WE CANNOT LOVE GOD - (at least the way He defines it)
God IS love. John said that twice in that 4th chapter of his first letter, and it sets the final reaches of human destiny. If a person truly loves, that is the evidence of his union with God. If a person truly loves his brother, the invisible God is made visible in that act. That is the last word that can be said – for time and eternity.
God is love. Love is selflessness. God is totally uninterested in what might be to His own advantage. When it speaks of Him vindicating His own righteousness, giving preeminence to His own glory, that is not because of what He gets out of it – it is because only in the sharing of His perfections can His creatures attain theirs. It is for their sakes, for the universe of His creation, that He maintains the sacredness and power of His love.
Love must sometimes appear wrathful, appear self-interested and demanding, appear to maintain its own rights and dignity. Only true love can safely do that, just because of its total detachment from self-interest.
The summit of revelation is that God has created man to be just that – containing, in union with, and guided by this true love without self-interest. And man knows it. Every religion and philosophy seeks love, often exhorting their members to love one another. Whether by this devious pathway or that, almost every philosophy and religion that has emanated from the mind of man ends up on the plateau of love. We might say that mankind has finally settled that one point – that brotherly love is the goal. Neither logic nor intuition nor revelation can offer an alternative. That could well be called “the light that lights every man that comes into the world” (John 1:9).
But pure love without self-interest? Total absorption in the needs of others? Service to others as a debt eternally owed and eternally claimed by my neighbor? The command, “Be you also perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect”? Can that be possible in human experience in this life or the next?
NO in one way, and YES in another.
The “No” way, in which it cannot be possible, is the path of delusion trodden by frustrated millions through history, the theme of a thousand religions, the pious aspiration but never realization of moralist, philosopher, idealist – and the butt of the cynic and pessimist.
It is mankind’s subtlest self-hypnotism. We can love, we can be friendly, kind, cooperative, they say. Give us time and self-discipline and we can attain (or at least approach close enough) to perfect love. Are we not commanded in the Bible to love God and one another? Do not the churches exhort us to imitate Christ? Do they not spur us on to climb the heights of good resolutions by a mixture of prayer and self-effort? The highest philosophers, returning from their explorations of the good life, tell us we ought, therefore we can.
The roots of self-reliance are so deep in us all, so undiscovered, that only by the hard knocks of experience do we discover our vast error. This mountain of perfect love has no route to its summit! It is inaccessible and unclimbable.
Paul makes a revealing comment in Romans 5:7-8,10 which nicely exposes the eternal and impassable gulf between human and divine love: “Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us…when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son”.
There is a limit beyond which human love cannot go – the limit of self-interest and human approval. We might even die for some one or some cause commendable enough, but it must be commendable to us. But pure unconditional love, unrelated to the deservingness of the recipient, is DIVINE.
WE CANNOT LOVE GOD WITH THIS HIGHEST LOVE THOUGH WE MAY OFTEN IMAGINE AND SAY WE DO. That is the “No” way.
Only divine love can truly love HIM. Perfect love cannot be obtained that way, despite the pathetic fact that the world through its centuries of history has tried to proclaim that it could and does. And that is true, not only of human philosophy from Plato onwards, and of all non-Christian religions; it is also tragically true of the perversions of the gospel by “the works of the law” which Paul and John and the other apostles had to combat even in New Testament days. It is seen in the mixture of self-effort and grace through the writings of many of the church leaders, returning again in a multitude of subtle forms from modern pulpits.
The “Yes” way, however, by which such perfect love can be attained is made plain in the Scriptures, and has been preserved in purity of teaching and experience by “the little flock” through the history of the church. Of course it has. God has never left Himself without a witness.
God only is love. That is the point at issue. Not a half of one percent of any mixture is possible. Human love – the love of the independent self apart from God – is the crippled growth out of a monstrous human birth. It is the use of the love-faculty for self-interested ends, instead of it being the means of the radiation of the selfless love of God. For every human birth comes with a “hook” – the nature of Satan’s self-for-self. No matter what heights of idealism or religion are attempted in our own strength, the basis would always be self-love, for creature love can never rise about its source and can never change itself into God’s uncreated love. Eros (sexual love) and Phileo (human brotherly love) is of a different quality from Agape (divine love), and never merely a variation in quantity.
God’s Love Perfected In Us
But now we see the glorious end-purposes of God. They are that we humans are purposed for a new birth in an eternal expression of the divine, by the fact that He who is love has joined Himself eternally to us and us to Him, in Christ. He IS love within and through us.
But that means that we redeemed new children of God are paddling in the middy shallows of the river when we are so constantly concerned with what benefits we receive from Him. Certainly we are thankful. But we must move on from there quickly because the very seeking something for ourselves is a form of self-effort. So how does this “Yes” way work?
