Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: love

  • God as Father

    God as Father

    I intended to schedule this post for Sunday morning, but life intervened. Jody suggested that as my final post for Father’s Day Week, I should look at divine fatherhood overall through scripture.

    She had some difficulty with the concept of God as father, because while she and her father were able to reconcile before his death, she had difficulty thinking of her relationship to Father-God in a positive way. Many people have that very problem due to the way they related to their own fathers in this life.

    And we can expect that any human representative is going to present an imperfect and challenging representation of God. This is an inevitable result of the human condition. When Jesus told people that they knew how to give good gifts to their children, he doubtless knew that there were people in the crowd who truly did not know how to give good gifts. There were likely people who didn’t know how to give at all because they were so self centered.

    But that parental relationship is still a valuable analogy. This works two ways. First, parental love and commitment to children provides one of our better examples of a loving, self-sacrificing commitment. When I talk about good and bad parents, readers have no problem thinking of examples. We may differ on were the boundaries lie, but we do have an image of good parents.

    Second, this works in reverse. We are told in this way that as parents, we are to be the sort of parents who can point the way to God. Being “godly” as a parent doesn’t mean adhering to a set of doctrinal standards. It means having a particular attitude.

    My own observation over the years is that children do well with quite a variety of parents. One critical common characteristics of parents I believe would be called “good” by their children later in life is simply that those parents cared. They were committed to doing right. They may have failed. No, they almost certainly did from time to time. They weren’t perfect, but they tried.

    And so Jesus could point to the idea of a good father as a way to point to God, and people can get an idea of what God’s love means.

    The best way to discover some depth in this view of God is to look at the experience of people with God. I frequently refer to the Bible not as a compendium of doctrine, but as a book of experience. That experience is primarily the experience of people with God.

    Jody spent a year looking at texts about God the Father. I’d suggest just such a project if you want to build your relationship with God. Here are a few key points.

    • God as creator is God as Father. At creation God not only produces human beings, God then goes on to care for them by providing a garden, animals, and companionship.
    • God is not eternally indulgent. God is patient, but there comes a time for trouble. Witness repeated failures of the people, and events such as the flood, slavery in Egypt, the exile, and so forth.
    • God’s parental love is not determined by our being the cutest or best behaved children. Hosea, particularly the first few verses of Hosea 11 or all of Ezekiel 16 (which is some rather rough reading!) emphasize.
    • God’s love is not limited, as seen in John 16 & 17 and many other passages. God keeps loving right up through death on the cross.
    • God’s love is relentless. See Romans 8:31-39.
    • God’s love will win in the end. See Revelation 21 & 22.

    We spend our time worrying about the little things. God’s love is the big thing.

    God is Love!

    (Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)

  • Psalm 119:167 – Keeping

    Psalm 119:167 – Keeping

    I keep your testimonies,
    I love them greatly.

    The first line here is formally “my soul keeps,” which is a way to refer to oneself. I does have the added connotation of keeping them from the heart out. That goes with the second line that says this comes from the love that the Psalmist has for God’s law.

    I couldn’t help today thinking about the difference in the way the various laws are presented here by the Psalmist. In Christian churches you rarely have positive references to the law as something to love and appreciate. We’ve taken pieces of Paul and used them to build the attitude that the law is very negative, so we want to avoid it.

    We have a major problem, however, in that we want to trot the law out to make other people behave the way we want them to. That again presents the law in a negative way, as we keep saying that salvation is by grace, meaning that “getting into heaven” is by grace, and then detaching that from Christian life.

    As a result we act as though God will take you to heaven, but we still need something to control things on earth before we get to heaven, so we have laws, and we enforce them. That tends to result in a loose and capricious application of standards of behavior, and soon the fires of hell will start sneaking in the other way.

    But both the law and grace come from a loving God. It’s not that grace is a way around the law. It’s more of a way through it. Ultimately, sanctifying grace says that God is going to get you in the end, which does not mean that God is going to discipline you into formal good behavior, but rather God is going to make you holy, and that “holy, just, and good” law will be part of you as well.

