Tag: loving god

Psalm 147:1-11 – An Ode to Divine Love

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year BLeave a comment
The Lord treasures the people
who honor him,
the people who wait for his faithful love. (verse 11, CEB)
 
            Early each morning I rise, take the dog for a short walk, make a cup of coffee, then open the life-giving message from the God of the Bible.  I read out loud – slowly, mindfully, carefully allowing the words to seep and make their way down into my soul.  The Holy Spirit of God gently nudges, sometimes forcefully hurls, me toward a verse, phrase, or word from the text.  Contemplating, ruminating, thinking about the Holy Scripture begins to set the trajectory of my day.  God is throughout the hours, as I move from one to the next.  Sometimes very much at the forefront of my thinking, other times in the background shaping how I speak and act, and always on my heart enlarging it and filling it with his grace.
            Most of life is lived in the mundane.  The banality of life is the norm.  While others run from prayer to prayer looking for miracles and the next big spiritual hit, the one who is patient… waits… and honors God… has a treasure within which transcends language or outward fanfare.  The settled conviction of the person in continual communion with the God of the universe peacefully waits for faithful, steadfast, committed, divine love.
            There is no description for such a divine/human spiritual relation which exists, giving patience to the penitent and joy to the heart of God.  Such love exists beyond the plane of daily news crises and the continual hum of the crowd.  Indeed, the Lord God Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, has stooped to cup his hands and treasure his creature.
            The great medieval mystic, Teresa of Avila, said: “Prayer is an act of love; words are not needed. Even if sickness distracts from thoughts, all that is needed is the will to love.”

 

            Patience is not a bore, and to wait is to be at peace because God is in it.  It is good to be full of him.

Revelation 3:7-13

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year CLeave a comment
            Over thirty years ago, Chuck Colson wrote a timely and influential book entitled Loving God.  In it, he presented a simple yet biblical premise concerning the life of every believer in Jesus:  The way to love God is to obey God, period.  Everything turns on our listening to God and doing what he says to do.  Jesus himself communicated to the church at Philadelphia (not Pennsylvania, but Asia Minor) and affirmed how they obeyed the message.  Because of their faithful and steadfast obedience, the Philadelphian believers would be protected and loved by Jesus. 
 
            The church at Philadelphia did much more than offer a confession of loving God – they affirmed that confession by obeying Jesus.  In my Christian circles, we call this “living into our baptisms.”  That is, it is one thing to experience the sign of baptism as being set apart by the Holy Spirit for a relationship with God through the person and finished work of Jesus.  It is quite another thing to “live into” this reality by knowing God’s Word and obeying it.
 
            There is much complexity to humanity and its psychology, sociology, and history.  But there is at least one simple straightforward Scriptural truth that we all can live into:  To love God is to obey God.  Therefore, it is quite necessary for us to spend extended times reading our Bibles in order to know them well so that we can obey what it says. 
 

 

            Gracious God, thank you for the message of good news that in Jesus Christ I have forgiveness of sins.  Help me to hold onto this gospel through all of the vicissitudes of life so that obedience springs from my heart in all things by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Loving God with All Your Strength

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment

 

 
 
God loves the smell of your sweat.  You might stink to high heaven from hard work but for God it is a sweet aroma and sacred incense.  God loves it because it brings him glory when we break a sweat loving him with all of our energy (Mark 12:30).  Love isn’t primarily measured by words spoken, but by calories burned (1 John 3:18).  We are to use all of our strength to love God.  Using our hands and our effort is as valuable to God as using our brains.
 
            We should feel free to go hard after God with all our strength.  We need not have any hesitation about using our very tangible efforts in work as loving God.  But because we only have so much strength and energy, we need to make sure we are not wasting any of our energy on sin.  Too many of us waste our energy on things we can’t have and stuff that we can’t control.  If we spend a bunch of energy on things like pride, anger, and selfishness then we only end up wasting even more energy on guilt, shame, and regret.  Nothing saps our strength more than sin.  So, then, we need to keep busy doing the right things.
 
            Loving God with all our strength requires limits and healthy rhythms of life.  If we understand the importance and value of hard work, we much too often wrongly think that the answer to most things is to work harder.  You don’t do that with your car.  You don’t see a red light come on the dash and automatically say, “Oh! there is a problem with my car – I will drive it harder and longer and the problem will go away.” 
 
            Some Christians have a bent toward working themselves into the ground, not using their God-given brains to tell them that this is not loving God.  Many persons feel the pressure of responsibility, the fear of failure, the obsessive need for perfectionism, and the just plain stress of dealing with people and conflict.  So, we ignore our better judgment and put our foot to the accelerator.  It is no wonder, then, that people have crack-ups and breakdowns, both emotionally and physically.  Some individuals find the shame of failure too unbearable to let up on the gas pedal, and so keep going day after day worried that they might be letting someone down.  Wise and rightly ordered priorities come from well-rested Christians.  So, it must be remembered that keeping the Sabbath affords an opportunity to put all our energy into loving God in ways that we cannot on the other six days.  
 
