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May 23, 2020 - April 5, 2021
It is surprising how we fight against Love’s accepting what we do not want to accept in ourselves—our defective, wounded, malicious self. But what a transformation when we can accept this poor self and allow love in!
For most people, nothing awakens feelings of deep terror like the experience of absolute disconnection from others. But in the same way, nothing vitalizes the human spirit like the experience of a loving connection—something that assures us that we are not alone and that we count for something to someone.
In spite of the messages of Western culture, personal fulfillment lies in connection, not autonomy.
He told me he knew how disgusting he was to God. He said he had stopped asking for forgiveness, as he couldn’t control what he thought and did.
Like loving parents who can look at their children with disappointment that in no way dilutes their love, the God in whose image such parents are made loves us with a love that is not dependent on our behavior. If at least some humans can do this, how dare we question God’s ability to do the same?
Think for a moment about how Christ-following develops if you assume God looks at you with disgust, disappointment, frustration or anger. The central feature of any spiritual response to such a God will be an effort to earn his approval. Far from daring to relax in his presence, you will be vigilant to perform as well as you possibly can. The motive for any obedience you might offer will be fear rather than love, and there will be little genuine surrender.
Surrender involves relaxing, and you must feel safe before you can relax. How could anyone ever expect to feel safe enough to relax in the presence of a God who is preoccupied with their shortcomings and failures?
The Christian God doesn’t turn away from sinners in disgust but moves toward us, bringing us his redemptive presence.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Christians who assume that God is preoccupied with sin tend themselves to adopt the same focus. In fact they often seem to think that they honor God by taking sin as seriously as they do. Sometimes they judge other Christians by how seriously they seem to treat sin. Often they become uncomfortable with an emphasis on divine love; they feel an urgent need to balance this by highlighting God’s hatred of sin. Unfortunately, while they may give intellectual assent to God’s love, they often experience very little of it.
God knows you are a sinner, but your sins do not surprise him. Nor do they reduce in the slightest his love for you.
All my fears about how God will respond to me in my sin wash away as I see the Father running to meet me. Why did I stay away so long? How could I have ever thought he would let me come back as a slave? Clearly I never need to fear returning to him—no matter what I have done or not done—because God’s love has nothing to do with my behavior.
Part of me—and I suspect part of all of us—wants to earn the Father’s love. In the story both sons fall into this trap, and both have to learn the same lesson. The Father’s love reflects the Father’s character, not the children’s behavior. My behavior—whether responsible or irresponsible—is beside the point. Responsible behavior does not increase the Father’s love, nor does irresponsible behavior decrease it.
Made in God’s image, humans are invested with a nonnegotiable dignity.
Creation was God’s plan for friendship. We were not brought into existence simply so that we could worship God. Nor were we created simply for service. Human beings exist because of God’s desire for companionship.
When God thinks of us he feels a deep, persistent longing—not simply for our wholeness but, more basically, for our friendship. This possibility lies at the core of our own deepest desires. It also lies at the core of our deepest fulfillment.
The love we receive from others is always limited by their brokenness and finitude. And the love we give to others is always contaminated by our self-preoccupation.
We long for perfect love but easily become discouraged about the possibility of ever deeply experiencing it. And so we content ourselves with a pale imitation of the love for which we were intended.
Deep down, however, something within us seems to remember the Garden within which we once existed. Part of us longs to return; we know that this is where we belong. But another part of us seems bent on living out our illusions of freedom and autonomy. We tell ourselves that we can create other gardens in which to find soul rest and encounter love. But what we create are weed-infested gardens of compulsion and idolatry. Instead of rest we get addiction and self-preoccupation. And our restlessness grows, our hearts yearning for something both familiar and unattainable.
The story of Jesus is the story of love personified. We miss the point when we simply try to do what he tells us to do. And we miss the point when we merely try to follow the pattern of his life. His life points us back to his own Source. His life is intelligible only when it is understood as the personification of divine love.