    Grace is the gift that keeps on giving. Even in Romans 7, which is often viewed as a “downer” chapter, Paul notes that he’d like to do God’s law, but he finds himself in a battle with the flesh which definitely does not want to keep the law.

    The answer is to live by the Spirit, at which point you do, in fact, love God’s law. You may (and should) still realize how much you fall short, and how much your flesh (to use Paul’s term) is at war with it, but it’s something that tells you where God is going to take you.

    As even the very next verse, which we’ll discuss tomorrow, the only reason anyone goes anywhere with any of this is that God is at work.

    Having trouble with keeping God’s law? Let God’s Spirit do the work.

    (Featured image from Adobe Stock. Licensed, not public domain.)

  • Psalm 119:136 – Crying

    Psalm 119:136 – Crying

    Streams of water flow from my eyes,
    Because people don’t follow your instructions.

    What makes you cry?

    We are often driven to tears by sad events in our lives or in the lives of our loved ones. We can be driven to tears through anger about what someone else does to us. We can be driven to tears by weariness, when life just won’t stop driving us.

    The Psalmist is crying because people are not keeping God’s law or instructions. The word here is Torah, which I have chosen to translate throughout these meditations with the word instruction/instructions. It covers the many categories of instruction that God has provided.

    When Rabbi Hillel the Elder was asked if he could summarize Torah while standing on one foot, he said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary.” That is one of many statements of what we call the golden rule. Jesus gave something very similar, though more than half a century later in Matthew 7:12.

    Jesus also summarized the law in another way. He said that we are called to love the Lord our God with all our heart soul and mind, and our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:40). I hear this taught frequently, but I wonder how often we really take it seriously. Jesus continued by saying that on these two commands “hang” all the law and the prophets. This sounds very important. I’m looking right now at the NLT, which says, “The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” That might clarify things in case we’re having trouble with the word “hang.”

    And please note that the two commands go back to Leviticus and Deuteronomy. They were not a new revelation when Jesus mentioned them. Jesus was quoting scripture.

    One of my practical hermeneutical principles is simply this: If you are interpreting scripture, test your interpretation by seeing if you can make it hang from one of these two laws. In 1 John we get an extension of this when John tells us we should love one another because love is from God (4:7a), everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God (4:7b), the one who does not love does not know God (4:8). Then in verse 20 he asks how someone can say they love God but don’t love their brother. How can you love God, whom you have not seen, but not love your brother, whom you have seen.

    I have drawn in all these verses in order ask this: When we see an absence of love, does that make us cry? Can we say, “Streams of water flow from my eyes, because the people in your church don’t really love one another?” What about “Streams of water flow from my eyes, because the people in the church don’t love the whole world, those who are near and far, those who belong to the church and those who don’t?”

    It’s really nice of me (I pause to pat myself on the back) to state these questions in that polite, unchallenging manner. Here’s the real question: “Do streams of waters flow from my eyes because I am not showing love to everyone God has put in my path?”

    Did I care enough about the elderly man I saw sitting in front of Walmart this afternoon? Sadly, no. I thought about him for a moment or two, and a fleeting thought suggested maybe I should say or do something, but my focus on my own problems took over and I walked right past him. Was that the love of Christ motivating all my actions?

    Jody and I were discussing this and connecting it to the great commission. If we are to make disciples, what will characterize those disciples? Well, Jesus said, “In this way will everyone know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). And if you’re wondering about what love is or how Jesus understood love, practiced love, remember that he was on the way to the cross.

    Nope, I can’t say I cared as much for that man in front of Walmart as Jesus has cared for me. And that should make me sad.

    What will make you sad today? More importantly, what can you do to live that great commission to make disciples, disciples characterized by love?

    Let’s turn that around! What act of sharing God’s love will allow you to rejoice at the end of the day?

    (Featured image was generated by Adobe Firefly in Adobe Express using a prompt generated by Gemini AI. Yes, I’m experimenting.)

