17 May 2020

To Live and Love in God’s Love for You in Christ

The Lord your God has created you for life, and He has created you for love.  That is how you are made.  It is what you are here for and who you are to be.  Your existence and your being are from God, and so there is a presence and a movement about you that belong with Him.  You live best when you live toward Him and move in harmony with Him.

When you are apart from Him, away from Him, or at odds with Him, you are and will be restless, out of sorts, and afraid.  Your heart will be searching and longing for Him, whether you know it or not, and it will never be satisfied, at peace, or at home, until you are found in Him and are living in Him.  Otherwise, your heart will grow cold, bitter, and hard, and you will be angry all the time, or despairing; arrogant and proud, or eaten alive with envy and jealousy.

Driving everyone else away and retreating into yourself doesn’t work, and it won’t help.  Nor does using and controlling other people.  Neither lonely isolation nor lording it over your neighbor will gain you the peace and satisfaction that you crave.  These are ways in which you try to be like God, and you make a god out of yourself, but they are not the divine life at all, nor anything like it.

The one true God never has and never does exist in lonely isolation, but is a perpetual communion of three divine Persons in perfect unity, an eternal relationship of mutual Love.  And it is for the sake of that divine eternal Love — the Father for His Son, the Son for His Father in the Holy Spirit — that He created all things in peace.  Not out of necessity or need, but solely out of Love.  Not to be served, but to serve, to give good gifts by grace, to love His creatures with fatherly affection.

You have been created — you exist, and you are here — to live with God, and to be loved by God.

He does indeed love you.  He has done so all along, from before you even were.  He has created you in love, and He loves you still.  The Father loves you in His Son and with His Holy Spirit.  Therefore, in His love you are like God, and you live God’s life, because God the Son has bestowed God the Spirit upon you, and He brings you to God the Father in and with Himself.

This true divine Love in Christ Jesus is the character and content of the true divine Life for which you have been created, and to which you are called.  Therefore, in the same way that your heart and mind and body and life are restless until they rest in God, so do you also long for love from your innermost self.  You long to be loved — and you are created by God to love others, as well.

As the Father loves you in His Son, so are you called to love the Father in Christ Jesus.  And as the Holy Spirit lives in you — who is Himself the very God who is Love — so are you called to love the Father and the Son, and to love your neighbor as you are loved by the Holy Triune God.  To love in this way — to love both God and man — is fundamental to the life you are given to live.

But the problem is that, while you have been created for love, and so you have a built-in inner hunger and deep desire for love, your heart and mind and soul and spirit have been bent, turned backwards, curved inward upon yourself.  Which is to say that you are consumed with self-love, which is not really love at all but selfishness and self-idolatry.  That is your most basic sinfulness.  You do not really trust any love but your own, and you are not really concerned about love for anyone but yourself.  And so the whole beautiful capacity for love for which you are created, has become instead this crushing insatiable appetite of lust and greed and jealousy and spite.

Oh, to be sure, you may love those who love you — with a certain kind of love — but there’s always a condition, a contingency, a contract, so to speak.  What’s in it for you?  And how can you best protect your own interests and yourself?  How can you be safe and secure and certain that you won’t be hurt or taken advantage of?

Knowing your own selfishness, even if you would hardly admit it, you don’t trust others to love you any better than you love them.  On the one hand, you must work for their love and earn it; and on the other hand, you must guard yourself against betrayal and treachery.  Selfish love is never free, and it is never certain.  But selfish love is all that you have ever known apart from Christ.

It is the sort of love that you expect from Christ Himself, as well, and from His God and Father.  For as you make a god out of yourself, so do you also assume that God must be like you, and that His love must be like yours.  That is the way of the world and its thinking, yes.  But the world does not see God or know Him.  Consequently, you strive to win His love, to bargain and barter for it, to work for it, to earn it, and then to horde it for yourself, as though others could rob you of it.

It is such a sad dilemma, because your heart cannot be happy or have any lasting peace apart from the love of God, but you are so mistaken and confused about the nature of His love.  You long for it, but you do not trust it, and you do not know where to find it or how to get it.  In fact, a love that you would have to work for and earn would be no real love at all.  That sort of love will never satisfy, but will only stoke the burning fire of your selfish desire and leave you desperate for more.

Longing for God’s love, therefore, but neither knowing nor trusting that He loves you, your heart is embittered toward Him, angry and resentful, but also hurt and afraid.  You perceive (wrongly) that He demands so much, and that He gives so little in return; and so you are scared, and you grow tired, and you don’t know what to do.

You can’t win this game, but there’s nothing you can do about it.  You’re playing by all the wrong rules, but you are not able to sort it out for yourself.  You’ll have no peace or rest or satisfaction until you live with God and abide in His love, but His life and love are foreign to your fallen nature and your sinful flesh, as elusive and beyond your grasp as they are to the world.  They sound like impossible demands, which accuse and condemn you and drive you to despair and death.