A. W. Tozer notes that most of us who call ourselves Christians do so on the basis of belief more than experience. We have, he argues, “substituted theological ideas for an arresting encounter; we are full of religious notions but our great weakness is that for our hearts there is no one there.”3
Looking back, I find it remarkable how easily I accepted ideas about God as substitutes for direct experience of him. It took me a long time to begin to know God through my heart and not simply my head. In my depths I longed to really know the God toward whom my heart was drawn. But all I seemed to be able to find was beliefs. I believed that God was love, and if I thought about it, I could see that this meant he loved me. But I didn’t know that love on a deep, persistent personal basis. God’s love was an idea, not a personal experience. In later chapters I will say more about how this began
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My own spiritual journey began with frantic steps to ensure that I escaped God’s punishment. After several years of hellfire sermons, I did what any reasonable ten-year-old child would do under the circumstances—I accepted Christ into my heart and began seeking to live a life that would please God. My motive for doing so was predominantly punishment avoidance. I was told that salvation was a gift of love, but it seemed strange to ask me to accept a gift at gunpoint. I tried to believe that God was a God of love, but what was prominent in my mind was his justice and holiness. I saw little that
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Some Christians bristle at the notion that love, not fear, should characterize their response to God. It overturns everything they have learned about how to position themselves in relation to the cosmos and the divine. In a strange way they have actually become comfortable with an unfriendly God who should be feared. Not settling for awe or reverence, they live with a fear of the God who keeps them in their place by ensuring their continued distress.
Fearful people live within restrictive boundaries. They may appear quite cautious and conservative. Or they may narrow the horizons of their life by avoidance and compulsion. They also tend to be highly vigilant, ever guarding against life’s moving out of the bounds within which they feel most comfortable. Because of this, fear breeds control. People who live in fear feel compelled to remain in control. They attempt to control themselves and they attempt to control their world. Often despite their best intentions, this spills over into efforts to control others.
Kierkegaard makes three invaluable contributions to our understanding of fear. He suggests that (1) fear occurs when the human spirit is afraid of itself, (2) fear is often a substitute for guilt and (3) guilt always results in an inhibition of love.
Often the part of self that is most disturbing for people plagued with fear is their emotions. Typically they fear the strength of their feelings, particularly those feelings associated with impulses to action. Anger, sexuality, and any of the inner urges and desires all feel disruptive because they are all capable of leading to action. Consequently, people may attempt to shut down all feelings and thereby eliminate the urges that lie behind them. But this only compounds the sense of danger, because now they also fear a lapse of control.
One particularly important feeling that often lies at the root of fear is guilt. The part of self that is dangerous in this situation is the self that is felt, in some nonspecific way, to have failed or done something dreadfully bad. These feelings are not usually conscious. But they tend to seep into consciousness as fear.
Fear was the price he unconsciously chose to pay to eliminate the guilt. When this happens, the displaced guilt tends to be betrayed by compulsions. Compulsive niceness might, for example, reflect a neurotic sense of guilt associated with not being nice enough—perhaps being too aggressive or selfish. Or compulsive busyness might arise from guilt associated with feelings of being lazy. The problem is not real, objective guilt. The root of the fear lies in unrealistic expectations of the self—expectations, for example, of always being loving or always being productive. Such expectations lead to
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Love is dangerous precisely because it invites surrender. Although we may try to give and receive love in measured doses, both our own deepest longings and the very nature of love bid abandon. But abandon brings us right up to the edge of an inner abyss. We are suddenly confronted by a series of “what if” questions, all of them pregnant with potential peril. What if I surrender to this love and am again hurt? What if I abandon myself to this lover and he or she fails me? What if I reveal myself and am rejected? What if I am overwhelmed by the strength of my own need for love? Or what if I am
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Crippling anxiety that makes commitment to love impossible is, however, always sad.
As Philip Yancey has written, “The Buddhist eight-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of karma, the Jewish covenant, and Muslim code of law—each of these offers a way to earn approval. Only Christianity dares to make God’s love unconditional.”3 The God Christians worship loves sinners, redeems failures, delights in second chances and fresh starts, and never tires of pursuing lost sheep, waiting for prodigal children, or rescuing those damaged by life and left on the sides of its paths.
Surrender to God’s love offers us the possibility of freedom from guilt, freedom from effort to earn God’s approval, and freedom to genuinely love God and others as the Father loves us.
Grace is totally alien to human psychology. We want to get our house in order and then let God love and accept us. The psychology of works-righteousness and self-certification is foundational to the human psyche and totally at odds with grace.