  • Psalm 119:120

    Psalm 119:120

    I get goosebumps from dread of you,
    I’m afraid of your judgments.

    C. S. Lewis has a wonderful quote on this, which is fairly well known. I suspect, however, that many people don’t know the context.

    Sometimes this question has been pressed upon our minds with the purpose of exciting fear. I do not think that is its right use. I am, indeed, far from agreeing with those who think all religious fear barbarous and degrading and demand that it should be banished from the spiritual life. Perfect love, we know, casteth out fear. But so do several other things—ignorance, alcohol, passion, presumption, and stupidity. It is very desirable that we should all advance to that perfection of love in which we shall fear no longer; but it is very undesirable, until we have reached that stage, that we should allow any inferior agent to cast out our fear.

    C. S. Lewis, “The World’s Last Night” in The World’s Last Night

    This question is asked in the context of concern about the second coming or the end of the world, however you see it. Lewis argues that an emotion of fear would not be helpful in that case, because the valuable results of a rational fear cannot be sustained for a long time. I would argue that repeated claims that the end of the world is around the corner make fear ineffective.

    There is valuable fear. That’s the kind of fear that keeps us from doing stupid things. Well, sometimes it fails to keep us from doing stupid things. That’s what Lewis is talking about when he says that ignorance, alcohol, passion, presumption, and stupidity can cast out our fear. I recall quite a number of times I did stupid things. In fact, even though I have never been drunk, there were a number of times when I did stupid things with people who were drunk, because I was part of they group, and hey!, the stupid things were fun!

    I figure the Lord had to have angels working over time to allow me to attain maturity. Not necessarily intelligence and good judgment, but survival, at least!

    There’s another way in which fear can be destructive, and that’s when it’s random fear. A child who is abused by a parent and can’t find a way out is threatened with destruction by the fear. The fear is constant, whether the abuse is currently taking place or not.

    Evil is the source of that kind of fear. Effective fear is consistent with reality and helps direct our paths.

    Often, people try to remove “fear” from the “fear of the Lord.” There’s a good point to this. There are those who live in fear of God as they would fear an angry, abusive father. That is not the fear of the Lord. But there is a healthy fear. The God who made gravity made it such that gravity will get you at the bottom of a cliff. You should fear jumping off.

    In our verse today what strikes me is the personal closeness of this fear. There are several ways to translate the Hebrew words, especially of the first line. But what is clear is that the fear is producing a reaction in his body. He is reacting to the presence of God and the realization of who he is and who God is.

    But then, in the presence of God, there is the perfect love. Continuing in the presence of God will cast out that fear, replacing it with a realization of love.

  • Psalm 119:108 – A Freewill Offering

    Psalm 119:108 – A Freewill Offering

    Accept with pleasure the freewill offering of my mouth, LORD,
    and teach me your judgments.

    Most translations treat the “freewill offering of my mouth” as praise, though I note that the LXX translates it quite literary as “voluntary [gift] of my mouth.” I don’t say this is wrong. In fact, Psalm 119 itself can be seen as an offering of praise, offering thanks and praise to God for the various aspects of God’s word and law.

    But I think that a freewill offering of our mouths, and specifically what comes out of our mouths may be more than that. I’ve heard any number of preachers say that we’re willing to surrender everything to God, but we stop when it comes to our wallets. I think we stop before offering our speech, and by extension what we type, to God.

    Is everything you write the sort of thing you would think was good and left a positive record. I don’t refer to the vigorous presentation of opinions that are important to you. There are those who consider any sort of firm opinion as impolite. I’m not talking about firm. I’m not talking about strongly expressed. I’m talking about things we say that are harmful.