So you fill your life with countless idols, and you erect your monuments of every kind to hedge your bets.  You’re as religious as you know how to be, captivated by whatever comes down the pike having any hint of spirituality, and still always craving something new, the next big thing.

You’re always searching for “the unknown God,” the One who will love you and give you life, who will save you and keep you safe.

But now, in spite of all that, you do know Him, don’t you?  You know the God of love, who is your life and your salvation.  Not because you have figured Him out and found Him on your own, but because He has found you and reveals Himself to you.  You know His Voice in His Word of the Gospel.  And though you do not see Him with your eyes, you love Him because He first loves you.

In His divine and perfect love, He has not forced Himself upon you, nor does He force or constrain you to love Him.  In gentleness He has come to woo you to Himself in peace.  In mercy He reveals Himself to you by His grace, and He makes Himself known to you through His forgiveness of your sins.  He gives you life by giving His own life for you, and by raising you up in and with Himself.  He does not accuse you or condemn you, but He comforts you and heals you.  He teaches you to know and trust His love, simply by loving you.  He gives you Himself and His Spirit freely.

His commandments, therefore, are not burdensome and deadly, but life-giving.  He does not set before you the righteousness of the Law and of works as a means of getting life for yourself, as though He were calling you to raise yourself up by some new and better effort on your part.  Nor does He offer you a “tit-for-tat,” “you-scratch-My-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours” kind of bargain.  The Lord does not learn how to love from you, nor is the love of God contingent or conditional upon your love for Him.  Rather, what does He command?  “Love one another, as I have loved you.”  It is first of all the case that He loves you, even in this world of tribulation, even to the end.  He has come to you in love, and He will not leave you.  He gets down on His knees to serve you, to cleanse and forgive you, to feed you, and to quench your thirst, in order to give you Life.

It is because He loves you — because He loves you so faithfully and so well — that you love Him, and that you love one another in His Name and for His sake.  His New Commandment is, in one respect, the same Law of Love that you have heard from the beginning, as He also commanded from Mt. Sinai.  But it is made brand new by His own fulfillment of that Law in His perfect love for you.  In Him it is not an order, a demand, or a threat, but an assertion of the Life that is given you to live — the divine Life, which Christ has lived for you in the flesh, that you may live in Him.

It is still true that you cannot raise yourself up to live and to love in that way by any wisdom, reason, or strength of your own.  But then again, it was never the intention that you should.

You have not been created to live independently or self-sufficiently, but to live in and with God, by His grace, through faith in His Word.  And you have been rescued and redeemed from your sin and death, from your selfishness and lonely isolation, not to live unto yourself, but unto Christ.  That is why the character and content of your life in Christ is Love.  Not that you achieve or gain that divine life by your loving, but that you now live that life which He has given you in His love.

To speak of this life and of this love is to speak of the Lord Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, crucified and risen from the dead.  For you know God, His Life and Love, in this dearly-beloved and well-pleasing Son of the Father.  He has loved you by coming and giving Himself for you.  He has loved you by taking all your sins upon Himself and bearing them in His Body to the Cross, making atonement for them by His death, by the shedding of His holy, precious Blood.  And in His Resurrection from the dead He now loves you by raising you up with Himself and bringing you to the Father in Himself.  That right there — His Resurrection and Ascension — is the life to which He calls you, which He now also gives you by His grace by pouring out His Holy Spirit upon you and into your heart through the Gospel.  That is how He loves you, and that is how you now live.

Likewise, even now, your Baptism saves you, as day by day it raises you up from death to life in and with Christ Jesus.  It cleanses your conscience before God through the Resurrection of the same Lord Jesus Christ, through whom you are justified.  For as He has given Himself for you and died for you bearing all your sins, His Resurrection is your resurrection.  His Resurrection is your righteousness.  And His Resurrection is your reconciliation with God the Father in heaven.  More than that, the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the sure and certain proof that God loves you.

In His Resurrection, and so also in your Holy Baptism, you are recreated, and you are made brand new for life with God and for love.  That is the hope that is yours, and is most certainly true, which is given to you in the Gospel, in the free and full forgiveness of all your sins.  Not one of them remains.  Not one of them is counted against you.  Not one of them is seen by your Father who loves you.  And as the Father thus loves you in Christ Jesus by and with that Gospel, so do you sanctify the Lord Jesus Christ in your heart, and you strengthen your heart, by the same Gospel.

If you are afraid — if you are ashamed — if you are embarrassed — if you are guilty — if you are hurting — if you are sad — if you are angry — if you are tired — listen to the Gospel, the forgiveness of all your sins, and hear and receive the Love of God in Christ Jesus.  It is for you.

Because you are loved by the Father, by the Son, and by the Holy Spirit, you have and you live the life for which you have been created, and you are free to love without fear.  You know such love, and you know the one true God who loves you, because He comes to you here, and He gives Himself to you, and He abides with you here at His Table in His House, unto the Life everlasting.

In the Name + of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

No comments: