Marriage in the Church

An acquaintance of mine recently remarried. She's a friend of mine on Facebook because I know her family well, but I'm not particularly close with her. She and her new husband look incredibly happy together, and all of our mutual friends were congratulating her on her wedding. But I didn't. Honestly, I'm confused by the whole situation. I don't know why she divorced her first husband (or even if she initiated the divorce). I do know that she still seems passionate about following and serving God, and probably is a lot better at those things than I am. It just gnaws away inside me that this is her second husband, that the vows she made the first time around have been broken, and that the community around her - the church community, the Christian community - spoke no words of sorrow or rebuke over the brokenness and is now publicly rejoicing in her new marriage. I don't know her story, and knowing her family I doubt that this divorce was entered into lightly, so I don't want to judge her specifically. For all I know, her first husband was abusive and unfaithful. But it makes me think. And in general, I see the church rejoicing at the beginning of marriages (which is all well and good) but sitting back silently when those marriages falter and fail.

Marriage is not strengthened when divorce is accepted.

The institution of marriage is a good thing, a God-ordained thing, meant to bring joy and sanctification to the participants and designed to represent the relationship between Christ and the church. So it is both natural and fitting that the church community should (in general) rejoice and celebrate the coming together of two people in marriage! But the intent and design of marriage necessitate boundaries and limitations to it. We would not rejoice if a father tried to marry his daughter, or if a man tried to marry multiple women, or if a friend tried to marry someone we knew to be abusive; those of us with more strictly Biblical views would also not rejoice if a man tried to marry another man, or if a Christian tried to marry an unbeliever. Some of those marriages act against the first purpose of marriage by destroying the spouses' joy or by making it more difficult for them to walk with God and grow in their faith; others work against the second purpose by twisting that imagery and distorting our understanding of the relationship between God and us as the church. Seeing the immediate and temporal happiness of the individuals entering into one of those skewed marriages might make it natural for us to want to rejoice in their coming together - but it might not be fitting if the relationship is inherently flawed.

One could respond that all relationships are flawed to some degree, and that no marriage adequately represents the relationship of Christ to the church, and I would of course agree. My own sin puts strain on my own marriage every day, eats away at my joy and my husband's joy, and dims our marital reflection of Christ. But incest, polygamy, and homosexuality are insurmountable obstacles to accurately reflecting the relationship between Christ and the church, no matter how happy and committed the individuals may be. On the other hand, a mismatched marriage would have the essence and character needed to reflect that relationship, and thus not be inherently flawed, but it may be unwise for a myriad of reasons. So I think the church should be firm about rejecting the first type of relationship (those which are in essence unable to reflect the full Biblical imagery of marriage) and should counsel against the second type but provide as much support as possible to those already in the midst of one (so that a bad situation might possibly redeemed, and the significant sin or area of discord used as a catalyst for sanctification and increased faith).

Divorce is difficult for me, however, because I'm often unsure of which category it falls into. Clearly, it destroys entirely the Christological imagery of marriage. Christ will not "divorce" or abandon His church, and our lack of faithfulness will not tear apart the relationship either. But I know that after a divorce people can go on to do great things and become great men and women of faith, and that God will even use the divorce to draw them to Himself. And the church should play a role in that redemptive work. Our judgment of the sin should not push the sinner farther away from Christ; rather, we should seek to respond in a way that pulls the sinner deep into the love whose depth and length and width and height are said to be beyond comprehension. The challenge is to do this well without compromising the truth that divorce hurts individuals, families, and society, Christians and unbelievers alike, by twisting our understanding of Christ's commitment and love for us.

So should I rejoice in a remarriage following divorce? I have, once, when the man remarrying had been abandoned by his wife in middle age for no reason other than her own feelings and whims. But even then I wondered if he should have let her go or if he should have continued to pursue her in love as long as possible, like Christ pursues us when we turn to our idols of comfort or power or respect. It's not a black and white issue, and I think culturally we are inclined to prioritize happiness over commitment. We might say that we value redemption more than atonement... we encourage people to simply move on and start over instead of taking the time to wrestle with and repent of the past. When someone vows before God to be committed to another person for a lifetime, and shoulders the mantle of reflecting God in one particular relationship just as he or she has endeavored to reflect Him as an individual, it is a serious matter. It is not to be entered into frivolously. That is why the whole church stands together (or should, at any rate) in witness to and support of the couple making those vows. It is an equally serious matter when those vows are broken, and yet the church does nothing. We rejoice when the oath-breaker stands a second time to make those same promises to a different person than before - but do we provide the counsel and support needed to make sure that this time the promises will be kept through the hard times once the swell of romantic love has ebbed away?