    • A group of church members in a Sunday School class run down their own church to a visitor
    • Mistaking the speaker for the day for a visitor, rather than a new member, a church member makes a litany of complaints about “this church” to which the visitor would surely not want to belong
    • A member of the church staff complains about other staff members in the hearing of people who are not responsible for dealing with staff issues
    • A shopper is rude to the person manning the checkout lane because they are in a hurry and mildly inconvenienced
    • A driver flips the bird at another driver whose driving skills are suboptimal
    • A parent yells at a child instead of correcting them firmly but kindly
    • We speak as if our disagreements in any area make another person less worthy of respect as a human being, created in the image of God
    • Because we believe someone is sinful, we fail to respect their full personhood as human beings and God’s children

    In 1 John 4 we read:

    Beloved, let us love one another,
    for love comes from God,
    and everyone who loves has been born of God
    and knows God.
    The one of does not love does not know God,
    because God is love.

    If anyone says, “I love God,” but hates his brother or sister, he is a liar. For the one who does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen is not able to love God, whom he has not seen.

    1 John 4:7-8,20, my translation

    Now how did I get to loving God and our fellow humans from a freewill offering from our mouth?

    I believe that lips expressing love will be giving the right kind of freewill offering, because God is love, and our love for God is shown by our love for one another. That offering will be determined by what is in your heart, “because out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45, my translation).

    What is going to come out of your mouth today?

    (Featured image credit: By Wattana, licensed from Adobe Stock.)

  • Psalm 119:102 – You Have Taught Me

    Psalm 119:102 – You Have Taught Me

    I do not turn aside from your judgments,
    for you have taught me.

    A couple of days ago, meditating on Psalm 119:99, I discussed teachers. I mentioned the idea briefly of allowing the Holy Spirit to be the teacher.

    I want you to notice the form of this verse. The second half is not an accomplishment that results from his good actions. Rather, the second line explains the first. The psalmist is faithful to God’s decisions, judgments, because it is God who has been doing the teaching.

    There is a line in the prophecy of the new covenant recorded in Jeremiah 31:31-34 that is often ignored. Verse 34 reads “No longer need they teach one another, neighbour or brother, to know the LORD; all of them, high and low alike, will know me, says the LORD….” (REB). We don’t see this now, but I think we need to recognize this as a goal in the church.

    Too much of our teaching energy is spent making sure people understand and accept the things that we, as teachers, believe. I definitely include myself in this. Too little time is spent helping people find their own relationship with God.

    No the word “relationship” has been used in some questionable ways, particularly as a way to avoid actually studying and thinking about God and the world in which we live. But no matter what we may feel or want, there is always a relationship between each of us and God as in created being to creator, and that relationship is important. Relationship doesn’t negate doctrine, understanding things. Rather, relationship is necessary to any learning about God.

    Consider Ephesians 3:18-19: “… may you, in company with all God’s people, be strong to grasp what is the breadth and length and height and depth (19) of Christ’s love, and to know it, though it is beyond knowledge.” Technical knowledge isn’t sufficient. Personal knowledge is required. But personal knowledge is not exclusively individual knowledge. We know “with all God’s people.”

    As teachers in the church, we should be constantly working ourselves out of a job, constantly relying on the Holy Spirit, and constantly expecting that the Holy Spirit will guide others. We live in a new creation. We are a new creation. So is everyone we teach.

    This means that while we still have a teaching and discipling role, that role is one that is mutual, that is, we learn along with all God’s people. We make it easier for everyone to learn from God. That means there is a difference in teaching and mentoring in the Christian community. We do not build a dependence on what we think or have to say. We look to join together and grow in our dependence on God.

    How can you encourage someone to grow in their knowledge of what is beyond knowledge today?

  • Psalm 119:6 – Overcoming Shame

    Psalm 119:6 – Overcoming Shame

    Then I won’t be ashamed,
    When I keep my eyes on all your commands.

    I didn’t get the poetry in my translation. It’s hard to get everything into it at once.

    This verse strikes at one of our most serious problems. Our identity. Our ability to live with ourselves.

    You’ve surely heard stories of people going on various pilgrimages to find themselves. Others go through their lives with a continuous question of whether they are important, or contribute, or make a difference of some kind. Who are we?

