Love Is The Answer

Originally written December, 2002

There is perhaps no greater human love than the love a mother has for her children. I don’t say that to debase any other form of love between people, and I know it is not true of all mom’s, but there are mom’s that have been known to pick up cars when their children’s lives are at stake. I have a mom like that. In fact, in her own way my mom has picked up many cars for my family and me. She is one of my hero’s. My dad too. There isn’t anything he wouldn’t do for his children if he believed it would help them. Recently however, my mom and I were having a discussion and she sadly said to me, with tears in her eyes, “I just don’t know if you know how much I love you.” Now with tears in my own eyes I hugged her and told her I did know – because my mom has proven her love to me all my life. Although Christianity has been reduced to be just another religion, the Bible says it is a love story about how much more God loves us than we love another person, including a mom or dad’s love for their own children. And God proved it by giving up the treasure no mom or dad would dare have to sacrifice, His Son. Love really is the answer, and Jesus Is The Proof

 

Christianity Today

My mom and dad recently celebrated their 51st anniversary.

According to statistics there are close to two billion Christians in the world today. In fact, over 73% of the United States population consider themselves to be Christian. Statistically speaking Christianity is a popular “religion”. Yet if you asked these two billion people what it means to be a Christian, you would hear a variety of responses. Many would say they are Christians just because they live in the United States. They are born “Christian”. Others believe they are Christians because they live a good moral life. They refrain from excessive drinking, illegal drugs, stealing, murder, and treat the people in their lives nicely, most of the time anyway. Another group would say they are Christian because they believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God. However, their lives don’t look any different from their culture. They live selfishly under the camouflage of grace without any Christian convictions. Still others identify themselves with Christianity in order to distinguish themselves from other religions. However, they do not believe in the basic concepts of Christianity. A final group consider themselves Christians because they live a life of denial and strict self-discipline. They live “by the book”. Many of us fall into one of these five categories. And, although each of these groups may contain a glimpse of Christianity, none of these versions gets at the heart of the version of Christianity that I read about in the pages of the Bible.

 

Life Transforming
According to the Bible being born in the United States does not make anyone a Christian any more than a garage makes whatever is in it a car. But obviously there are many devout Christians living in the United States. Neither does the Bible say Christianity is just about being a “goody, goody”, although it will make us more of one. Furthermore, those that say Jesus is God and then lives a life of flagrant sin is like Clark Kent claiming to be superman without ever actually acting like him. No, Biblical Christianity is much more than these cheap imitations. In fact I believe the heart of Biblical Christianity transforms lives by its very essence. And its very essence is love. Not the kind of love that Hollywood has engineered, founded on lust and always seeking something else to satisfy itself. ¹ Rather, it is the kind of love that all of us crave at the deepest place in our hearts. The kind that rescues us from insecurities, addictions, broken relationships, unforgiveness, rejection, sin, and any kind of bondage or hurt that we may struggle with. The kind of love that frees us to be ourselves and come “as we are” without fear of rejection.

 

God’s Love
Interestingly, the Bible says that “God is love”. The implication of this is that none of us “love” on our own. Rather it is the imprint of God’s character on our hearts that gives us the ability to love at all.² Furthermore the Bible defines the essence of love. It says, “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails”.³ Which implies that true love requires sacrifice. Not trivial sacrifice that requires minor changes in one’s lifestyle. Rather the type of sacrifice that demands a complete change of lifestyle. A change of lifestyle that every parent knows all to well when they have their first child. The kind that puts another persons needs ahead of their own. The kind that is willing to die for another person. Which is the essence of Biblical Christianity.

 

Sacrificial Love
Consider this as an explanation. Lets say you have a son who gets kidnapped. The kidnappers tell you that in order to save the life of your son, you must give up your own. It will be your life for his. Would you die to save the life of your son? Probably you would. The Bible says there is no greater love than this because it demands our ultimate sacrifice, our life.⁴ Christianity, however, goes a step further. Let’s change the last example just a bit to show the difference. Now one million peoples lives are at stake, rather than your sons. But the ransom to save all those people is your son. Now the question becomes, will you willingly sacrifice the life of your only son to save those million people? Some that you are close to, many that you are not, and some that may even be your enemy?