It breaks my heart to see so many marriages foundering on the shoals of life, to see the church dimming its warning lighthouse beacon, to see her members laboring on the shore to pick up the pieces instead of helping steer the ship to safer seas, or throwing together hasty and poorly-built boats instead of taking the time to construct sea-worthy vessels before sending them out from port. Should we be there to help people rebuild after a divorce? Of course. But we should be working even harder to keep that shipwreck from happening in the first place, instead of just counting on the skills of the rescue team. Our marriages are not simply private contracts that only hurt or help the individuals directly involved; they are also public statements of the nature of Christ and His relationship to His people, and we as the church need to fight for them, stand beside them, and give them the supplies and guidance they need to sail safely across the ocean of time.

Acknowledging need

"It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realise for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us. Surely we must have a little - however little - native luminosity? Surely we can't be quite creatures?
"For this tangled absurdity of a Need, even a Need-love, which never fully acknowledges its own neediness, Grace substitutes a full, childlike and delighted acceptance of our Need, a joy in total dependence. We become 'jolly beggars.' The good man is sorry for the sins which have increased his Need. He is not entirely sorry for the fresh Need they have produced. And he is not sorry at all for the innocent Need that is inherent in his creaturely condition. For all the time this illusion to which nature clings as her last treasure, this pretence that we have anything of our own or could for one hour retain by our own strength any goodness that God may pour into us, has kept us from being happy. We have been like bathers who want to keep their feet - or one foot - or one toe - on the bottom, when to lose that foothold would be to surrender themselves to a glorious tumble in the surf. The consequences of parting with our last claim to intrinsic freedom, power, or worth, are real freedom, power and worth, really ours just because God gives them and because we know them to be (in another sense) not 'ours.'" - C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

This is not the way I naturally think, and I don't think it's the way most other people think either.We are ashamed of our Need, even our Need for God; we wish to be independent beings, possessing something utterly our own which we can then give to God and to other people. In fact, we don't want to admit that we are dependent on God, not just because of our sin, but because we are His creatures, the things He has made and whose life He sustains. I love the analogy in the first paragraph above: we want to have some light of our own, to shine bright with the goodness of our own being, instead of simply reflecting the light of God. But since we are His creatures, even if light did shine forth directly from us, it would still be His light that He put within us in the first place.There is nothing we can offer Him that He did not give to us, and because we are fallen we tend to need His help and encouragement even in that act of giving. And that is hard to accept, so I tend to fight it - I try to prove to myself, through continued efforts to be perfect, through the accumulated praises of people around me, through my own self-assessment in every situation, that I am a being who can live without Need and give freely of what is inherently my own to God and others: in other words, that I am a being like God in that I am my own self-sufficient person characterized by Gift-love rather than by Need-love.

But of course this is not true! So the fight becomes a lesson in failure and discouragement, or in self-righteousness and pride, depending on how the battles of the moment are progressing. In either case, there is no true delight, freedom, or consciousness of value. How could there be, when I am trying to live outside the constraints of reality? As Lewis wrote above, the false belief that we are self-sufficient, independent beings is what bars us from experiencing happiness. It imprisons us in continual striving for inherent personal perfection, in lies (believed in the heart if not spoken), in competition even with those we love the most, in the desperate fortress of pride faced with defeat. Having proclaimed to ourselves that we are Need-less - without Need of any sort, and particularly without that Need of God that infiltrates our whole being - we begin to feel that we are needless - meaningless beings without any greater purpose or worth. The One whom we need even to be truly ourselves is the same One who has made us able to meet the needs of people around us, given us a purpose and a meaning for our lives, and thus bestowed upon us greater worth than we could have ever made for ourselves. The One before whom we are utterly powerless, and upon whom we are dependent for life itself, gives to us His power, that we might live by His strength and do greater things that we could ever have imagined for ourselves. And the One who is a fountain of joy and love, apart from whom we are dark and hate-filled little creatures, will, if we will let Him, cause that fountain to spring up in glory within our very hearts, giving to us that which we could never earn or make for ourselves, but in the act of giving making it truly ours in Him.