    Often this comes as shame. We are ashamed of things we have done. Let me confess that there are things I have done in my life of which I am not proud. Even more, I have rarely (almost never) done my work to what I consider a high level of quality. There are always things in what I do that I want to apologize for, even to myself.

    But when we get our eyes on God, in this case the God revealed in the commands he gave, we can begin to find our identity. The God who did these things actually cares about us.

    7 “It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples. 8 It was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath that he swore to your ancestors that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

    Deuteronomy 7:7-8 (NRSVue)

    For a New Testament quote,

    1 See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.

    1 John 3:1a (NRSVue)

    (Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)

  • Love Is All You Need

    Love Is All You Need

    Starting on Martin Luther King’s birthday, we have seen a number of quotes advocating love. I intended to post something that day, but as I frequently do I got diverted.

    I wrote something about this long ago. It’s unfortunate that love has become a sort of cliche for a benevolent feeling combined with inaction. We can post comments about love and unity, and then go on doing what we were going to do anyhow.

    I wrote about this back in 2006 in a post titled On Being a Love Preacher. I still am.

    But love isn’t easy. I fail at it on a daily basis. That’s why I’m also a grace preacher. Grace deals with our failure to love.

    The next error follows quickly after. Grace is not an alternative to sanctification. It isn’t a way to get out of being transformed. It’s not grace vs holiness. Rather, grace is the one means by which sanctification can happen. Wesleyans call it “sanctifying grace.” But all too often we pretend that sanctifying grace is something other than grace. It’s nice to have all those labels for grace applied in different ways at different times. But we can also forget that some of them are grace.

    Sanctification is God working in you. It begins with God’s love and spreads through you. It is very active. It is not easy, any more than love is.

    I hope that we don’t just comfort ourselves with quotes about love in action, but rather begin to see others through God’s work in us. Recognizing our limitations and failures and the way God has worked with us, we let grace sanctify the way we see our neighbors.

    In the incarnation, God crossed the greatest gap possible, from the infinite to the finite, indeed miniscule on the scale of the finite. Your differences with your neighbor cover much less ground than God already covered.

    The same gap crossing God can work in me, and in you.

    Featured Image by Pexels from Pixabay.

  • Philippians 2:1-11, Romans 12, and the Nature of Christian Community

    Philippians 2:1-11, Romans 12, and the Nature of Christian Community

    That’s a fairly ambitious title I gave myself, but the content is a bit less ambitious.

    When I found that I’d be teaching from Philippians 2 in Sunday School, I commented that if someone couldn’t teach a class from Philippians 2:5-11, they should just give up teaching. That’s probably a bit harsh, but the passage is certainly teachable.

    One key element, that we sometimes don’t emphasize in all the theology, is the fact that the expression of the mission of Jesus is made in the context of a call to Christian community.

    Each one shouldn’t look after his or her own interests, but for one another’s interests.

    Philippians 2:4 (my translation)

    This is tied to the giving of/by Christ through verse 5, which tells us that our minds are to work like his, as we give for others. This is interesting as we see that he has given up much more than we could possibly possess in order to take action for our salvation.

    It’s impossible for us to conceive of giving that much; certainly never to actually give it.

    A similar call comes in John 15:12 “love one another as I have loved you.” This may sound easy to some, but only if you allow some weak definition of love to replace the one Jesus is using. This is on the way to the cross. “As I have loved you” is not simple.

    Yet we find ourselves constantly unable to love those who are different from us in any way whatsoever.

    One way to look at and classify a community is to look at the purpose of it’s ties, those things that make it a community that can be identified. A community can gather together and love (or care for, or commit themselves to) one another because they are afraid of the outside world and want to keep it out, or they can commit themselves to the same sorts of values in order to reach out and include the rest of the world.

    “Circling the wagons,” is common in westerns. Heaven help the person inside the circle who thought that those outside might be open to peace! Such a person is a traitor, even if they don’t intend to act on their own, because they question the very basis for the circled wagons. They question the reason for this temporary community’s existence.

