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May 2 - June 20, 2025
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!
At heart, essentially and necessarily, Christianity is a question of accepting a love that went so almost unbelievably far as to sacrifice the Love’s own beloved Son for me, for you, for each one of us, no matter how miserably unworthy we are of such love.
is so difficult for us to open to love—because we know in the end we will have to return love for love. Anything that helps us to open to this, which is the basic fabric of our lives, this interweaving of love, this embrace of divine love for which our whole naked being longs, is a great grace.
Christians often focus on obedience more than surrender. But while the two concepts are closely related, they differ in important ways. As we shall see, surrender is foundational to Christian spirituality and is the soil out of which obedience should grow. Christ does not simply want our compliance. He wants our heart. He wants our love and he offers us his. He invites us to surrender to his love. Christianity puts surrender to love right at the core of the spiritual journey. Christ-following is saying yes to God’s affirming Yes! to us. If it is anything less than a response to love,
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surrender to Perfect Love holds the promise of wholeness and holiness.
Regardless of what you have come to believe about God based on your life experience, the truth is that when God thinks of you, love swells in his heart and a smile comes to his face. God bursts with love for humans. He is far from being emotionally uninvolved with his creation. God’s bias toward us is strong, persistent and positive. The Christian God chooses to be known as Love, and that love pervades every aspect of God’s relationship with us.
I do not think that sin changes everything, particularly how God feels about humans. God is simply not that fickle. 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?
The presence of anger does not mean the absence of love—particularly in God. Love is God’s character, not simply an emotion. What a small god we would have if divine character was dependent on our behavior. The Christian God is not like this. The Christian God is slow to anger and rich in mercy (see Exodus 34:6, echoed in Joel 2:13 and many other places in Scripture). He is quite unlike the god we would create if we were making him in our image.
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?
I knew that while he wanted to uphold the holiness of God, he had absolutely failed to understand Christ’s incarnation.
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. How much we need to believe this. Our Christ-following would be quite different if we did.
Creation is an outpouring of love—an overflow of love from the heavens to earth. Creation not only declares the inventiveness and resourcefulness of God but reveals the abundance of his love. Creation declares that humans are born of love and for love, created in the image of a God who is love. Love is our source and love is to be our fulfillment. Made in God’s image, humans are invested with a nonnegotiable dignity. We are compatriots of God, not just creatures of God. Even more astounding, God chooses us to be his friends. That imputed status was never annulled, despite our sinful rebellion
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But genuinely encountering Love is not the same as inviting Jesus into your heart, joining or attending a church, or doing what Jesus commands. It is the experience of love that is transformational. You simply cannot bask in divine love and not be affected.
If God is love, he cannot be truly known apart from love. He cannot, therefore, be known objectively. One cannot observe him from a distance and know him. To do so is to fail to genuinely encounter his love. One can encounter divine love only up close and personally.
To know the Christian God is to experience love. One cannot genuinely encounter the Christian God and not encounter love—first as love received and subsequently as love returned.
if we confuse our thoughts about God with personal knowing of God, we confuse theology with spiritual experience.
Transformation demands more than a momentary experience of love. It demands sufficient basking in this love that being deeply loved becomes the foundation of your identity.
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. Is this the response that the Christian God invites from us? I am convinced it is not. The Christian God wants the intimacy of our friendship,
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I didn’t think of myself as fearful, because I was generally successful in avoiding what I feared.
Fear was the price he unconsciously chose to pay to eliminate the guilt.
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. The Christian God of grace stands in stark contrast to the vindictive, whimsical, threatening and often capricious gods of other religions. Only the Lord God unconditionally cherishes human beings. Only the Lord God forgives all our offenses and teaches us how to forgive ourselves. Only the Lord God provides everything he demands. Only the Lord God
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A familiar Christian hymn states that as I come to God, “nothing in my hands I bring, simply to thy cross I cling.” How deeply I resent this fact. How desperately I want to be able to contribute something to the deal—my faith, my effort, my love, my belief. But the bottom line is that Perfect Love meets me where I am and asks only that I open my heart and receive the love for which I long. It is surrender to love that I really resist. I am willing to accept measured doses of love as long as it doesn’t upset the basic framework of my world. That framework is built on the assumption that people
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This is the reason God’s first words to us are “Fear not.” This is not a command but an invitation. God understands our tendency to fear. And in gentleness he invites us to let him rid us of our fears and heal us by love.
Confusing fear and reverence, some Christians think God wants us to feel afraid of him. They might assume that the angel’s call to Moses was designed to teach him the fear of the Lord. But I would suggest that it was designed to protect Moses from danger—the danger of a presumptuous approach to the divine that failed to recognize God’s holiness. God didn’t want Moses to stay away. Indeed he wanted Moses to approach him, because he wanted to share his heart with him. But he wanted Moses to approach him as the Holy Other.
God does not want us to stand back in fear. What he desires is reverential intimacy. He wants us close enough to him that we know his heart—close enough to hear his heartbeat. He wants to look into our eyes, and he wants us to look into his.
Jesus is the antidote to fear. His love—not our believing certain things about him or trying to do as he commands—is what holds the promise of releasing us from the bondage of our inner conflicts, guilt and terror. Jesus comes to us to show us what God is like. Knowing how we would react to a god who suddenly turned up on the human scene, God becomes human, to meet us where we are and minimize our fears. The incarnation is God reaching out across the chasm caused by our sin and starting the relationship all over again. The incarnation reveals true Love reaching out to dispel fear.