Pursuing Christ, and letting righteousness follow

In Philippians 3, Paul writes of the surpassing greatness of the knowledge of Christ - how to know Christ is so much better than anything else that all those other things can be considered rubbish or even loss in comparison. What seems incredible to me is that knowing Christ is this much better even than being righteous. God wants us to be righteous (indeed, He commands us to be), and we have to be righteous to be in His presence with joy and love instead of terror and condemnation, but ultimately righteousness is not the highest goal. That distinction goes to knowing Christ. And it is so much more important and more wonderful to know Christ that all the labor and time we have invested into becoming righteous through the efforts of our flesh in submission to the law, even if it has made us as near perfect as humans can be, is loss.

What God desires is for us to know Him as He knows us, and becoming righteous is a part of that process. But sometimes I think we mistake the ends and the means, and we treat knowing God as a means to becoming righteous - we make our own perfection the goal we seek, and use our relationship with God as a tool in our labors toward that end. I know I sometimes think and act this way, anyways. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. God doesn't allow Himself to be used as a means to any other end (at least not for very long), because He is the only end in which we will find joy and fulfillment, and He wants us, if we will, to find the true happiness and meaning for which we were created. So in the end, if we have not sought to know Him first and wholeheartedly, we will lose all that we thought we had gained instead of Him. The castles of righteousness we had built so proudly on our own will come crashing down, because they were built on the foundation of our sinful nature rather than on the foundation of Christ. But if we seek Him - if we press forward toward that goal, the goal of knowing Christ, with all our heart and mind and strength - then we will find that we have not only found Christ and come to know Him, but have attained to righteousness as well: the righteousness which is from God by faith. And this righteousness obtained in this way is the only righteousness that will not someday be a loss to us, that will be in the end of any worth.

Thoughts on marriage for my 9-month anniversary

For marriage, as indeed for life as a whole, I feel that there is one primary (though two-fold) purpose: to know God more and, being in Him, to become more like Him. Practically, what this means is that our own pleasure is not the purpose of marriage. We marry someone we love and whose company we enjoy, with whom we share similar interests, beliefs, and visions for life, and with whom we expect to be able to cultivate happiness - but ultimately the end for which we ought to strive, in marriage, is most emphatically not our own personal temporal happiness or fulfillment. In a word, the purpose of marriage is sanctification.

When I was single, I noticed how many of the resources for singles focused on God's use of that time of life to draw one closer to Him - to help us learn, variously, to trust in Him more, to be content with the situations in which He places us, to deepen our faith in both large and small things, to give of ourselves wholeheartedly and passionately for His work, to develop godly character, and so on: essentially, to sanctify and refine us through the "fire" of singleness. Similarly, when I read the old classics of the Christian faith (and I mean the very old classics!), I found that most of them were written by vocational celibates (such as monks) for other vocational celibates, and singleness was praised because of its ability to be used by God for our sanctification. And I thought as a single and still think now that this is very true. God will indeed use our singleness to teach us about Him, to draw us closer to Him (often by giving us no one else to turn to), and to generally shape us into the person He desires us to become.

But what all those messages left out, and what I felt seemed to be missing in most of the marriage resources I was given when Paul and I were approaching our wedding, was that God continues this sanctification process in marriage. Just as He will use the unique challenges and opportunities presented by singleness to grow our character and deepen our relationship with Him, so He will use the unique challenges and opportunities presented by marriage. The situations will be different, and the ways in which He will change us will very likely be different, but the overarching purpose will be the same: our sanctification. God desires to make us holy, so that we can be with Him in joy and glory instead of fear and condemnation, and in this life He is working out in us through the Spirit the righteousness that He gave us in Christ. Whether we are single or married, He will use the circumstances in which we find ourselves to transform us for our good and His glory.

I must admit that I wouldn't have thought of this idea of marriage as a means for sanctification unless I had read it in a book given to us by an older couple I knew in college, titled Sacred Marriage. But this book is the only one that has even mentioned, much less developed, the idea, and I think it is important for those of us who are married and thinking about getting married. It should give us cause to examine our motivation for marriage in the first place - are we seeking marriage to obtain physical pleasure, emotional security, or companionship, or are we seeking it because we feel God is leading us in that direction and has a purpose for it in our walk with Him? Once married, it should inform the priorities that we create in our relationship with our spouse: do we use them for our own pleasure (whether blatantly or through more subtle hinting and manipulation), or do we strive to put his or her needs first, even when that entails self-denial? Do we see their weaknesses as insufferable flaws, or do we learn to show them (consistently and constantly) the same grace that God shows us? Do we try to ground our identity on their approval and on our perception of their love for us, or do we find our meaning and worth in Christ and from that established and secure identity begin to truly love our spouse without a continual search for their validation? Do we expect our marriage to be perfect, and fix blame and condemnation on either our spouse or ourselves when struggles arise, or do we expect those struggles and learn to work through them together, edified and strengthened by the grace of God?

Essentially, the question to ask in marriage (and maybe in any venture of life) is whether I am making any given choice for the glory of God and out of my new life in Christ, or whether I am making that choice for my own convenience - to obtain my own desires - and out of my old life enslaved to sin. If throughout each day I consciously strive to take the former path, I will be employing marriage for its intended purpose in my life: my sanctification. But if I fail to be vigilant and intentional, if I choose not to seek God in those situations that marriage has brought upon me, I will throwing away those golden opportunities God would like to use to draw me to Him. By His grace, I hope that my marriage to Paul will truly be a means for both of us to learn to walk more closely with our Lord, and grow in our knowledge of Him and in the fruit we bear in our lives.

Hoping in His Mercy

"He [the Lord] does not delight in the strength of the hose;
He takes no pleasure in the legs of a man.
The Lord takes pleasure in those who fear Him,
In those who hope in His mercy." - Psalm 147:10-11

Sometimes I wish I were perfect just so I could give myself to God and have Him be pleased with me, as if, somehow, my own merit and appearance of righteousness could be enough to meet His standards. I wish I could save myself (or somehow make it so I didn't need salvation) so that I could come to Him without needing to be dependent on Him, as if that would somehow make Him love me more or be more pleased with me. I think it is a common human desire: we wish to accomplish great things on our own to win the approval or acceptance of someone we respect, and we want to be able to do what ought to be done without needing to be a burden on someone we love. Of course, it doesn't work in our relationship with God! In our own strength, we can never live up to His standards or make ourselves righteous in His eyes, because we are stained and weighed down by sin. And in our own strength, we can never pay the penalty for our sins, because the punishment is too great for us to bear outside of eternity; if we chose to bear that burden ourselves because we didn't want to be dependent on God, He would let us - but we would never be able to be with Him in fellowship and love. For that, His grace is necessary.

The beauty of these verses is that in them we see that God finds pleasure not in the things we accomplish by our own striving and strength, but in us, we who have chosen to depend upon His grace and hope in His mercy. In the mindset of the previous paragraph, we were trying to make God delight in us by doing things that we thought would please Him and hoping that His pleasure in the good acts would translate to pleasure in us as persons; now what we see is that He takes pleasure in us when we let go of the good acts, and stop trying to be perfect on our own, and put our hope in His mercy and grace. Why would this be? Why would He be more pleased with us when we burden Him with our weaknesses and needs, relying on His grace and mercy to cover our sins, than when we strive to be righteous and offer to Him our good deeds?

Well, simply put, the answer is pride. To think that we are capable of doing for ourselves what only God can truly do (and what He suffered pain, humiliation, and death to accomplish) is incredibly proud. To want God to love us for our merit and innate goodness, so that we reject the love borne of His grace, is incredibly proud. It is saying, in essence, that we want the universe (and God!) to operate on our terms rather than on God's terms. We want His love and acceptance more than anything else - but we don't want to receive it in the way He has chosen to offer it to us. Let us lay down this pride before it leads us to the end to which it carried Satan! Let us accept the breath-taking offer of love and grace that He wants to give us, instead of trying to prove we are worthy first! We never will be, unless we first accept it as an undeserved gift.

But if we do accept His grace, knowing we don't now and never will deserve it through anything we can accomplish, then the incredible will happen. When we lay our broken and filthy souls at the foot of the cross, to receive His grace in humility and awe, we will find that He delights us, that He accepts us, that He loves us unconditionally. We will find that in the moment of surrender and faith we will have attained what all our striving could never earn: His pleasure in us. For He takes pleasure in those who fear Him - in those who hope in His mercy.

Little gifts and mighty graces

God is always giving us little gifts - the sun coming out after rain, the happiness of welcoming a loved one home again, good food and a full stomach, the comforting warmth of blankets and pillows at the end of the day, the quiet pleasure of a day of rest, and so on. Indiscriminately, he fills our days full of these little gifts; sometimes we rejoice in them with gratitude, and sometimes we hardly notice them. Assuming we choose not to ignore them, though, these little gifts are enough to bring us joy and satisfaction for a lifetime. However, God does not limit Himself to them. His purpose, being set on eternity as well as temporality, is not content with merely blessing us in this life; He wishes also to bless us with gifts that will last for eternity and with gifts that will bring eternity to our hearts here and now. Obviously the greatest of these gifts is salvation! In between this overwhelming, unfathomable, unbelievable grace, and the little daily graces that we take for granted, though, are many rich and beautiful gifts - graces that surprise and amaze us with their extravagance, and that transform and inspire our hearts.

These intermediate graces are, I think, children of the grace of salvation. Having saved us - having bought us with the blood of Christ, adopted us into His family, and sealed us with His Spirit - God is not content to have merely covered us with His righteousness: He desires to cause that righteousness to grow up and bear fruit within our very hearts. To accomplish this purpose, He bestows upon us these sanctifying graces. There is the grace of knowing His tender comfort in the midst of great sorrow; of gaining security and peace through His strength becoming our defense in times of worry or fear; of hearing His ever-loving voice answer our confusion with His truth; and so on. They are less frequent than the little common graces, but they are also more powerful. They cause us to know God more, and thus they are indescribably wonderful.

One of the most wonderful of these graces is when God removes for a moment some veil of sin and allows us to see something with His eyes instead of our own. We may not have even realized that our vision was so obscured - but then all at once everything looks different, and we know that it looks as it truly is and the way we had formerly perceived it was skewed and blurred. To compare it to something much more trivial, it is akin to putting on a pair of glasses and suddenly seeing the world without the astigmatism and myopia. Overwhelmed by joy, the heart effortlessly overflows with praise; it is impossible to contain the gratitude at being given such a grace as this, at being privileged for one brief moment to see with clearer sight. There is humility, also, in the knowledge that the vision is not born of any merit of our own, but is purely gift and grace, and in the deepened recognition of our sinfulness and of how small our relationship with God really is - but it is the humility of self-forgetfulness, not the humility of despair. With eyes newly open in Christ to some beautiful and glorious truth, we lose ourselves in Him; our whole being is colored through and through with His radiance, and His light is the joy of our hearts.

There is a strange shyness about the things we see by these graces; the sweetness is too piercing and too intimate for it to be revealed to the world as some great spiritual experience. It is like trying to tell someone the secrets you whisper with your lover - the joy is too high, the love is too great, and above all the thing itself pulls back from being told. These graces change our hearts and draw us nearer to God; they give us new eyes to see more clearly; they are the planting of seeds and the bearing of fruit in our lives; but they themselves are not known outside the heart in which they labor. They are the love-notes of our eternal Bridegroom, delighting in His Bride.

My soul longs for You like a thirsty land

I am a person of many moods. A compliment, a glimpse of light on falling water, a butterfly, a feeling of God's goodness or nearness, or a fascinating idea, can send me soaring crazily high into happiness. On the other hand, a small troubling thought, a worry about something almost insignificant, a failure to accomplish everything on my to-do list, or a feeling that someone (especially God!) may not be pleased with me, can send me spiraling downward in seconds. In the same day I can be almost overwhelmed with joy, praising God and rejoicing in the blessings He has given me, and then be burdened with the feelings of guilt and unworthiness to the point where it is difficult for me to do anything at all.

Because of this tendency of mine to ride an emotional roller coaster, I have found it extremely important to keep my mind meditating on the truth of God's word. If His promises aren't there in my heart, then I have no guard against those things that would weary my soul and empty my heart of hope. So I read Scripture, and I memorize verses (Psalms are especially encouraging), and I delight in the Lord who loves me, and His word encourages me. But in the darkest times - when the light of joy seems to have set like the sun beyond the horizon, and the night stretches out around me, starless and moonless and void - in those times, my only recourse is to cry out to my God, and cling to Him desperately, my Rock and my Deliverer.