    A medical or dental mission team displays quite the opposite reason. Far from desiring to protect themselves against those they meet in a foreign country, they want to serve. They are bound together by the intent to serve and through the mission they wish to carry out. In this case, the one who wants to reach out to more people is welcomed. The traitor would be one who harms the ability of the team (temporary community) to carry out their mission.

    Real communities function between those two poles. One needs identity in order to be of any sort of service. In the command of Jesus, the disciples are to be identified by the way in which they love one another. That makes it clear who is in the community and what the community does.

    Then we have the community reaching out to others. Is this love inside the community the mission of that community? Do they bring in more people to love?

    If they are to follow the example of Jesus, that must be what they do, because that is what Jesus did. He came to people (all humanity) who did not find him all that attractive. They’d rather have revenge on their enemies than love them. They weren’t ready for Jesus. We aren’t ready for Jesus.

    If the community that forms around his principles becomes inward looking, and spends its time defending itself as a privileged community of people who are more right in a theological or even an ethical sense, they will fail to actually emulate their Lord.

    Romans 12 points to this when Paul calls for application of these principles to enemies (12:20), to persecutors (12:14), to those who do evil (12:17).

    There is another side, the side where we lose our identity. If we become the enemy in order to love the enemy we may lose our ability to help. This is why Christian love is so hard and so rarely attained.

    I read a comment recently that we can’t expect our children to love other people if we constantly tell them those other people are wrong. Perhaps. But Christian love calls on us to love the people even when they’re wrong, because we know that God loves us, even when we’re wrong.

    This is our identity and our witness, defined by the one we call Lord.

  • Morgan Guyton Reviews a Review

    I will definitely be reading Rachel Held Evans’ new book A Year of Biblical Womanhood, but I haven’t done so yet, so I’m not commenting on that book. It’s always interesting to me, however, to see reviews of reviews before I’ve gotten my hands on a book.

    In this case the review getting reviewed is by Kathy Keller at The Gospel Coalition, and Morgan Guyton is doing the reviewing of the review. The whole thing is interesting, but I’m particularly interested in one aspect that comes near the end:

    Kathy Keller responds to this with a very presumptuous and uncharitable indictment: “If you say, ‘Parts of the Bible express love, and other parts express power interests,’ you’ve clearly gotten your standard and definition of love from outside the Bible—specifically, from contemporary sensibilities—and these are your ultimate authority and norm.” Beyond the breathtaking unfairness of leveling such a strong accusation with so little supporting evidence, the palpable irony here is that Rachel, without naming (or perhaps realizing) it, has articulated the hermeneutical principle of the spiritual godfather of the Reformation, Augustine, who says in his opus De Doctrina Christiana: “If it seems to you that you have understood the divine scriptures, or any part of them, in such a way that by this understanding you do not build up this twin love of God and neighbor, then you have not understood them” (De Doctrina 1:36:40). Augustine is calling upon us to do precisely what Rachel tells us to do: read the Bible with the prejudice of love. This is similar to the hermeneutical standard of the famous 18th century British evangelical John Wesley who said, “No scripture can mean that God is not love or that his mercy is not over all his works.”

    I’ve tagged this the “hanging rule” and of course it goes back to Jesus–“on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:40). You can see my KJV background by the fact I remember it that way and the name I use comes from that particular passage. And as Guyton notes it couldn’t be farther from original.

    I consider this one of the best rules the non-expert can use in applying scripture. I’m not talking about writing scholarly papers on exegesis, unless one is doing theology, but rather about how one understands and applies scripture in one’s life.

    What amazes me is how many people think that love is such a dangerous principle. Yes, one might improperly define the word “love” but that is true of any word. The problem I often see is that by letting scripture define “love” (or claiming to do so), people often rob the word “love” of any meaning. If you take any interpretation of any violent passage and claim that must somehow be part of God’s love, then you can easily make love meaningless, and thus statements in scripture such as “God is love” are robbed of any force.

    “God is love” should be permitted to stand against our theology and correct it.