Where’s this radical love from that Jesus commands us to nurture? Just how do we love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and our neighbour as ourselves? I mean, really.
Let me answer this from my own experience. There are two versions of me, even though a lot of me has always been the same. The before version of me was pre-September 2003, pre-36. The after version of me has been ever since, the last 19-years.
The former version of me didn’t know how to love because I was never in the position to receive love, even though I was loved. I had never truly received God’s love. Don’t get me wrong, God has always loved me, just as he has always loved you, but I couldn’t receive his love.
The latter version of me knows how to love because I have finally received the love that God had always purposed for me to receive. The worst thing that could’ve happened to me—the failure and loss of my first marriage—was the catalyst. Because it forced me into prolonged brokenness where I had to rely on a strength outside of myself.
In losing just about everything overnight, apart from the retention of the love of my three daughters and of my parents, a doorway was opened to me because of the brokenness I fell into. That doorway was genuine Christian spirituality offered up initially through the rooms of AA, then later by the local Baptist assembly in Mandurah, Western Australia.
I entered an absolute paradox. The more I gave away of my material being, my material possessions, and all worldly hopes, the more I gained spiritually. It worked like a miracle every time. The more I lost myself, the more I gained the real me.
Because I had lost everything else, suddenly I was in a position of desperation reaching out for God’s help. Only then did I discover what I could’ve discovered 13 years earlier when I first became a Christian. But of course the earlier version of myself was not ready to BE the latter version. I needed to experience that 13-years of failing as a Christian, because it proved to me comprehensively that EFFORT counts for nothing in faith.
The former version of myself hid away in a closeted life, struggling all those years to live as “the Christian” I said I was. I knew I was a hypocrite in key areas of my life, but I had no power to reverse the habitual trends that had formed my material life. I was stuck in a rut.
The former version of myself didn’t know how to surrender and in this former version of myself I was uncomfortable in any sort of weakness. I had limited love to give because I could receive such little love. I had no idea that embracing weakness was central to faith.
To ground this further, I need to get really specific. The former version of myself didn’t know how to control my anger. My responses in family situations were occasionally, and at times often, over the top. I’d then quickly regret my overreactions and be racked with guilt. I was ashamed of my lack of self-control. I drank too much. I was a hypocrite in other ways. I wasn’t the person I wanted to be. I wasn’t the person I felt I needed to be. I felt like a fraud in my own life.
Then one day when the worst thing happened, suddenly the impetus had arrived to turn 180 degrees and, for the first time of my life, truly FIND God. And because it was the first time in my whole life that I had desperately WANTED God more than anything else, God gave me his love, and a light switched on, and the love of God which had become mine gave me the confidence to love others with the love God had given me; a very real sense of love for myself, out of which confidence comes. Suddenly, sacrificing for others was easy, and indeed it was a no brainer, it was all I wanted. It became the only thing I could do.
What I’d tried and failed to do in my own strength
was now ridiculously easy in HIS.
The love of God that had come into me had caused me to want to passionately share it. I wanted everyone to experience what I had experienced, because there is no drug on earth, no higher high beneath the heavens, than the love of God. When suddenly the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts, everything makes sense, and you know that LOVE is the only thing that makes that sense real.
A radical love for God and neighbour starts with the love of God in our hearts, to know how muchhe loves us, to experience the perfection in this love, and to know that there is no sense in turning back, to know that the power comes from giving away to receive.
Suddenly from this vantage point there is no question that you want your neighbour loved as yourself, because you yourself know how MUCH you are loved of God.
When you know how loved you really are, you suddenly recognise that everybody else is loved just the same. When you realise this, all the brakes are taken off, and your love knows no bounds. All of life clicks into place. It doesn’t mean you no longer experience pain, but with the love of God you accept a whole lot easier that which cannot be changed.
This is the genuine Christian life, and unless we are living this, we ought to wonder what’s wrong. There is no other way we should want to live, because the supremacy of the love of God is beyond anything else we can experience in this life.
I don’t care how much you own, how rich or talented you are, what your prospects are, how admired you are, or what you’ve done or where you’ve been. None of this really matters, and the only time you really understand is when you understand the concept of God’s love—for YOU. This one principle puts everything else into its proper perspective.
The concept I am discussing is the secret to life that so many of us chase in myriad other whirlwinds of sensationalism that ultimately produce the same thing: a dull prolonged despair of pretending we’ve got our lives together with a seething frustration that we haven’t.
This secret to life is the contentment that has been nestling in our hearts since before we were born. And all through life we have searched for this way of peace only to stumble and fall every time, because we thought we could buy it with time, attention, or money.
The only way we can possess this secret to life—the receipt of the love of God—is by giving up what we cannot keep to gain what we can’t lose. It’s really as simple as that, and when we understand this, it solves our anxiety problems, because we stop worrying about everything we cannot control.
To love how only God could empower me to love, I had to receive God’s love, which meant I had to love me. Only when I could love myself could I love my neighbour with a “love neighbour as myself” kind of love.
IMAGE — of the little New Testament Bible I received in 1990 from the pastor who helped bring me to faith. He is still a mentor today after we reconnected when I became a pastor in 2013.
With acknowledgement to my friend, Tim, who got me thinking.
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