Tears Vs. Texts

This past Sunday I experienced a strange phenomenon in church.   I must admit up front that I was already pretty emotional when I walked into the worship center.  You see, this past Sunday I told many of my friends that I was leaving our church to take a new position as Associate Pastor at a small, nearby, struggling church.  For some people, this Sunday was the last time I would be worshiping with them.  To add to that emotion, as I walked into the worship center, I was made aware that one of my students at The LoveLady Center had been sent back to jail.  It was news that tore me apart on the inside.  It was really no wonder, then that as we began to worship, and as we began to sing of the grace and holiness of God, that tears began streaming down my face.

OK.  I need to be honest.  I am a guy that – at least every now and then – cries.  Not always, mind you, but under certain situations.  For example, I ALWAYS tear up during the airplane crash scene of The Incredibles.  Don’t judge me.  I can empathize with Mr. Incredible losing his family.  It is a very emotional scene!  It makes my wife laugh.  But despite the ridiculous times that it happens, I do cry every now and again during worship.  Not every time, and usually not at church.  Usually I cry when I am worshipping alone and I am overwhelmed by my own sinfulness and the magnitude of what my savior did for me on the cross.  Maybe it was all the other stuff going on, but this past Sunday it was just simple worship that sent me over the edge.

To understand what happened next, you have to understand that I truly believe that worship – both personal and corporate – is still a very intimate act.  While worshipping together, I typically find that I am singing alone to God.  While part of a larger body that is praising in unison, I find that there is no one around but me and God.  That is where I was Sunday, with tears rolling down my face.   I don’t know what happened, but right in the midst of this incredibly wonderful time of worship, something broke my concentration.  For a short moment, instead of being lost in the worship of my savior, I was just a guy in a big room full of people. 

It was at that moment that I began to notice those people.  Some of those people were just like I had been – completely lost in their worship to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.  Most of the people were at a place not quite as remote.  They were clearly worshipping – well, they were at least singing with the rest of the crowd – but I cannot say that they were lost in their worship.  Maybe it was real and maybe it was ritual, but that is not for me to judge.  It was not this group that bothered me.

As I looked around, I saw another category of people that I will not even begin to classify as worshippers.  There was a lady reading her bulletin.  Really?  Oh look, another man doing the same.  Have I done that before – that is, read the bulletin when I should be worshipping?  Probably.  I continue to look around - yes, I know I should have gone straight back to worship, but I was now fully distracted.  As I looked around, I saw people texting!  TEXTING.  Wait a minute.  Two seconds ago, I was lost in worship to the point of tears and these people are texting?  Were they in the same worship center as I was?   

I had to ask the question: How could it be that one person is so lost in worship that he is crying while another is texting?  The easy answer is to point the finger at them and make accusations about their spiritual wellbeing.  That may be part of the answer, but the real answer of course is personal preparedness and participation.  Worship is a participatory activity and it requires the worshipper to prepare himself or herself to enter into the presence of the living God.  Then the worshipper must choose to actively engage in that worship.  To fail at either of these points runs the risk that you will be texting while others have tears streaming down their faces.

Are there days that I walk into the worship center completely unprepared?  Absolutely.  On those days, I probably end up being just one among a host of singers.  I may be participating, but I am probably missing the blessing of being lost in worship. Don’t get me wrong, I almost always make an active choice to participate in worship.  Sometimes though I have a hard time focusing on God because I am not adequately prepared for worship.   Even then, like this Sunday, being prepared does not make you immune to distraction.   Likewise, are there days where I choose not to participate at all?  Well, I did just say almost always… that’s not my desire, but I am human… let’s just say that I would much rather have tears than have texts.  