And I found today that the great pray-er of prayers, whose very cries to God were inspired by God, has been in that place, and lifted up his voice to God with words that I can also speak when my own words fail to come from the heavy ache inside me (forgive me for quoting so much of this psalm here; it is just so meaningful to me).

"Hear my prayer, O Lord,
Give ear to my supplications!
In Your faithfulness answer me,
And in Your righteousness.
Do not enter into judgment with Your servant,
For in Your sight no one living is righteous.

For the enemy has persecuted my soul;
He has crushed my life to the ground;
He has made me dwell in darkness,
Like those who have long been dead.
Therefore my spirit is overwhelmed within me;
My heart within me is distressed. 

I remember the days of old;
I meditate on all Your works;
I muse on the work of Your hands.
I spread out my hands to You;
My soul longs for You like a thirsty land. 

Answer me speedily, O Lord;
My spirit fails!
Do not hide Your face from me,
Lest I be like those who go down into the pit.
Cause me to hear Your lovingkindness in the morning,
For in You do I trust;
Cause me to know the way in which I should walk,
For I lift up my soul to You." - Psalm 143:1-8

 He will hear our prayers. He will send light into our darkness. He will not condemn us for our sins, for He has forgiven us in Christ. He will satisfy our longing souls "as with marrow and fatness!" For "His compassions fail not. They are new every morning!" And when my spirit is overwhelmed within me, I can cry out to Him and He will not despise me for my weakness or grow impatient with my stumbles and hesitations, because He loves me. He loves me unfailingly and unconditionally! That is a truth to hold close to my ever-changing heart! In the fiercest of storms, in the darkest of nights, in the depths of self-condemnation, this I know, and this I can hold fast to: that my God has called me His beloved, and He will never cause His love for me to lessen or to cease.

Dwelling in the word

"Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, 'If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.'" - John 8:31-32

 The word "abide" is incredibly rich (at least to me...). It is like the word "dwell" - there is this feeling of resting and remaining, of making a home. So His word is to be, in a sense, our home - the place where we live, the place to which we return for comfort and strength, the place in which we are nourished, loved, encouraged, and helped to grow. It is the place where our identities are formed (if we are truly abiding there), and where we establish habits and patterns of godliness in our lives.

A family home here on earth is full of flaws, no matter how full of love it is, because no one in it is perfect in himself or has perfect understanding of the other people dwelling there. There can be conflict, tension, and strife; parents may impart poor values to their children; people can isolate themselves even while living under the same roof, causing distance in their relationships; family members may expect too much from each other and give too little; someone might feel left out, lonely, or sad; and in the worst cases, abuse could happen.

But when we're abiding in the word, we're spending time in God's home. Here He is the Father, and He knows His children completely - so He draws us into His love in the ways that we can understand and receive it, and He teaches us what is right without introducing error or sin, and He raises us up to be beautiful and holy sons and daughters in Christ. If we are choosing not to abide in His word, we are choosing to miss out on this deeper communion with Him that comes from dwelling in His home. Come, seek Him in the place where He lives! Make your home with Him, and know His love!

"Even the sparrow has found a home,
And the swallow a nest for herself,
Where she may lay her young -
Even Your altars, O Lord of hosts,
My King and my God.
Blessed are those who dwell in Your house;
They will still be praising You." - Psalm 84:3-4

Living and loving

When a person does something kind for another person, and does it genuinely intending to be kind, there are two main motivating reasons: first, they are doing it out of love for the other person; second, they are doing it in hopes that the other person will love them. At least, these are the two contrasting motivations I have seen in my own life, as I go about trying to do things for others and for God, and I like to think that I'm not the only person with this struggle :) Sometimes, selfless acts and encouraging words spring up from a heart full of God's love and eager to pass it on; other times, I force those acts and words up from a desperately dry and empty heart yearning to be filled by another's love. If I am secure in the belief that I am loved by God no matter what - that I don't need to strive to be righteous to merit His love or to keep it from fading away - then it is far easier to genuinely love others and act towards them not just in the right way, but with the right heart and attitude. It allows me to gain the confidence I need to show love to other people out of genuine love (growing ever more like God's love, hopefully) instead of in a self-centered attempt to win their love in return.