It is the things in ourselves that we refuse to face that have the greatest potential to tyrannize us. To deny the reality of fears is not to know ourselves, and then we risk becoming possessed by that which we refuse to face. But if it were easy to face our fears, we would have already done so. So something must be different to allow you to really face things you previously avoided. That difference is love. The courage to face unpleasant aspects of our inner self comes from feeling deeply loved. It also comes from the assurance that we are safe. Our gaze needs to go back and forth between
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Those who surrender obey. But not all who obey surrender. It is quite easy to obey God for the wrong reasons. What God desires is submission of our heart and will, not simply compliance in our behavior.
obedience that does not flow from the heart counts for very little in the eyes of God. It’s what’s inside that counts. Motivation counts because God wants our love and friendship, not just the right behavior. If he simply wanted compliance, he could have created a race of automatons. But desiring communion with beings enough like him to make intimacy possible, he created humans. And he patiently woos us as we learn not just to do what he desires but to surrender to his love.
If the core of Christian obedience is listening to God’s will, the core of surrender is voluntarily giving up our will. Only love can induce us to do this. But even more remarkable, not only can love make it possible, it can make it almost easy.
Only God deserves absolute surrender, because only God can offer absolutely dependable love.
In Jesus, God becomes human and courts us with tenderness and unimaginable kindness. He does so because he wants our heart and not just our will. He knows that only love will make us willing to give him both our heart and our will.
Paradoxically, the abundant life promised us in Christ comes not from grasping but from releasing. It comes not from striving but from relinquishing. It comes not so much from taking as from giving. Surrender is the foundational dynamic of Christian freedom—surrender of my efforts to live my life outside of the grasp of God’s love and surrender to God’s will and gracious Spirit. Surrender is being willing rather than willful. It is a readiness to trust that is based in love. It is relaxing and letting go. It is floating in the river that is God’s love.
Surrender is the discovery that we are in a river of love and that we float without having to do anything. Apart from such surrender, we always are in the grip of some degree of fear. Apart from such surrender, we will always thrash about, trying to stay afloat by our own efforts. And apart from such surrender, we remain self-preoccupied as our willful attempts to stay in control cut us off from life itself.
Too often people see Christianity in terms of rules and morality—a system of obligations and prohibitions. This entirely misses the point of Christ-following. Christian obedience is more like what lovers give each other than what soldiers give their superiors. Lovers demonstrate their love by doing what each other wants. And so it should be with Christians and their God.
We should obey God because he has won our hearts in love. If he has not, our focus should not be so much on obedience as on knowing his love. For once we get that solidly in place, obedience begins to take care of itself.
Christian surrender is saying yes to God’s Yes! to me. It begins as I experience his wildly enthusiastic, recklessly loving affirmation of me. It grows out of soaking myself in this love so thoroughly that love for God springs up in response. Surrender to his love is the work of his Spirit, making his love ours and his nature ours. This is the core of Christian spiritual transformation.
unlike the message of self-improvement gurus who offer the small extra bits of help we think we need to finish off our personal renovation projects, Jesus’ offer is abundant life based on death and rebirth.
Turning is repentance. Repentance, however, is never simply turning from something—sin or a way of life. It must also always involve turning to something. Christian repentance is turning to Jesus.
Turning toward Jesus is the heart of repentance, because this is the only real possibility of turning away from sin. Turning toward Jesus also makes clear that repentance must be an ongoing matter. It must become a way of life.
Conversion is the lifelong transformational process of being remade into the image of God. It is so much more than simply trying to avoid sin. The focus of repentance and conversion is Jesus, not my sin nor my self.
There is no substitute for surrender to divine love as the fuel to propel such undoing. Divine love transforms both my heart and my will. Divine love enables me to choose God’s will over mine. Without this, repentance will be nothing more than a self-help scheme based on effort and resolve.
love is transformational only when it is received in vulnerability.
Genuine transformation requires vulnerability. It is not the fact of being loved unconditionally that is life-changing. It is the risky experience of allowing myself to be loved unconditionally.
How terrifying it is to face my naked and needy self—the self that longs for love and knows it can do nothing to manipulate the universe into providing the only kind of love I really need. The crux of the problem is that I cannot feel the love of God because I do not dare to accept it unconditionally. To know that I am loved, I must accept the frightening helplessness and vulnerability that is my true state. This is always terrifying.
Contemplative or existential knowing may be supported by belief, but it is never reducible to it. It is based in experience, the direct personal encounter with divine love. The goal is, as stated by Paul, that we might know the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, and so be filled with the utter fullness of God (Ephesians 3:16-19).
Learning limited surrender to relatively trustworthy human beings helps prepare us for more complete surrender to perfect love. Tragically, however, the flip side of this is also true. Conditional and imperfect love from human beings makes the unconditional and perfect love of God seem unbelievable and untrustworthy.
What she discovered was that God was not at all like the god of her imagination. The biggest surprise was God’s vulnerability. It was this that made her most ready to receive his love. She had expected a God of power. What she found in the Christ of the Gospels was a God of weakness. It was the love of this weak and vulnerable God that was most transforming for her. For if God could dare to take risks in entering human life in vulnerability, perhaps she could take the risk he invited in meeting him in her weakness. She was finally ready to receive perfect love in an undefended state.
The point of God’s love is to remake us in his image of love. The point of the spiritual journey is not simply to be received back into the welcoming arms of love of the Father but to become like the Father. Jesus reminds us of this when he tells his followers to “be compassionate as your Father is compassionate” (Luke 6:36). God wants us to make his life ours, his heart ours, his love ours. He wants us to be—like him—characterized by love.
Love is the acid test of Christian spirituality. If Christian conversion is authentic, we are in a process of becoming more loving. If we are not becoming more loving, something is seriously wrong.