It works by staying close in guidance and obedience to the indwelling Christ who IS our love, our divine love, back to the Father and out to those in the world around us. This even surpasses 1 Corinthians 13, the “love chapter”, in that a cause is more fundamental than its effects. A redeemed person must love his brethren. Why? Because being born of God he is born of love. God within is his new nature. This kind of love, reaching out to save the whole world, is the way He now loves others through us, and its manifestation is our love for each other is the only way God is seen by men.
This kind of love, - divine love – is the ONLY way God’s children can “love God with all your heart and mind and your neighbor as yourself.” The Eros and Phileo human crippled forms of love will not do. WE CANNOT TRULY LOVE GOD OR ANYONE ELSE EXCEPT BY GOD’S OWN INDWELLING DIVINE LOVE. [Back to Home]
Discovering Our Roots
Many people take great pleasure in hunting up their pedigrees, their family tree or their roots. There is always a risk in doing this since one may encounter some unpleasant character that could somewhat spoil the picture, but it could nevertheless add to the excitement. In any event, an understanding of our roots gives us a sense of our true identity.
My sister and my aunt have been great genealogy buffs. They have traced the Hodapp ancestry through a direct line back as far as 1637 in Baden-Baden, Bavaria. The Hodapp’s were Bavarian bakers. (I guess this is the reason that I love the bakery section at the supermarket. The taste for those wonderful baked desserts is in my genes!)
They have traced a very specific history of how the Hodapp’s came to America in the early 1800’s. They came ashore at New Orleans and began a trip up the Mississippi searching for a place to settle which, preferably, had a similar climate to their Bavarian roots. Some dropped off the boat in the St. Louis/St. Charles area and, for whatever reasons, decided to settle there. The majority of the family continued north on the Mississippi into the area of Minnesota. The climate and the fertile soil made them decide that this would be their home.
We now know names and dates of specific brothers and sisters who made the journey. We know about events which occurred along the way such as cholera on the boat and attacks by Indians from the shore. We know about the rough times that the Minnesota settlement had in carving out a place in the wilderness in the heart of a hostile Indian territory. This information was found in a local history of the Mankato, Minnesota area written in the late 1800’s by a German Catholic priest from the area.
All of this information has given our family a sense of real Hodapp roots.
Of course, that great book, the Bible, gives us an even deeper discovery of human roots. In regard to Jesus’ humanity, the Gospels give us His family tree or genealogy, without omitting those shadier characters who helped to form the direct line to His birth at Bethlehem. There was Rahab the harlot, and David the man of blood - the murderer, a man of lust and pride and fear. These, and others who fell short of the divine ideal, were not left out of the record, but in each case were given a place of honor. Despite how dishonorable this pedigree appears, how wonderful to know that God has everything in hand, for “He works all things after the counsel of His own will” (Eph. 1:11).
We certainly are all aware that our family tree - or roots - might well reveal participation in evil as well as commendable actions. However, it is our hidden roots, our spiritual connections, that are more important in giving us our sense of identity. As creatures originating from God, what is the nature of our spiritual roots?
That we have such roots is certainly substantiated by Paul in his word to the pagan Athenians when he said, concerning the “unknown God”, “In Him we live and move and HAVE OUR BEING” (Acts 17:28). The apostle John affirmed that there was not a man who came into the world in whom there was not concealed the Light of Life (John 1:4). And Paul said that every person is without excuse in recognizing that there is a Creator God (Romans 1:19-20). Hidden in all is a God-consciousness! It can be ignored, or recognized and acted upon.
God does not leave His creation - man and nature - and become “God in absentia”, as would a clock maker who makes a clock, winds it up, and puts it on the shelf as something existing quite separate from himself. No, God’s creation is in a unique way an extension of Himself, a manifestation of His being. It is true that God is hidden in all His creation, but not absent. The “divine genes” are there doing their spiritual work. God is hidden in man’s consciousness, though He may be sadly ignored by man’s devotion to lesser gods. To tear man away from his self-chosen gods is the supreme work of the Cross, applied by the Holy Spirit.
Man is composed of spirit, soul and body - three parts making up one whole (1 Thessalonians 5:23). I like to say that I AM a spirit, I HAVE a soul, and I LIVE in a body. The real root of me is my human spirit which is the foundation of my being, an eternal part of the spirit realm of God. My soul is my intellect, emotions and will which connect my human spirit to my body for material action. And, of course, my body is strictly earthly and material (although it will be replaced with some form of spiritual body in the future - see 1 Cor. 15:35-44).
Looking for his real roots, man can come to look into the face of Jesus Christ and there begin to see what has been up to then a negligible matter to him - the glory of the Family of God. The person who begins to tire of and turn from the lesser gods will begin to see that not only are his sins to be dealt with (actually have been!) but that his personal identity is inescapably threatened. Jesus died not only “for our sins” but AS sin: “He became sin for us” (Eph. 5:21).
