Rev. Ron Sumners
April 14, 1996
In the musical "Oliver,” Oliver Twist sings a song that presents a haunting question, "Where is Love?" Oliver's search is universal. And it is not merely love we search for, but for a steadfast and enduring love.
How often the fickle nature of human love disappoints us. After George Matheson, the hymn writer, found out he was going blind, he decided to tell his fiancée. He was crushed by her response. She gave back his ring and refused to marry a man who would rapidly become dependent on her. From the bleak despair which came after his engagement was broken, Matheson moved to new confidence in the Savior and wrote these words:
O Love that wilt not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in Thee;
I give Thee back the life I owe,
That in Thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be."
Matheson, in pain, made a discovery about the kinds and quality of love. In the most shattering of circumstances, we are often forced to realize the fickleness of human love. Human love is often frail and flies when faced with crisis.
God's love is different! His love is constant and dependable. As Matheson learned, His love is there when other loves are gone. All other relationships have their source in His care.
Our happiness as Christians comes from this. The scriptures do not read "God has Love" as though love were a possession which God might lay aside if he got angry with us. The Bible says, "God IS love." Love is not an attribute of God but His very substance and Being.
We would not say, "Man has protoplasm." Protoplasm is not something that we own and can discard if we want to. Protoplasm is the very "stuff'' we are made of. Just so, love is the very "stuff" that God is made of. God does not exist without love and if you do not have love in you then God does not exist in you!
I remember when I was a little boy watching my grandfather chop down a tree with an axe. The chips flew in all directions and picked up one and said "Granddaddy, I didn't know trees had wood in them." Trees, of course, do not contain wood. Trees ARE wood!
Love is the food of our spirit. We are nourished on it or we are mal-nourished. God made us the way an engineer designs an engine, to run on a certain type of fuel. The only fuel designed to drive our spirits is the infallible Love of God.
We must have love and esteem before we can become mature individuals, before we can become secure. So, we all seek love that won't desert us when our needs are great. God's constant redeeming love is the source for our security and, therefore, of our joy and happiness.
Yet we have all struggled. We all have cried out to God and heard our cry ring like an echo. We ask, ''Where is Love?" convinced that God is absent. The Love of God is always there, but it is not real to the individual until it is accepted.
Jesus told the parable of the nobleman who had a banquet but those invited refused to attend. So, the lame and blind were asked to come, and they did. For the poor who accepted it, food was there.
For years I knew about Africa. I knew where the continent was located on the Globe. I knew a lot about the people from classroom study. But it was not real for me until I stood in the squalid streets of Lagos, Nigeria. Only when I experienced it was it a real place for me.
It is not reasonable for us to ask non-Christians about the love of God. They can speak of it only in secondhand terms. They have never really experienced it. I think that too often we talk too easily about the love of God. We have pretty words and theological phrases to explain it. But when the eternal God enfolds you in His love, words are inadequate. God's love cannot be known by definition. If we have a firsthand experience, the sheer joy prevents our being able to define it.
Some of us, however, lapse into unhappiness because we embrace a kind of self-punishment. Saved by the overwhelming presence of God's love, we turn with an inner feeling of incompleteness to ask, "Is this the Love of God? Surely there must be something more?" We begin to search for deeper evidence of something that we already possess. We are never more miserable than when we believe we have discovered that God is inadequate to give us support because our problems are too big. Soon we begin to believe that God does not love us.
We are not so much problem-solvers as problem-seekers. Even in our gadget-ridden completeness of Western civilization, we rarely meet a happy person. Having everything, we feel cheated. Deprived of big reasons to lament our circumstances, we take the little things and magnify them. We are experts at mountain construction from molehills. Victor Frankl said it took him only a few days at the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz to realize that he never had a real problem at home in Vienna.
Even after becoming Christians we seem to want problems. Instead of drawing near to God, we retreat, like Jonah, from what we know to be His will for us. We want to love the world and the things of the world, while fully aware that friendship with the world is the quickest way to drift away from God. As a result, we make God remote. And when God grows remote, so does His love.
In our first coming to Christ, we rejoiced in the inner delight of his new presence. He filled us and then encircled us with love. Christ left no doubt that he was real, and He was ours. What magnificent love! We had found the life beyond ourselves that filled the void within ourselves.
Then came the days of dread. Our confidence siphoned off into uncertainty. I n a cold room, the farther we are from the warmth of the fireplace, the less we feel its effect. Likewise, in the remoteness of our self-will, we feel the chill of our rebellion and shutter because we suppose that God does not love us.
When we are redeemed, the indwelling Spirit of God convinces us that His love is there through the presence of Jesus Christ and will not forsake us even when we tum away from Him. There was a son who disobeyed his father and was sent to spend the night in the attic of their old house. The child was terrified to spend the night amid the shadows and the creaky darkness of the attic. But the father's love moved him to compassion. He could not commute the punishment he had given, but he did climb to the attic and spend the night with his son. God's love does not abandon us in the long night of our despair. We undergo trails. We endure long nights of crisis during our pilgrimage through this world, but we are never alone, for the love of God has come to spend the night.
God's love was costly, so costly that it went to the cross. But while His great love is not cheap, it is free. It is the gift of God. In fact, the root meaning of the word "grace" is "gift.” Thus, our happiness is destroyed not only when we create problems that don't exist, but also when we try to repay God for His magnificent love.
Any attempt to pay for any gift mars the gift itself. The gift becomes a purchase. If I offer you my watch as a gift, all you have to do is receive it to make it yours. But suppose that I require you to walk around the block to make it yours. How have I altered the gift? You would be glad to earn so much by doing so little, yet the very act of even such a small requirement makes the gift become a wage. The temptation is then to say, "Look what a bargain I have made! I must really be clever to have earned something so valuable." The value of the Father's gift lies precisely in the fact that it cannot be bought.
Jesus alone is Savior! There is nothing we can add to Grace. If there were, then in some minimal sense we would become responsible for our own redemption. Any struggle to be a better person which aims at earning favor with God is a futile attempt to make payment to God for a completely free salvation.
A wise friend of mine once warned me that most of us are better at giving gifts than receiving them. When we are given a gift, a simple "thank you" never seems enough. We want to offer something in return, a kind of repayment. Our reluctance to receive God’s Grace illustrates this. We want to contribute to Grace for all it has done for us. The unfortune consequence is that the Love of God passes from gift to wage.
So much of our unhappiness comes from our attempt to purchase what is free. Many feel that they must somehow deserve the Grace of God. They will try to do good or be especially earnest to read all the "Begat" passages or withdraw from all civic organizations to devote their time to bible studies and more spiritual pursuits. Often such activities are the result of their subconscious unwillingness to accept Grace as a gift.
We might call this "Home-made atonement." If we thought about it, we would probably be less comfortable with the hymn "Amazing Grace" than with any other hymn. There are literally thousands of believers whose good works are not so much a response of gratitude for grace as an attempt to pay for it.
Such believers can know only a neurotic kind of discipleship. They cannot know acceptance with Christ nor ever really know true happiness. For happiness is never possible under the heavy burden of debt. Love is free in Christ, and we are best prepared to know happiness as the natural order of God's abundance when we freely accept it, with no attempts at self-atonement.
God is bigger than our theology could ever define. He is infinite love. Infinity has a strange, uncomfortable dimension for us. Infinite Being is God. Infinite time is eternity. Infinite knowledge is omniscience. Infinite power is omnipotence. Infinite existence is omnipresence. Infinite love is AGAPE.
We discover misery only when we make God's love remote, for his love is here. We are just as frustrated when we seek to earn his love, for His love is free. We will be equally miserable if we attempt to discover the limits of God's love, for it is infinite.
How frequently we illustrate the size of our guilt when we ask, "Would God love me if I committed such and such a sin?" The question is an attempt to make the infinite containable. We are like swimmers who are afraid our splashing will empty the ocean.
Guilt may cause us to put boundaries around God's love. It is as though we say, "My sin is too great to be absorbed by God's love." We suspect that somehow His love is not big enough to cover our many sins. The Bible makes it clear that "as far as the East is from the West, so far does He remove our transgressions from us" (Psalms 103:12) Our false guilt is an effort to make things easier for God. But God wants us to trust our every burden to His love. We cannot really convince others of the trustworthiness of His love until we have committed all our sins to Him, and never again dredge up the leftovers from our past.
GOD IS LOVE. His love is big enough to cover all our sin. Will you accept the gift He offers today?
Yorumlar