An Embarrassment of Riches

I am with Leah almost every day.  We laugh, we talk, we hug, we kiss...and at the end of every date, neither of us wants to let the other go.  We know it must happen, but every parting is an exercise in willpower.  It doesn't matter that we know we'll see each other tomorrow, even if it's in the morning, such as it will be later today (oh the joys of typing past midnight!).

Why is it not like this with God?

When I'm with Leah, I feel amazing.  I'm entranced by her.  Every new thing she tells me about herself has my full attention.  Every serious conversation we have, every time we get lost in each other's eyes, even when we just watch a movie cuddling together on the couch - she is wonderful to be with no matter what we're doing.  I feel like I have an embarrassment of riches with her because of her intellect, sense of humor, how well we match, and how accepting she is of my flaws.  These would be enough already for me to fall for her, but she's generous, beautiful, humble, easy to please, and has several of the same hobbies I do.  That phrase, "waiting for the other shoe to drop" doesn't apply here because I'm still waiting for the first one to drop.  I'm not naive enough to think she's perfect - I'm learning her flaws as she's learning mine - but she's such a great match for me that I find myself in awe.

The problem is that, while I recognize she is a gift from God, I don't seem to realize in my heart that He couldn't have matched me up so perfectly if He didn't know me better than I know myself or if He didn't love me more than I love myself.  I have to fight to keep from losing sight of the Giver in the celebration of the gift.  I know in my head how important it is to keep God first, yet my heart seems to always have different ideas, self-destructive ideas of seeking joy and contentment everywhere but the true Source of them.

And all of this brings me back to my earlier question of why I can't feel the same about God as I do with her.

Don't get me wrong.  I love God.  Between God and Leah, I would choose God.  Yet I don't have the same passion for God that I do for her.  When my Bible study time ends in the morning, my thought is, "Ok, what do I want for breakfast?" not, "When can I do that again?  Tomorrow is too far away."

The problem is that I don't see Him for who He is.  I see Him still as the source of things that can give me happiness rather than the source of my joy and comfort itself.  I don't see Him as wonderful, merely His gifts.  In an effort to change that, or rather to at least begin the process of change, I'm going to go through some of the aspects and roles of God.

First, and the only one I'll get to today, is that He is a God of goodness.  He could have let us burn for choosing ourselves over Him, yet He redeemed us at the cost of His own life.  Imagine that you sign a contract with someone in which you'll wash his car, do his laundry, clean his house, cook his meals, and do all his shopping every day for fifty years and, if you can do all of these things flawlessly for that entire time, he'll pay you $100 million.  One mistake, though, and you get nothing.  You start in on the cleaning and on just the third day, you leave a smudge on his car.  Instead of tossing you aside, he cleans the smudge, then agrees to do all the chores required of you, does them perfectly, and hands you the money that you didn't deserve.  He made a covenant with you originally, then superseded his covenant by paying your share of it.  All you have to do is let Him.

Our deal with God is even more generous than that.  We get Heaven for eternity rather than the penalty for our sins.  We get life instead of death.  And we have to do nothing but believe in Him and accept the gift.

If God stopped there, that would be so much more than we deserve.  He's only just beginning, though.  This is not a name-it, claim-it message, but God wants to give you good things, beginning with more of Him.  He wants you to take hold of His strength (Isaiah 27:5) and ask Him for wisdom (James 1:5).  He wants you to come to Him for your needs because He wants to fill those needs with good things (Matthew 7:11).  He offers a relationship with Him, peace, wisdom, and our needs being met.  These may not always be our earthly needs (much less the desires we've misclassified as leads), but they are always what is truly best for us.

The children of Israel saw ten plagues on Egypt before Pharaoh let them go.  Then they saw the parting of the Red Sea and the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night.  They ate manna from Heaven and still they complained against God ten times within the first year, so God said only Joshua and Caleb would see the Promised Land of all who were 20 years or older.  Yet even though God had said they'd die in the wilderness, neither their clothes nor their sandals wore out.  God protected them throughout.  He let them eat manna, even after they spoke against Him.  He still led them with the pillar.  At every turn, God is gracious to them, giving them much more than just salvation.

Manna didn't have to taste like honey cakes, but the Bible says it did.  It was apparently delicious.  That was an unnecessary blessing.  It could have tasted like plain oatmeal and it would have been a miracle.  God just wanted to be good to them.  God is not the God of just enough, but of abundantly more than you could ever dream of.  At every opportunity, He is good to you without fail.  Once we realize that in our hearts, we can start to desire the other aspects of God.  Next post, we will discuss God's attention to detail.

My Tank Runneth Over

In The Five Love Languages, Gary Chapman presents a concept he calls the "love tank."  It's the idea that in order to love someone, you have to have love in your love tank.  Your tank is depleted whenever you love someone and is refilled whenever you are loved.  It explains why it's so difficult for those who feel unloved to love others and why those who feel very loved can more easily do it.

One note I'd like to make on it, though, is that many Christians want to pour out a pure love for others, yet don't have enough pure love flowing in.  Imagine that you are a waiter or waitress going around the restaurant refilling people's glasses with water.  They want pure, clean water, yet you got the water from a rusty tap and the pitcher you're using had been used as a makeshift flower vase but wasn't washed afterward.  What are the odds that the water you're pouring out is even close to pure?

Your love is no different.  You can't give out any better or purer than you're receiving.  To truly love others, to give them what they really need, you have to be getting what you really need.  We so often look for love from other people and seek to fill our love tanks with friends, relationships, and family, yet we don't realize that all this love, wonderful as it may feel, is still contaminated if it is only human.  Love is only pure if it comes from the source of all love, God.  He can show His love through others, certainly, but these others have to have received it from Him.  You can't give what you don't have yourself.

I'm not going to offer the overly simplistic advice of "just get in the Word and pray" if you want to love God more.  It's good and necessary, but your relationship with God should be alive and real, not formulaic.  Besides, I'm still working out how to desire Him more myself.  This post is just to offer another reason we all need Him.  :)

A Foreign Language

This post isn't really that theological, just something I've been thinking about.  On my first date with my girlfriend, Leah, I asked her what her love languages are.  Her top one is my bottom one and my second one is her fourth, but my top one and her second one are the same.  It worried me slightly at first because it's a shift in how I usually express affection and so if one or both of us didn't successfully shift, the other could end up feeling unloved, despite the true feelings of both of us.

As I got involved with her, though, I found that the shift for both of us came easily.  It got me wondering whether we're supposed to have primary love languages or those that don't speak to us.  It seems that our love languages are set when we're kids by those who know how to express themselves well in one language or who express themselves terribly in another.  For example, I heard so many different things about myself growing up that words of affirmation started to be meaningless to me.  I'd be complimented to no end at home and then ridiculed by my friends.  It seemed over-the-top both ways, but I felt it was more likely that those insulting me were telling it like it is since it's easier to be nice (especially for family who love you) than to say hard things, so I started ignoring the words of affirmation.  It's been difficult for me to give a compliment since and they still don't mean much to me when I receive them.

But is this how it's supposed to be?

Somehow, I just don't think so.  Consider Jesus.  He showed all five love languages almost constantly.  He spoke kindly and encouragingly to those who were lost.  He served by walking to those who were sick and healing them and then by washing the disciples' feet.  He spent three years constantly with the disciples, giving them quality time.  When He healed someone, it was almost always through touch.  And He gave us Himself, salvation, and then the Holy Spirit, not to mention the two separate occasions he turned a small amount of food into enough for thousands.

He accepted their praise and when they touched Him (I'm sure He was hugged countless times by those He'd healed).  He accepted an act of service when the woman washed His feet.  He accepted gifts as well (unlikely that He had enough money to support Himself and twelve other men for three years from his earnings as a carpenter), including the expensive ointment the woman used on His feet.  And He died so that we could have an eternity up in Heaven with Him.

I think we were meant to show and accept love equally well in all five love languages and that we've been limiting ourselves and allowing ourselves to feel less loved than we are by ignoring some of these based on our past.

Here's what I want you to do: examine your love languages and ask yourself why you do or don't feel loved when someone shows their affection that way.  If the answer is something in your past, I want you to forgive the person (if they turned you off to that language) and then, either way, try to start balancing your love languages out.  Maybe you'll never get to the point where all of them are equally accepted and given, but we shouldn't be limiting how we feel loved because someone else failed in our lives.  It may take practice and reminding yourself at first, but I think once you realize where your aversion came from and have let it go, embracing love in that way will come more easily than you think.

As this is just a theory I came up with a couple days ago, I'd be very interested in hearing feedback, either here or on my facebook page.

Justice and Grace

It sounds like they're two opposites, doesn't it? Justice is getting what you deserve and grace is being shown mercy, i.e., not getting what you deserve. As Christians, I think we fall into one of two traps: we either ignore grace and try to earn everything or we ignore justice and forget that our sins, any one of them, are enough to earn us hell for eternity. In other words, we forget either grace or we forget justice because we figure that they both can't apply, being opposites.

I want you to look at this a different way. I want you to consider how meaningless grace is without justice. If you were in a foreign country and broke one of the laws they have there that they don't have here and a cop stopped you, told you what you'd done, and then let you go without a penalty, it wouldn't mean much if your violation was one that didn't have a penalty associated (there actually are such laws, oddly enough). You could do that violation over and over and the worst thing that would happen is an inconvenient conversation with an officer, asking you to stop but powerless to make you do so.

Now imagine the penalty was 20 years in prison. It wouldn't matter whether you thought the penalty was fair. You are in another country and subject to their rules. (Ignore for now things like your country's gov't stepping in to negotiate.) You're quickly found guilty and sentenced. As you're being hauled off to jail, the judge steps in front and says, "Let him/her go. I will serve the sentence in their place." The guards take off your handcuffs and put them on the judge. Then that innocent judge goes willingly to take your place while you are set free. How much does grace mean to you now? That judge took your place so you could be forgiven.

"Why didn't he just acquit me?" you may be asking. Because if he did, he'd be making a mockery of the law that he has sworn to uphold. The law, and by extension, the judge's integrity, demand that someone be punished for the crime. If there was no punishment, it would not truly be grace, but corruption. God did exactly this for you, but on a much grander scale, saving not just you, but all who would call on Him from punishments infinitely worse than 20 years in prison. He created the laws, knowing full well you would break them and be guilty of the punishment necessary. Then, because He cannot be holy or good if He is not just, He knew that someone had to bear the punishment for our sins, so He took it on Himself because He loved us.

"Why not just not make the laws in the first place?" 

Because in that case, too, God is neither holy nor good. You are without crime in a state without laws, but you're not law-abiding. You are in an amorphous state where neither good nor bad exist. God cannot be in this state and be holy at the same time. To be holy, by definition, requires the possibility of unholiness. 

Perhaps even more importantly, the core of God's laws are choosing Him instead of yourself.  The purpose of the Universe, after all, is to glorify its Creator.  If there is no law, then there is no difference in which you choose, which would greatly diminish Him, which is something that cannot happen since we will never be even fractionally comparable to God. Conversely, if God compelled obedience, then there would be no possibility of love, since love, like holiness, requires the possibility of its opposite to exist.

Thus, the laws are required for God to be holy and good.  His laws require both the possibility of breaking them and, once they are broken, punishment for those infractions, or else they are meaningless.  That punishment was taken by Jesus because He wanted to be merciful to us.  Without the law, though, that grace and His sacrifice would have been meaningless.

Render Unto Caesar

I was reading Matthew 22:15-22 this morning. In this passage, the Pharisees tried to trick Jesus into saying something against Caesar or the Roman government, so they asked Him if it was right to pay taxes if He doesn't regard men. Jesus asks for a coin and then asks them whose image and inscription is on it. They answer, "Caesar's." Jesus replies, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's." For years, I thought this just meant that we were supposed to pay our taxes and submit ourselves to the governments where we live, provided they are not commanding us to do something against our beliefs. This morning, it meant something totally different. Jesus asked whose image and inscription was on the coin and when they said it was Caesar's, Jesus' reply means the coin is Caesar's because it has his image and inscription on it. The coin belonged to him. The Bible says we are created in the image of God. Also, God created us, much like an artist creates a painting. In most paintings, the artist signs his or her name, even though they often leave signature strokes in various places that separate their works from the works of any other. You won't find some small tattoo of God's signature on you, but you can see His signature in the brilliant complexity of everything in your body, from larger organs like the brain to almost infinitely complex human DNA strand that the body replicates perfectly countless times a day. If you are imprinted with His image and have His signature on you, you are His. The Bible says we are to give Caesar what is Caesar's and give God what is God's. If we are God's, then we are to give ourselves to Him. Another aspect of this is Jesus didn't say, "Cut the coin in half, then, and give half to Caesar." The whole coin was given. Likewise, we are to give all of ourselves to God, not just a certain portion. Here's where the analogy breaks down a little: most people had multiple coins, only some of which were required in taxes, but you have only one you and God wants far more from you than Caesar ever did. Your entire self belongs to Him. The advantage, though, is that He knows what to do with you far better than you know what to do with yourself. In a movie, one kid picked up a guitar and started playing, but the music was awful. A father figure came in, took the guitar, played a few bars perfectly, and handed the guitar back to the boy, saying, "It sounds fine to me." The guitar was the same, but one player was a novice and the other a master. In your life, you are that novice. You pick at a few strings and try to find the right chords, but you're slow, clumsy, and sound flat or sour notes more often than pure ones. God is the master. He knows exactly what to do in your life to make the most beautiful song possible come from it. It doesn't mean you'll enjoy every bar as it happens to you, but the end of the song is going to be triumphant on a scale that the Hallelujah Chorus can only dream of...but only if you give your life to the Master. It's His anyway.

Moving On

My life has been tumultuous over the last two weeks. I was set up with a potential girlfriend, had a great first date, but things fizzled from there and ended last night. My landlords moved back and announced that they're not renewing our lease. Then I found a new place that's even better than this one. A few days after that, I found out I had only been looking at one region for my book sales, so what I thought was 1600 downloads in the last six weeks was really over 1900. I finished a query letter proposal for this book and did one round of editing on the proposal so now all that remains is a second round of editing and then researching agents and publishing companies. Then today, the woman I volunteer for at the church bookstore let slip a secret she had promised to keep, which led to several unpleasant conversations with a couple other parties, one of whom wasn't even involved. Lastly, it came out that I'm going to another church, so the boss of this bookstore manager fired me. That's an awful lot in two weeks. And now comes the part that I've been most looking forward to and least looking forward to: returning to Virginia, which I still think of as home. I'm looking forward to it because I'll see my friends again, some of whom are like family to me. There will be hugs aplenty, which I get maybe once a week around here if I'm lucky. There will be laughs and deep conversations and lots of catching up. But then comes the part that makes me not look forward to it: leaving. It's not just that I will have to say goodbye again to these people; it's that when I say goodbye this time, I don't know when I'll see them again. One friend has already moved away and another is moving in a couple of weeks, so it's actually likely I'll never see them again after this weekend. It's almost like in the winter when you've been out in the cold for a while, knowing that there's a merry fire crackling in the fireplace. You were there once, but had to leave to shovel snow. You're invited back in, but it's almost worse to go in again because you're finally used to the cold, so getting warm and then going back out again makes it that much worse. Yet I need the warmth. I need the friendship and love that I've been almost entirely without for the last seven months. I know God is in control. The way He handled my future living accommodations is amazing and how the book has been selling is encouraging as well. For the other situations, I may not understand why they happened, but there's a reason somewhere. There's not really a Christian point to all of this. If anything, it's that I'm growing in my trust in God. Through everything that's happened this past couple of weeks, I've remained calm and my faith in God hasn't wavered. All I have to do is trust in Him to not let me fall, and then do what He bids me to do. Much easier and more productive than kicking and flailing and fighting Him every step of the way... :)

Scar Tissue

Hundreds of years ago, princes had whipping boys to take their punishment for them. They messed up in school, the whipping boy would get hit. They lashed out at the servants, the whipping boy got the belt. They talked back to their parents, it was the whipping boy who got stripes. No matter what the young prince did, he was pretty much immune to being punished himself, at least as far as corporal punishment. One result of this was that princes had few scars. Oh, they might get some from sword practice or from any rough-housing they may have started with siblings, and perhaps one from clumsily tripping on the stairs or falling off a horse, but their sins weren't punished. This meant that not only did they not feel the pain of what they did wrong, but they didn't bear the marks of it, either. We have a volunteer whipping boy, who has already taken the punishment for our sins. His name is Jesus. We may still face correction from God or the results of our actions from the world, but the penalty for our sins has been paid already. The stripes have been taken by someone else. This means that we shouldn't be bearing the scars of our sins. So many of us, however, bare our scars to the world, almost proudly. We talk about our past, not just when it will help bring people to God, but anytime a related topic is brought up. We mention them not just with the hurt that our sins caused us and how far they took us from God, but with a certain longing for those good times that we left behind. Some of us, on the other hand, are so ashamed of our past that we don't bring it up to anyone. We act as though our past can never be erased, like we are tarnished for all time. If you do either of these, I'm not judging. I have been guilty of both myself, especially the latter. What I'm saying is that God doesn't want you to live this way. He doesn't want you wearing the scars, whether you show them to the world or keep them hidden. He wants you to remember where you came from, but not to live as though the past is your future. You don't have to bear the pain from what you did because He already bore it for you. To continue to claim those scars is to say that His blood isn't good enough, that it can't wash away your past. God the King made you His adopted prince or princess, and then Jesus volunteered to be your whipping boy so you could be presented without scar or blemish before God. To do this, though, you have to let go of your past, forgiving yourself for it, whatever you've done, and walking away from it. No more shame or berating yourself and no more boasting of all that you did and got away with. You have to let it all go, or you take only half the gift that Jesus offers you.