The Bible traces my human roots back much further than 1637 in Bavaria. All the “family” names of Smith, Brown, McCarthy, etc., and HODAPP can be traced back ultimately to our first parents, Adam and Eve. Everyone’s human gene structure, as complicated as DNA has become, goes back to the egg and sperm DNA of these first human beings. Our bodies, souls, spirits had their human roots in the composition of these two first people.
Now what did we inherit from them in these roots? The Bible says that all humanity inherited the human spirit nature of Satan! (Gen. 3:14-19; John 8:38-44). Our spirit root became saturated with the ideas and desires of Satan - the Enemy and the Accuser - because of the wrong choice of our first parents in the Garden. We inherited the desire to sin, i.e. to be separated from dependence on God, our Creator. We inherited the effects of our first parent’s mistaken desire to live their own lives in their own strength. This was not an “anti-God” desire. I am sure that they still recognized God as a friend that they could call on when they really needed to. But they chose to attempt to be independent selves making their own decisions about life. Is this not what we see in the worldly people around us? Most are not “anti-God”. They just think that they can get along without Him almost all of the time. They look to their own supposed strengths to handle things. But of course, in a dire emergency, they then call out for help. They say that you never saw so many people praying in earnest as on the Titanic in its last moments.
So our human roots from our first parents consisted of the effects of their sin (commonly called “original sin”), but also included the nature and desire to commit our own sin - to live separated from God except in drastic emergencies. Adam and Eve had to make an original choice of roots - would they depend on God or would they depend on themselves - and they made the wrong choice. This established our human roots to this day.
This was the bad news! Now here’s the good news: like Adam and Eve, each one of us can also choose the root nature of our human spirit! WE CAN CHANGE OUR ROOTS! We are born with a SIN root nature; but we can choose to change our roots into a GOD root nature. And I don’t mean just temporarily - I mean permanently, forever!
This change in root nature is called “salvation”. It can only come to us by deliberate choice - in becoming persuaded by all the circumstances of human life that we DO need to depend on our Creator God. When we recognize this dependence, we are then shown by revelation the cross of Jesus Christ and the necessity of belief in His sacrifice for our sins.
As we repent and accept Christ as Lord, we instantly change our roots. The Satan nature is instantly removed and the nature of God replaces it in the Person of Christ who comes to indwell the changed human spirit.
Though I can’ t change the fact that I came from a baker in Bavaria in 1637, and I can’t change the fact that I came from the “loins” - the sperm and egg - of my first parents Adam and Eve, I CAN CHANGE MY ROOTS WHERE IT REALLY COUNTS - IN MY SPIRIT NATURE!
This recognition and acceptance of God’s foundational plan will begin to undo man’s self-centeredness and bring him eventually (still by trial and error after the salvation change) to the spiritual growth God desires in His children. Each person’s experience in passing through this process may differ in a thousand ways from others who are making the same quest for their roots. This discovery is often made through pain, as the person is released from the self life into an awareness of union with Christ. Man discovers that his “union” roots are in the eternal union experienced with the indwelling Christ - and with Christ’s own union with the Father. In the following scriptures, Jesus is clearly identifying us along with Himself in relation to the Father:
“The firstborn among many brethren” (Rom. 8:29).
“Chosen in Him before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4).
“That they may be one, even as We are one - I in them and You in Me that they may be made perfect in one” (John 14:21).
There are many scriptures that show that we are brought into that same flow of Divine union which the Son enjoys with the Father. We are therefore not experiencing some new solution to man’s problem, but are being engulfed in and embraced by the only union there is - the eternal Son-Father relationship. The ability to comprehend this was transmitted by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the comprehension continued with the teachings of Paul and John to the fledgling Church, and continued on down through the checkered career of the Church’ s history - always known to those who saw through to a reality far beyond the mere formal and much-embattled doctrines current in their day.
Today it is being realized more and more that we are not the product of a plan that emerged from God to meet a problem, but that we have emerged from that holy ROOT union of Father and Son and must at all costs be brought to an awareness of the wonder which is at the ROOT of the universe. The Father and the Son are referred to as “one Spirit”, and therefore “he that is joined to the Lord is one Spirit.” This is the unalterable ROOT of our being which can be anyone’s chosen spiritual ROOT. Human life is a schoolhouse of circumstances to bring us to see clearly that our ROOTS are in this absolute union of the Godhead.
In this eternal union in which we are participating, we are embraced by God as His real spirit nature children. Our becoming effectively aware of it, whether by an immediate or by a delayed awareness, is a matter concerning which many stories can be told, both of personal ecstasy and agony.
