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Monday, September 06, 2021

Outreageous Love

 

Have you ever been tickled by Jesus’ teaching, so filled with delight with what he taught that you are happy from the top of your head all the way down to the tip of your toes? While I cannot say all of his teaching affects me that way, much of it does!

Loving others to me seems so much more pleasant and agreeable than hanging onto cold, prickly feelings toward them, harboring grudges, and that sort of thing. Doing good to others seems so much more enjoyable than doing harm to them. I love the look of surprise of someone’s face when I give them an extravagant gift that they were not expecting. I feel happy inside. I have done them more than a good turn. I have shown them more than ordinary love. I have shown them outrageous love.

God shows us outrageous love. He shows no restraint in his love for us. He is bold and daring. He does not hold back. He can startle us with his love. We may say to ourselves, “What is going on here?” God is showing us his extraordinary love.

A part of me loves people like God does. That part of me is filled with warm feelings and goodwill toward the people in my life, the people around me. Love bubbles up from within me like water from a spring. It can be too much for people who are unaccustomed to that kind of exuberant love. I have to sit on it. “No, you can’t say, ‘I love you’ to….! She’ll get the wrong idea!!” My heart is overflowing with affection, caring, and tenderness. But I must restrain these emotions lest I am misunderstood.

The part of me that loves people like God does, I believe, is activated by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit not only flips the on switch but also provides the power. We can hit the on-switch on our laptop but if the laptop is not plugged into a power source and its battery is dead, nothing will happen. The structures of our brain and the chemistry of our brain may play a part but loving people like God does is more than a chemical reaction. Loving people like God does also requires an act of will. We set our hearts and minds on loving them like God does. It is a choice that we make, enabled and influenced by God.

What if someone does not want us to love them? I have struggled with that question. Jesus, however, does not give us any wiggle room. We cannot opt out of loving others and consider ourselves a disciple of Jesus. A disciple in a deliberate, positive, and vigorous way emulates the life and teaching of the one whom he or she calls lord, master, or teacher. He or she puts a lot of energy into it. 

As the apostle James stresses in his letter, “faith without the right actions is dead and useless.” Our faith and our actions may be described as partners. Our deeds implement our faith. In James’ words, “faith without action is as dead as a body without a soul.”

Jesus did not give us the two Great Suggestions. Jesus did not couch his instructions to the multitude to love their enemies and to treat others exactly as they would like other people to treat them as suggestions. Jesus did not give us the New Suggestion. Jesus spoke with authority and gave these precepts as commandments. He gave them as rules of action or conduct. Jesus also taught that if we loved him, we would show our love for him by obeying them. We would not obey them out of a sense of duty or obligation but out of love for him.

In expressing our love for others, we are expressing our love for Jesus. This takes us back to the question, “What if someone does not want us to love them?” Here we must ascertain what is prompting them to feel this way.

Have other feelings for them become tangled with our love for them and they are picking up on those feelings and they do not welcome such feelings? Do they have a view of love that associates love with these other feelings so whether these feelings are present, they are reading these feelings into our love for them?

Do they have such a low estimation of themselves that they do not feel that they are worthy of anyone’s love?

Do they prefer to keep an emotional distance between themselves and other people? Does the thought of someone loving them stir up emotional conflict within themselves or cause them to experience stress or anxiety? Do they struggle with being open and honest about their own emotions? Do they associate love in their minds with giving people a lot of emotional attention, which they themselves have difficulty giving, and consequently shy away from those who express or show love toward them out of uneasiness and apprehension that they might be expected to reciprocate?

Have they had a bad experience with what they thought was love in the past? Have they had a bad experience with individuals who claimed that they were Christians but tried to manipulate them with what these individuals said was love for them? Did such an individual show them unwanted sexual attention or sexually exploit them? Did such an individual exploit them in other ways?

Do they have difficulty in trusting other people? Are they suspicious of our motives?

Do they harbor bitter feelings or resentment toward us personally or toward Christians as a group?

This is just a short list of reasons that someone may be unreceptive to our love for them as a disciple of Jesus. It is not exhaustive.

Whatever may be their reason, we cannot stop loving them. We cannot stop treating them with respect, kindness, caring, forgiveness, gentleness, patience, empathy, open-handedness—treating them lovingly as Jesus would treat them.

It goes beyond showing our love for Jesus by loving others. We are made in the image of God. God is love. We were created to love our fellow human beings. God’s image, however, has been marred by sin. As a result, we do not love as we were meant to love. God’s grace is working in us to restore God’s image in us, including loving like God. In loving others, we are exhibiting what should have been our true nature if sin had not entered the human story.

In his science fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet, C. S, Lewis describes a world in which its races of intelligent beings are living as God created them to live. It is a world that have never known sin. Only in our world is its race of intelligent beings, humankind, “bent.” We are not living as God created us to live. Due to sin, we became changed as if by bending from our original condition. 

God sent Jesus into the world not only put things right between God and us and to teach and show us how to live but also to begin our unbending, the restoration of God’s image in us. In loving others, we become what we should been from the very moment God gave humankind life. We become what God meant us to be.

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