 

Biblical Christianity
Well, regardless of whether any of us would or would not make such a sacrifice, the Bible says God did make a sacrifice of this magnitude. According to the Bible we were the people that were going to die if God did not sacrifice His Son. However, rather than simply sacrificing His Son, He mysteriously became His Son and sacrificed Himself. That is why it is so important to Biblical Christianity that Jesus was God’s Son as well as God Himself. Because it means our God put Himself on that cross and died for each one of us. He did not send a substitute. He came to earth, He lived a perfect life, and He died for our transgressions, our faults. Furthermore, the Bible says there is a real villain, Satan, widely referred to as the devil, who is causing havoc on earth, preventing as many people as possible from believing this message. “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”⁵ In fact, I believe what many people blame on God is simply the devil’s work. Furthermore, we, you and I, are the ones responding to the event. Since love, by definition, demands a choice, each of us is given the choice to respond to this message as we choose. We can accept it or we can reject it. It’s our choice. Moreover, the Bible explains why it had to happen this way. Which has to do with God’s character.

 

God Is Holy
As we have already stated, God is love. That means that any love we have for any human beings are from God. Furthermore, God loves each person more than any of us loves another, no matter how great our love might be, because God is love. And we know that God’s definition of love is sacrificial. It requires us to die to ourselves as we have just mentioned. What is often overlooked however, is God’s Holiness.⁶ So lets cut to the chase here. God being Holy means God is complete or perfect in every way.⁷ Take creation as an example. If the earth were one degree closer to the sun, we would all burn up. If the earth were one degree farther away from the sun we would all freeze.⁸ The earth is perfectly designed for life as we know it to exist as it does. Our breathing today is also proof. Each of us is made up of about 100 trillion cells.⁹ Each of the trillion cells in our bodies contains all of the genetic information necessary to build a human being.¹⁰ If printed out the script for each of these trillion cells would take up 1000 one thousand page telephone books. According to the medical community if just one letter of the code gets misplaced disease may result.¹¹ We are all walking miracles, no matter what might be wrong with our bodies today.¹² Moreover, science agrees. The second law of thermodynamics says that the natural order of all change is to create a greater degree of disorder and randomness rather than cohesion and order.¹³ In other words if life were random it would be total and absolute chaos. Although some might agree with the Darwinian theory that life evolved “naturally” by a survival of the fittest process, this contradicts this law of physics.¹⁴ The point is that God’s Holiness refers to His perfection and His perfection is proven by the fact that you and I are alive today. And because God is Holy, His own perfect nature demands justice.

 

Justice
Sadly, we all know that on September 11, 2001 hijacked airplanes hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center buildings. One also hit the Pentagon and we know another hijacked jet was crashed into the ground before hitting its target. In the wake of the terrorist crisis many are demanding justice. We all know that life without justice is anarchy or chaos. Justice is required to keep order. Someone or something must pay for any injustice or wrong that is done in order to maintain justice. So it is with God. The Bible says that God is just.¹⁵ Therefore justice requires that the penalty for our sin, our flaws, be paid. God loves us more than we can imagine, but He must deal with the problem of our sin or He is defying His own perfect nature. This is another one of those areas where many of us check out. We don’t want to face the fact that we are not perfect and God is. We compare ourselves to murderers, terrorists, or whoever is beneath us (morally) and think we are all right compared to them. Don’t we? But the bad news is that none of us is “good enough” to please a perfect God on our own.

 

Man
The Bible says, “there is no one righteous, not even one” and “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”¹⁶ Because, in comparison to the true measurement of God, it doesn’t really matter how much better we stack up to someone else, we still don’t reach God’s standard. Although the terrorist attack was awful, we seem to forget that we have legally aborted over 50 million children in the past 30 years.¹⁷ Not only that but children are killing children in the classroom. Moreover some mom’s don’t love their children at all, they are murdering them. Just look at today’s headlines and you will understand my point. Although most of us enjoy finger pointing at the more seriously flawed people in the world, the bottom line is that we are all flawed. And God’s nature demands perfection. Which brings us all to a serious problem that none of us can afford to overlook as we intellectualize our religious debates. What do we do about our sin, no matter how great or small it may be, before a Holy, perfect and just God? Because according to what I understand from the Bible, we cannot and will not be allowed into God’s presence without all of our sin having been atoned for in some way. Sin is simply against His nature. And justice demands payment. Which brings us to Jesus.

 

Our Choice
According to the Bible God sent Jesus, His own Son, to die in our place, as a payment for our sin. Jesus satisfied God’s justice because He, our Creator, paid the price Himself. He mysteriously became Jesus Christ¹⁸ lived a perfect life on earth, took on the sins of the world and was nailed to a cross. However, God defeated death by raising Jesus from the dead. The Bible says it like this, “This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world” “as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” Also like this, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” and “was raised on the third day”.¹⁹ And most of us are familiar with John 3:16-17, which says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” That is why Jesus is so important to humanity. Take away Jesus and you take away the payment for our faults. Without Jesus we are left to account for our sins before God upon our physical death on our own.²⁰ Which is why every other world religion is about what we have to do to please God instead of what God did to save us. Did you catch that? Every other world religion is about what we must do to please God. It is works based, performance oriented. Christianity is the only religion that is about what God already did to save us rather than what we have do to save ourselves. If God hasn’t already made the payment we must try and “do something” to satisfy God’s justice. But we can never do enough to compensate for our sin because God is perfect and we are not. By accepting Jesus into our hearts however, we receive God’s free gift of grace and mercy.²¹ Then, when we physically die, mysteriously our spirits go straight to Heaven to spend an eternity with our loving and Holy Father who chose to give us life in the first place.²² On the other hand, if we deny Jesus the Bible says we are left to receive God’s judgment without any payment because He is Holy and perfect and we are not. That judgment is separation from Him in a place called Hell.²³ The Bible says Hell is a place that we choose because of our rejection of the gift of grace offered to us by our loving and Holy Father. Moreover, those who embrace Jesus, truly understanding just what He did for them, live a life transformed by love. In other words we stop doing those things that are offensive to God because we know for sure that He loves us.

 

Jean Val Jean
In the opening scene of the movie Les Miserables²⁴ the main character Jean Val Jean is laying outside on a bench at night with no other place to sleep. An old woman walking through the town approaches him and pokes him with her cane asking why he is not sleeping at an inn or in someone’s house. He bitterly explains no one will have him. He had knocked on about every door possible but nobody would take him in because he had just been released from prison after serving19 years of hard labor. The old woman told him he not been knocking on the right door. She pointed her wooden cane directly at the local Bishops house and asked Jean Val Jean to knock on that door. So he did. Before Jean Val Jean entered the Bishop’s home he explained that he was a convict. The Bishop welcomed him into his house, telling him he knew who he was, even though he was indeed a stranger to the Bishop. At the dinner table Jean Val Jean told the Bishop that the real punishment in life came after being released from prison because he was a marked man. The Bishop responded that man can be unjust. Jean Val Jean replied, “man, not God?” Jean Val Jean drank what remained of his glass of wine and flippantly remarked, “Tomorrow I will be a new man” and went to bed. During the night Jean Val Jean had a dream of being back in prison and taking one of the regular beatings he endured while in prison. He woke up suddenly, jumped out of bed, went downstairs, and began stealing the Bishops silverware. The Bishop woke up and caught Jean Val Jean in the act. So Jean Val Jean hit him in the face hard enough to knock him out and then took off. The next day Jean Val Jean was captured by the police and was brought back to the Bishops house. Jean Val Jean claimed that the Bishop gave him the silver that he had stolen. The police, laughing, told the Bishop what Jean Val Jean had said. The Bishop replied, “Yes, of course I gave him the silverware. But why didn’t you take the candlesticks? That was foolish of you. Madame Sheilo, fetch the silver candlesticks. They’re worth at least 2000 franks. Why did you leave them? Did you forget to take them?” Stunned, the police let Jean Val Jean go. In a very poignant scene the Bishop stands alone with Jean Val Jean. He pulls Jean Val Jean’s hood back, looks him in the eye and says, “And don’t forget, don’t ever forget, you’ve promised to become a new man”. Jean Val Jean replies, “Promise. Why are you doing this?” The Bishop responds “Jean Val Jean my brother, you no longer belong to evil. With this silver I have bought your soul. I have ransomed you from fear and hatred and now I give you back to God.” Jean Val Jean walks away in shock, yet a free man. The rest of the movie is about Jean Val Jean’s entire life transformed by that one act of grace that cost the Bishop all his silver. Jean Val Jean never forgot what that Bishop had done for him and he understood grace, unmerited favor, for the first time in his life. He became an administrator of that same grace as a result. I believe this is analogous to the testimony of the Bible. We are the sinners. We are Jean Val Jean, all of us. And the silver of the Bible is more precious than silver, it is Jesus. God ransomed His Son in order to set us free of our sin because God loves us that much. When we finally understand just what has been done for us, just what price was paid for our sin; our entire lives will be transformed just like Jean Val Jean’s. That is why the Bible tells us that it is God’s kindness that leads us to repentance.²⁵