Reflections on Designs for Hope

When I first started working with Designs for Hope (www.designsforhope.org), I really had no idea what God had in mind or where he would take my involvement in the ministry.  All I knew was that God’s hand was moving in the work that Designs for Hope was doing and I wanted to be a part of it.  Even though I haven’t done any real engineering in many years, my background and education is in electrical engineering, and so the very nature of the goals and vision of Designs for Hope intrigued me from the beginning.  I was captivated by the thought of using engineering designs and skills to develop simple, low cost solutions that can be used to enhance the lives of impoverished people around the world and could even be used to further the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Although I will always be an engineer at heart, my first calling is to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who has called me into the service of his ministry.  As such, one of my passions is missions.  Imagine the joy of being able to combine that which is imprinted on you through education and years of secular employment with your divinely inspired passions.  That is how I first saw Designs for Hope.  To be honest, when Chris Bond first approached me about his ideas, I must admit that I was a bit jealous because he had come up with the idea and I had not.  More importantly, when Chris first came to me with the idea and was asking for some electrical engineering help with the design, I was more than a bit embarrassed that I was so far removed from actual engineering design experience that I really couldn’t help him.  I distinctly remember sitting in a Milo’s restaurant with Chris and thinking (a) what a neat concept and (b) I can’t believe he came to me for help and I’ve got nothing really to offer in return.  I shared a few elementary things that I am sure made no difference whatsoever to his design and he graciously listened.  It was a little bit disheartening.  That was a little over a year ago.

God, however, had other ideas about how I should be contributing to the Designs for Hope effort; and as is always the case, his plan has been far more fulfilling than whatever simplistic plans I might have desired.  It took until this past March before my involvement with Designs for Hope became “official”. In the last seven months, I have been talking about Designs for Hope just about everywhere I go.  When I do, it never fails that someone will say, “Hey, I know someone you need to talk to!”  As a result, I have been making all kinds of connections that I never dreamed possible.  I have talked to everyone from missionaries and pastors to finance wizards and lawyers.  I’ve spoken to people directly involved in missions in two different states in India, in Uganda, in Zambia, in Nicaragua, in Peru, and in Haiti.  In addition to missions ministries that I already knew about – such as E3 Partners (www.e3partners.org) - I have learned about all kinds of ministries out there that I never knew existed,  such as TLA Ministries in India (www.tlaministries.org), African Children’s Mission in Uganda (www.africanchildrensmission.org), and Zambikes in Zambia (www.zambikes.org).

I think that sometimes here in America we get an unfortunate case of tunnel vision and forget about what God is doing all over the world.  Yes, the economy is bad.  Yes, college tuition is insanely out of control (trust me, I have two in college).  Yes, it seems like our moral standards have fallen off the proverbial cliff.  These things are all true.  However, maybe we need to take a moment to open our eyes and see the handiwork of a Sovereign and Almighty God who is still very much at work in this world and is still faithfully carrying out his plan despite our blindness and narrow vision.

Designs for Hope is very much a young organization, still struggling to get off the ground and make an impact on the world for the gospel of Jesus Christ.   Sometimes it seems we are moving too slow.  Fundraising is not an easy task.  However, God owns the cattle on a thousand hills and I have no doubt in my mind that Designs for Hope is progressing at exactly the right pace that God wants in order to carry out his plan.  I am just excited to be a very small part of that.

The Love of God (1 John 4:7-21)

We love to say that God is love… It is so easy to say and it has such a good ring to it.

GOD IS LOVE… go ahead and say it.  That felt good, right?

Here is a question for you, though.  Do you truly understand what that means?  Our world’s understanding of love is so twisted and warped that a simple statement such as “God is Love” can take on almost limitless possibilities of meanings because of our broad use of the word love. 

The world speaks of love in terms of feelings and emotions. 
The world speaks of love in terms of lustful desires.

The world speaks of love in terms of preferences and wishes.

Almost always, love is spoken of as something fleeting that can change with the wind.

We easily fall into and out of love.  We love our car, but then when it breaks down we hate it.  Today we hate mushrooms, but tomorrow we might love them.

Very rarely do we speak of love as a permanent thing.  Oh we may speak of “True Love”, but even then not everyone believes such love is possible.

If you look up the word love in the dictionary, it will reflect all of these sentiments.  It is through these lenses, therefore, that we interpret our understanding of the phrase “God is Love”. As a result, we have difficulty understanding and reconciling certain paradoxes in life. For some of us, we look at our own lives and realize how horrible we are and we ask the question “How could God ever love me?” and so we refuse to turn to him because of our shame. For others of us, we see the evil in the world or we experience some tragedy in our lives and we ask the question “If God is Love, how could he have allowed that to happen?” and so we turn away from him in our anger. Still others of us have this constant fear that somehow God’s love for us may change; that he will somehow come to his senses and realize he’s getting the raw end of the deal here; that we are not worthy of his continued love – and so we live in fear of him.