As temporal beings we date things from the historic events, and rightly so, for these are what arrest us and direct our attention to the eternal truths. Going back to 1637 family history can, in fact is meant to, instill a sense of inheritance of values. This sense can be used by God to draw us into a recognition of inheritance of sin or separation from Him. By this the veil is drawn aside for us to see what reality is in the work and presence of Christ IN US and FOR US and AS US. We date all this from Eden when the process of bringing light out of darkness began to be a working operation. This process has never been stopped through all history; it has flowed as the river of God’s grace through the centuries.
Paul says that we are to be “rooted and grounded in love” (Eph. 3:17). And John says that “God IS love” (1 John 4:16). Our eternal ROOTS are given us, for our beings are grounded in God!
For many, these theological concepts have been almost bypassed. For they, at best, have been the objective prelude to the total personification of our ROOT in Christ, changing for them what has been external formulas into a life-changing inner revelation - a transcendent God out there somewhere to an immanence, an awareness of union as a reality of the soul.
I am going to paraphrase my favorite Bible verse, Galatians 2:20, in light of my ROOTS:
I am crucified with Christ [I have changed my spirit ROOTS from Satan to Christ], nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me [I am no longer a child of Satan but rather a child of God], and the human life which I live, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. [We are ROOTED in Christ, and it is out of Christ IN ME that the fruits are grown and delivered.]
So ROOTS and FRUITS are all Christ![Back to Home]
Take a Tip From Columbo
Have you ever taken a verbal beating when trying to talk about Jesus? If so, try this simple approach to stop challengers mid-punch and make them take a close look at their gloves. It’s called the Columbo tactic.
Peter Falk as Lieutenant Columbo was the 1970s bumbling TV detective whose re-runs continue to this day. As I watched one of his programs the other night, I realized that his crime-solving success was based on a simple inquiry: “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
The key to this strategy is to shift the burden of proof to the other person by asking carefully selected questions. It can even be played out Columbo style - halting, head-scratching, and apparently harmless.
The Columbo tactic is most powerful when you have a goal in mind. If you see some weakness in another’s view, instead of plainly pointing out the error, you expose it by asking a question in a disarming way.
Though there are literally hundreds of ways to do this, the Columbo tactic offers tremendous advantages. For one, it’s interactive, inviting the other person to participate in dialogue. It’s good to use to spread the word about Jesus because no preaching is involved. This approach allows you to make good headway in presenting and defending your view without actually stating your whole case. More importantly, a carefully placed question shifts the burden of proof to the other person where it may belong.
Christians tend to listen politely or else to take the burden on themselves to refute every fantasy a skeptic can spin out of thin air. Why let challengers off so easily, though, when they’re the ones making the claim? It isn’t your job to disprove his fairy tale. It is his job to demonstrate why anyone should take his ideas seriously.
Remember, the one making the claim shoulders the burden of proof. For far too long, skeptics have contrived fanciful challenges, then sat back and watched Christians squirm. If someone tells the story, it’s his job to defend it, not your job to refute it.
Three Key Questions
Sometimes when you are not sure how to proceed, it is good to ask open-ended questions. The most effective open-ended question I've found is some variation of “How do you know?” There is a three-step formula along this line that can keep the dialogue going with even the most belligerent antagonists.
The first step is asking a clarification question: “What do you mean by that?” This question accomplishes several things. First, it immediately engages the challenger in an interactive way. Second, it’s friendly because you’re expressed a real interest in knowing more about the other’s view. Third, it forces him to think carefully - maybe for the first time - about exactly what he believes. Fourth, it gives you valuable information about the roots of the person’s thinking. So pay careful attention to the response.
Here’s the second question: “How did you come to that conclusion?” This is a gentler variation of “Where did you get your facts?” Though it’s similar in content, it has a kinder tone, assuming the critic has not just made an unsubstantiated claim, but has actually done some thinking.
The additional data puts you in a better position to assess and respond to the person’s view. You now know what he thinks, and you also know how he thinks giving you valuable information on how to proceed if you choose to.
I say, “If you choose to” because you may detect that it’s not the time to move forward, nor are you automatically obliged to. Depending on your personality you’ll face the temptation to be over-eager or under-eager. Remember, you don’t always have to hit a home run. Sometimes just getting on base will do, and the first two questions accomplish that.
If you do proceed, your third question suggests an alternative. Ask, “Have you ever considered...” and then finish the sentence in an appropriate way. Offer an option that gently challenges the person’s beliefs, possibly exploiting a weakness you uncovered in the answers to your first two questions.
Christians don’t have to be experts in everything. In fact, God can use believers effectively despite a lack of knowledge if we learn to ask good questions.
You might be surprised to find that many critics aren’t prepared to defend their “faith”, or lack of it, when asked some basic questions.
As Lt. Columbo demonstrated so well - making the TV series so popular for so long - asking the right question frequently settles the case.
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