 

Conclusion
My parents just celebrated their 51st wedding anniversary. They haven’t let anything stop them from “succeeding” at “marriage”. In that regard my mom and dad are a model for the institution of marriage. But to understand my mom and dads marriage through that vantage point would debase what I see in their relationship as their son. I see two people who fell in love at 11 and 13 years of age, and who lived out the very essence of the word love for the rest of their lives. Their marriage is successful, yes, but it is successful because it is founded on true love, the kind of love that is built on commitment and responsibility, rather than simply “feelings”. They have chosen to love one another. As a result, besides showing a non-committal generation what true commitment means, my parents have shown a selfish and lustful generation what it means to truly love. And although some may still want to recognize my parents as having a “successful marriage”, that still misses the point of their choice and commitment to love each other. In my opinion, thinking like that is akin to seeing Christianity as merely another “successful religion”, or seeing the Bible as a rulebook rather than a love story. Because, according to the Bible I read God has pursued us all, all of our lives, because of His love for us. As our Heavenly Daddy He has relentlessly revealed Himself to all of us through the miraculousness of creation, through the Holy Bible, through prayer, through godly people in the church, and through our circumstances, because He wants a personal relationship with us just like we might have with our spouse or best friend. Yet I watch many people give the credit of creation itself to science, the credit of our own lives and the lives of our children to chance or “luck”, the credit of healing to doctors and medicine, and the credit of love to evolution. How broken-hearted God must be at such thinking. Perhaps it is a magnitude of the pain my own mom was feeling that day in her kitchen when she wondered if I knew how much she loved me. And yet we all still have a choice, because love demands one. We can turn from God, distrusting the Holy Bible and thinking God is some distant, mysterious, hard, haphazard God who set the world in motion and may or may not let us into heaven based on what we do, or we can choose to believe the Bible and love Him because “He first loved us”. Because this is what the Bible says, “I am the Lord, who has made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who spread out the earth by myself” who “knit us together in our mother’s womb” while ordaining all the days of our lives.²⁶ God is our loving Daddy²⁷ who loved us enough to prove it by sending Jesus, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.”²⁸ And when you think about it, what more could God have done? So, in conclusion, love really is the answer because God is love. And, Jesus is our greatest proof. Perhaps this Christmas we can choose to celebrate that, because that is something worth celebrating.