  

The apostle John understood the love of God.  John wrote four of the books of the New Testament and the love of God is a major theme in all of them. However, he understood that God’s love is a “Holy Love” and not some divine manifestation of a human understanding of a self-centric love.

One passage in particular, 1 John 4:7-21, speaks directly to the love of God and is in fact where we get this statement, God is Love.  It is mentioned explicitly twice in this passage.  Here’s the thing though.  I love that God, in his infinite wisdom, inspired the New Testament to be written in Greek instead of English, because in this case, Greek is so much more precise than English and we can truly get a more precise understanding of what John – and therefore God himself – meant when he said “God is Love.”

First of all, if you are a Greek scholar or even if you have been the type of person who goes to church on a semi-regular basis, you probably already know that there are 4 Greek words for the one English word LOVE and so we would not be surprised to know that the word used here – Agapao – or Agape Love as we call it sometimes – refers to an unconditional commitment.  Ironically, not even Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (at least not the 1913 online edition) has an entry for the word love that describes the type of unconditional commitment that it represented by the Greek word, Agapao, and is so thoroughly explained in the “love chapter” of 1 Corinthians 13.   There should be no surprise, therefore, that God’s love is different than any human concept of love.

However, there’s something else we get in the original language that is really beneficial to understanding the love of God.  First of all, the original here doesn’t say that “God is loving.”   To say that would imply that God somehow behaves in a manner that meets our flawed expectation of what is means to be “loving”.  As a result, we hear people say things like… “A loving God would want me to be happy” or “A loving God understands that I was just born this way” or even “A loving God would never send anyone to hell.” Those statements are all based on a human understanding of what it means to be “loving.”

Likewise, it does not say that “Love is God.”  However, many of us make our concept of love a god in our lives.  We will do anything to experience the emotion that we often mistake as love or to experience the illusion that we are loved.

Instead, what is says – and means in the original – is that “God IS Love”.  When we speak of the love of God, we are speaking not about some character trait of God, but of his very existence - his PERMANENT existence.  HE IS LOVE – AGAPE UNCONDITIONAL LOVE - and so the Love of God is the essence of God.

But what does that really mean?  Well 1 John 4:7-21 helps us understand precisely what that means, and so from it we can see four characteristics of God’s love.

The first characteristic of God’s love that we see from these verses is that God’s love is manifest (made known) in Jesus.  God revealed his love to us through the person of Jesus Christ.  Hebrews 1:3 says that Jesus” is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature…”(ESV). Since Jesus is the exact representation of the being of God, and since God is Love, Jesus is the manifestation of that love. If we want to know what the love of God looks like, all we have to do is look at the life of Jesus Christ.

The second characteristic of God’s love we see from this passage is that God’s love is demonstrated in the cross.  While it is true that God is love and that he has no desire for any of us to perish, God is also just and holy and must punish sin.  As such, God demonstrates his love by putting to death his one and only son, Jesus – the very one who is the manifestation of his love.  Romans 5:8 says “But God demonstrated his love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (NIV84).

Verses 9 and 10 of 1 John 4 give us 3 important facts about the demonstration of God’s love through the death of Jesus on the cross.

a.       Jesus’ death gives us life: Romans 5 tells us that death came to all men because of Adam’s disobedience, but it also tells us that one man’s obedience brings live to all who believe.

b.      Jesus’ death occurred even though we did not love God: God didn’t decide to save us because we loved him; he saved us while we were his enemies.  It is because he loved us first that we love him.

c.       Jesus’ death was a propitiation for our sins:  A big word that essentially means he took our deserved punishment.