            On the other extreme, laziness can easily creep in because the classic spiritual disciplines of Bible reading, solitude and silence, prayer and fasting, and giving rarely clamor for our immediate attention.  We may have so many other irons in the fire that the very relational activities that help us connect with the Lord Jesus get squeezed out.  Tyranny of the urgent is a harsh taskmaster, and we rarely slow down long enough to realize that we have drifted far from God and are in danger of ignoring Christ and his salvation out of sheer neglect (Hebrews 2:1-4). 
 
            Let us, then, put all our strength into loving God, rather than simply loving the idea of loving God.  All relationships take work.  So, if we claim to be Christians it only makes sense to use the best time of our day each day to relationally connect with Christ and seek to connect with other Christians in fellowship.  Now is not the time to feel guilty for what you have not done, but to accept the grace that is in Jesus and enjoy his presence and his Church.  Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness, for they shall be filled.

Loving God with All Your Mind

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry Blog1 Comment

 

 
 
“What do you have in there worth living for?” That is just one of many quotable lines from The Princess Bride.  Miracle Max was trying to find out if he could rescue the young Wesley from certain death.  Turns out he was only “mostly dead.”  What came out of Wesley when Miracle Max pressed on him was “true love.”  It is always a great story:  true love is never satisfied; true love conquers all. True love has an insatiable desire to know more and more about the object of its affection.  To love God with all of our minds is to want to learn more and more about Him, to know Him better and better.  It is to have a constant curiosity about God.  And the really cool thing about this is that God has given us the brains to accommodate this curiosity about Him.
 
            The average brain is only the size of a softball and weighs about 3 pounds, yet neurologists estimate that we have the capacity to learn something new every second of every minute of every hour of every day for the next 300 million years.  We have the mental equipment to love God.
 
            So, then, to just want to know the right answers about God and Scripture without putting any thinking behind it is to miss the whole point of Christianity.  Simply wanting the Cliffs Notes to the Bible and/or perusing God For Dummies is to miss the entire direction of love.  Loving God is about curiosity and learning, a desire to know the object of my affection.
 
            Since we are to love God with our minds, we ought to invite questions and curiosity rather than shutting it down.  Adults of all stripes:  kids and teenagers and college students who ask questions is a good thing; let them flex their brains.  There are too many adult Christians in this world that feel threatened by healthy robust questioning.  We are not just to fill up with correct information, as if the sheer accumulation of right doctrine is all there is to it.  We are to have a deep experiential knowledge of God that leads to learning about him more and more.  It is never satisfied, and the learning never ends.  Our minds are like muscles – they must be used and exercised on a consistent basis because if we stop learning we stop loving.  And I’m not talking about Sodoku puzzles.  I’m talking about stretching our minds with reading Scripture and good Christian books.  I’m talking about getting into discussions about God, Christ, and the Bible that broadens our understanding and deepens our faith. 
 
            We are to love God with all our minds; loving God with half your brain isn’t going to cut it.  Some people are dominantly left-brained people, that is, they are bent toward being logical, analytical, practical, and think mostly in concrete black and white terms.  There are other people who are heavily right-brained, that is, they are much more artistic, intuitive, creative, imaginative, humorous, even sarcastic, and tend to speak more poetically with lots of satire and metaphors.  If we are to love God with all our minds we will seek to use all of our brains, both the right and the left parts of it.
 
 
 
            One of the problems we run into is that the mind of sinful people is death (Romans 8:6).  Death means separation.  They are separated from God in their minds.  To have a sinful mind is to have a small brain.  The sinful mind isn’t interested in genuine critical thinking – only in stubbornly expressing opinions.  Sinful people aren’t using their brains, or only a small part of them.  But God wants to sanctify our whole brains.  That means we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2).  We are to use all our minds to love Him.  That means we will value the left brain orientation of desiring to know the bottom line and being results driven.  We will embrace order and discipline, and use all the tools of reason and logic, learning critical thinking skills that can serve us in growing and knowing and loving God and God’s people.  But it also means we will value the right brain orientation of embracing mystery, paradox, and gray areas, enjoying the process of discovery and probing the deepest issues of scripture and humanity – all the while being comfortable with asking questions and not always having the answers.
 
Loving God means we will tap into all our minds, not just half our brains.  The Bible itself engages us in a mentally holistic approach.  We have, for example, the linear arguments of New Testament epistles, as well as the creative and poetic approach of the prophets and the psalms.  We are to combine the right brain value of viewing the Christian life as a road in which we journey along, and the left brain pursuit of the goal to win the prize for which we are called heavenward in Christ Jesus.
 
Do you love God with all your mind?   How can you engage all of your brain to love God?  What contribution can you make to God’s people with your intelligence and creativity?  Will you seek to have your mind renewed?  May your mind be so flooded with God’s grace that the thoughts and words that come out of it is true love.