had a water sky trip with our youth group. Then that night while we were at a pot luck at church one of the girls came up and tearfully told me her brother and his wife had just found out their baby had died in the womb and would be still born that night. Her brother was one of my son's best friends. So, when my son got to the dinner, I told him and he headed up to their house on his motorcycle. I had no sooner gotten home from the dinner when the phone rang. The girl told me that her brother and his wife had headed to the hospital and that I needed to meet her and my son at the emergency room because our son had had an accident on his motorcycle. No bones were broken, but he was so badly scraped up that they wanted to bandage him and watch him for awhile. He asked me to go check on his friends. His friend's parents had gone to get her mom so they asked me to stay with them. I did stay with them until the baby was born. We wept, then I went down stairs to take our son home and had to take him back to the hospital for bandage changes over the next few days. We also got a call that my step dad had died. I couldn't go, because I was tending to my son. Then Sunday evening came, and I left to help at a Christian camp. I remember sitting in chapel the first night and telling God I had absolutely nothing left to give. As I was praying, I was filled with an overwhelming feeling of being loved and found in that love the strength to grieve and to continue to minister to others. It ended up being one of the best weeks.
As I look back I realize there was a time in which I felt the most loved and close to my husband. Ironically it didn't have anything to do with him. It was during the time that our youth had a small group of prayer warriors that we would take up to the mountains to pray. We would pray for about three hours solo and then come back together and share what we were learning and pray as a group. During that time I not only felt close to God, but I had a deep desire to love my husband and he was more loving toward me as well. We experienced a peace in our relationship and at that time our needs were filled by God and we were able to turn our expectations and demands into desires. Through counseling we also learned to communicate what we desired, without demanding it, letting the other off the hook for our happiness. It sounds easy, but it wasn't. It took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to get there. To be perfectly honest, we are both still working on letting God be the one who fills our hearts with love so that we can love each other well.
Our pastor loves to teach about marriage and his way of putting it is that marriage is about sanctification and personal responsibility. I used to get angry when I heard him say that, but I have come to believe it whole heartedly. Because marriage is an intimate relationship it exposes our selfishness, self-centeredness, sinfulness, and brokenness and to be honest I kind of wanted to blame all of that on my spouse. But I also think that marriage exposed something more that I found terrifying at first. It exposed a deep craving for love that never felt filled. I realize it had always been there. As a child I looked to my parents for that love and then my friends and then eventually transferred that need and expectation to my mate. The exposure of that need was painful, because I feared it would never be filled. And it wouldn't be if I kept trying to extract that love from my spouse. It was a craving written on my heart by God, but it was also a craving only God could fill.
I wonder, how different our marriages, our families, out church families, and our communities would be if we empty, broken people quit trying to excise love we so desperately and legitimately need from other empty, broken people and begin to really believe and to live as ones who are already loved. Maybe we could really grasp the truth of the verse that says we to because He first loved us. In this crazy culture we will have to make time to sit before Him and let His love fill us. We will have to assume our personal responsibility to love--to initiate, to disclose, to serve and to sacrifice. So, I confess, that I am a needy person struggling to fully learn to live loved, and I am loving it!
No comments:
Post a Comment