To Christ Be The Glory

End Notes

1. According to Webster’s dictionary lust is defined as; “Pleasure or delight, personal inclination, wish, intense or unbridled sexual desire, an intense longing, craving, enthusiasm, eagerness, to have an intense desire or need.” And although many may want to characterize lust purely with sex, it clearly crosses sexual boundaries. It involves anything we crave or have an intense desire for, sexually or not. Furthermore, since it craves pleasure, it could be considered the antithesis of love. Therefore we could extend its definition to be impatient, unkind, envious, boasting, proud, rude, self-seeking, easily angered, keeping records of wrongs, delighting in evil, not protecting, not trusting, not always hoping, and not always persevering. In fact, we could conclude by saying that lust fails. It is an ugly force rooted at the heart of our selfishness.
2. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says God stamped eternity on our hearts. Genesis 1:27 says that man was created in His image. Since God is love and we were created in His image, perhaps it is safe to assume that every human being is born with a part of God’s character, which allows us the ability to love like He does.
3. 1 Corinthians 13:4-8.
4. “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends”. John 15:12
5. 2 Corinthians 4:4
6. Isaiah 6:3, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty”. According to Webster’s dictionary the definition of “holy” is “exalted or worthy of complete devotion as one perfect in goodness and righteousness”. Furthermore, “righteous” is defined as “free from guilt or sin”. Therefore God, by definition, is perfect in goodness and is without sin. Sin is actually anti-His nature.
7. Psalm 18:30, “As for God, his way is perfect.”
8. The earth is on a 23˚ access towards the sun. It is tilted just right for life to exist for us as it does.
9. National Institutes of Health, The Human Genome Project: From Maps To Medicine, National Center for Human Genome Research (Department of Health And Human Services, Publication No. 96-3897), pg. 1-2. “Each of the 100 trillion cells in the human body (except red blood cells) contains the entire human genome-all the genetic information necessary to build a human being. This information is encoded in 6 billion base pairs, subunits of DNA. (Egg and sperm cells each have half this amount of DNA.)”
10. IBID. “Inside the nucleus of nearly every cell in the body, a complete set of genetic instructions, known as the human genome, is contained on 23 pairs of chromosomes. Chromosomes are mostly made of long chains of a chemical called DNA – deoxyribonucleic acid.” “Our genes are made of DNA, a long, threadlike molecule coiled inside our cells. Within the cell nucleus, the DNA is packaged into 23 pairs of chromosomes. Each chromosome, in turn, carries thousands of genes arrayed like beads on a string. Genes, which are simply short segments of DNA, are packets of instructions that tell cells how to behave. They do so by specifying the instructions for making particular proteins. the hereditary instructions are written in four-letter code, with each letter corresponding to one of the chemical constituents of DNA: A, G, C, T. Genes are, in essence, the sequence of A’s, G’s, C’s, and T’s constituting a recipe for a specific protein. If the DNA language becomes garbled or a word is misspelled, the cell may make the wrong protein, or too much or too little of the right one-mistakes that often result in disease. In some cases, just a single misplaced letter is sufficient to cause the disease”.
11. IBID, pg.3.
12. Furthermore, when we think that disease or any problems on earth are a result of God being imperfect, we discount the fact that love demands a choice and many of us choose sin. We choose, ourselves, to put awful food in our bodies. And sin passes on from generation to generation. We call that genetics.
13. Henry M. Morris, The Twilight of Evolution (Baker Books, Grand Rapids, 1963), pg. 43-44. From James F. Crow: “Genetic Effects of Radiation,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 14, January, 1958, pp. 19-20. “Thermodynamics is a physical theory of great generality impinging on practically every phase of human experience. It may be called the description of the behavior of matter in equilibrium and of its changes from one equilibrium state to another. Thermodynamics operates with two master concepts or constructs and two great principles. The concepts are energy and entropy, and the principles are the so-called first and second laws of thermodynamics…” pg.34.
14. Charles Darwin’s ‘Origin of the Species’ says that life randomly evolved over millions of years.
15. John 5:30 – my judgment is just. See also Romans 3:22-26. Christ paid for our sin.
16. Romans 3:10, 3:23, Psalm 53:1&3. See also Jeremiah 17:17 about the deceitfulness of the heart.
17. The Bible says that God knows all of us before we are born. In fact it says he knit us together in our mothers womb. Check out Psalm 139. It truly does suggest that a fetus is a person! And if you have had an abortion, remember, God forgives us all of our sin. He only wants our confession so that He can cleanse us.
18. Jesus claimed to be God; John 14:9, 8:56-58, Colossians 1:15-20, 1 Timothy 3:16.
19. 1 John 4:9-10, John 3:16-17, 1 Corinthians 15:3-6. See also John 11:25, John 10:30, Romans 5:6-11, & Acts 10:39.
20. Romans 6:23.
21. Ephesians 2:8-10.
22. John 14:1ff, John 18:36ff, Matthew 25:1-13, Matthew 22:1-14, Matthew 21:33-44.
23. Revelation 1:17-18, Matthew 25:46. See also Matthew 25:31ff.
24. Les Misérables, Columbia Pictures, 1998.
25. Romans 2:4.
26. Isaiah 44:24-27, Psalm 139:13, 139:16.
27. Matthew 7:7-11, Luke 12:22-34, & John 3:16.
28. 1 John 3:16.

 

“Hardcopy’s available upon request at tawheeler@truevine.net“