Too many people think that because God is love that he can simply wave his hands and all of the evil and sin in our lives is just forgiven.  It is not God’s love that forgives us.  The price of sin had to be paid.   It is the very precious and costly price that Jesus paid on the cross that allows us to be forgiven.  However, in being obedient to death, Jesus demonstrated the depth of God’s love for us.  By the way, Jesus’ death wasn’t just a demonstration of God’s love, but being the manifestation of God’s love, his death was a demonstration of Jesus’ own love for us as well.  1 John 3:16 says “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us…” (ESV).  Not exactly the human understanding of love, is it?

The third characteristic of God’s love that we see from this passage comes from verse 12, where we find that God’s love is perfected in the believer.  Verse 12 says that God’s love abides in us.  However, it only abides in us if we have faith and so his love is present in our lives as a result of our faith.  John 3:16 says “For God so loved the world that he have his only son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (ESV).  In the original, that word, believes, is the verb form of the word faith…  In other words, God’s love does not abide in us without faith.  

So we have to have faith before God’s love is present in us, but it is not perfected until it is powered by the Holy Spirit. Without the Holy Spirit living within us, we could not experience the Love of God in our lives. Romans 5:5 says that “God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (ESV).  Likewise, without the Holy Spirit living within us, we could not carry out the Love of God in our lives. Galatians 5:22 tells us about the fruit of the Spirit, and what is the very first attribute of the fruit of the Spirit?  It is love.  It is the Holy Spirit that enables us not only to experience God’s love, but to be able to  reproduce it in our lives.

Ultimately, though, the perfection of the love of God in our lives is proven through our obedience to his commands.  1 John 5:3 says “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments” (ESV). But what is the commandments we are to obey?   Simply - his commandment is to love one another.  John 15:12 says “For this is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you” (ESV). If the world sees our love for one another and for them, then they will believe that God is love.   However, if the world looks at us and they see hatred and division, how can they possibly understand that God is love? 

True love for one another must be like God’s love for us.  How did Jesus love us?  He laid down his life for us. And so we are to be willing to lay down our lives for others.  We saw the first half of 1 John 3:16 a moment ago… the whole verse says “By this we know love,that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.” But it is more than just laying down our lives for theirs… it is caring for their needs 1 John 3:17 says “But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” (ESV) What that means is that we are to love through our actions, not through our words.  It is easy to say we love each other, but do we show it through our actions.  In fact, 1 John 3:18 says precisely that: “Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth” (ESV).  The bottom line about having God’s love perfected in us through our obedience is that we cannot love God and hate men, which is precisely what John says in this passage in verse 20.

The final characteristic we see about the love of God from 1 John 4:7-21, however, is the one that should provide us with the most comfort, because God’s love is confidence for the day of judgment.  What is it about death that we fear most?  Is it the uncertainty of it?  It is the fear that maybe God is real and we haven’t lived up to his standard and so there is punishment waiting for us?  Look at verse 19.  It tells us that  perfect love casts out fear.  Fear of what?  Fear of punishment.  When we are abiding in the love of God, we have no reason to fear. 

In God’s love, there is no fear of the unknown, because he gives us confidence in our eternal security.

In God’s love, there is no fear of punishment, because he gives us confidence in our eternal reward.

On the other hand, where fear exists, love has not been perfected (i.e., does not exist in the believer).  It may very well be that the reason you fear death or you are not confident in your eternal security in Christ or the reason you fear that you can’t meet up to God’s standards is because you really do not have the love of God abiding in you.  If that is the case, I urge you to turn to Jesus, because the love of Jesus can cast out all those fears.  Through his life as the manifestation of God’s love and his death as the demonstration of God’s love, he can forgive you of your sins, and give you the Spirit of God so that the love of God will dwell in you.  That, however, requires you to put your faith in him.

For those of us who already know we have the love of God, did you notice as we discussed these four characteristics of God’s love that none of them had anything to do with my desires or my wishes?  Unlike our human concept of love, they are not “me-centric” at all.  In fact, the only sense in which God’s love really is focused on me is that it provides me confidence in my salvation.  Instead, the love of God is outwardly focused.  As God focused his love on us, we are to focus our love on others.  That is how we are to show that we have the love of God in us.  Work towards perfecting the love of God in your lives by being obedient to his command to love others as he loved us – for that is what it means to say GOD IS LOVE.