The difference between serving someone out of love for them and serving them in hopes of earning their love is incredibly vast. In the first there is joy, confidence, and inner peace; in the second there is loneliness, a pervading sense of unworthiness, and constant fear. I feel like this is a very basic concept that I am only now fully starting to experientially understand :P But now that I am beginning to grasp it, and to see the fullness of life that comes from living out of God's love, that is what I am going to try to do. Instead of thinking, "I ought to make supper so Paul will keep loving me" (as a rather simple example), I can think "I love Paul! And I have this opportunity to bless him by making him supper!" However, that capacity to love another person and have that love be the foundation of my actions toward them can only come from God, from walking close to Him through every part of every day, from drinking in His word and constantly turning to Him in prayer. This is probably why I have so much trouble with it - I am trying to manufacture love on my own instead of channeling it through my heart from the overflowing spring of God's love. So here's to relying on God, right? :) He is our strength, as the Psalms are continually reminding us, and if we build our lives on Him He will not let us down.

Being seen by God

I get kind of scared when I think about God always watching me, always seeing me even down to the depths of my heart and the hidden places inside me. I mean, He is good and holy and just, and there is so much in me that is bad, and so much in addition that is just weak and useless and cluttering. Sigh. I don't know why He would want to see down into those places! Doesn't it disgust Him, to see what lies inside my heart? Does He ever regret redeeming me and adopting me into His family, when the price was so high and I am so worthless even after all He has done for me and in me?

But look at how Nicholas of Cusa writes about it:
"... Thou never ceasest most lovingly to behold me, yea, even the secret places of my soul. With Thee, to behold is to give life; 'tis unceasingly to impart sweetest love of Thee; 'tis to inflame me to love of Thee by love's imparting, and to feed me by inflaming, and by feeding to kindle my yearnings, and by kindling to make me drink of the dew of gladness, and by drinking to infuse in me a fountain of life, and by infusing to make it increase and endure." - The Vision of God

How do I change my way of thinking so that it is more like his? How do I consistently cause myself to perceive God as loving, regarding me with care rather than in judgment? How do I find joy and gladness in the knowledge that He beholds me? Sometimes I do have that gladness in the assurance of His love, but other times I just get scared or afraid or feel like a failure, falling short of what He desires from me. So what distinguishes those two times? In the first, I am choosing to trust Him, to lean upon Him, to look on Him in faith; in the second, I don't trust Him, I want to be perfect in my own power, and I am focused on myself and my shortcomings rather than on Him in His glory and goodness. So I should spend more time in the first mindset, if I want to spend more time in that incredible joy which comes from feeling the presence and love of our Lord! Even when it is emotionally hard for me, I should do my best to cultivate faith and practice trust in the God whose love is far greater than I can comprehend.

Pleasing or trusting

In rereading Truefaced (since I haven't yet returned it, and am delaying doing so as long as possible...), one of the ideas that jumped out at me was that the path of Pleasing God is not the best one to take. That contradicts pretty much everything about the way I live! I try so hard to do everything right, to make God and other people happy with who I am and the way I live, and now this book has the nerve to tell me that I'm going about it all wrong?

When I think about it honestly, though - when I set aside my fear and pride long enough to listen to what the book is saying, and take the time to look at my own life without becoming defensive - I am forced to admit that it is right. Ultimately, living to please God first and foremost leaves me empty, unfulfilled, feeling like my life is meaningless and like I am a complete failure, because as long as I strive to please God on my own, as long as I try to eliminate my sin by my own power to earn His approval, and as long as I attempt to win His acceptance by my earnest efforts to obey His commands, I will keep failing. It simply isn't possible to accomplish those tasks in myself, without His grace.

What is the alternative, then? According to Truefaced, the other path to choose is that of Trusting God. Trusting God with my imperfection and sin means trusting Him to love me and be delighted in me as His daughter despite those things in my life, and trusting Him to have a plan to cleanse and renew me of those things. That can be really hard sometimes, when I don't feel worthy of love and can't imagine how He can keep pouring it over me with grace, or when I feel trapped in the same struggles I've had for years and don't see how His hand is at work to sanctify me.In the end, though, it is worth it. Trusting Him brings peace and joy and contentment to life, and even better, it brings a deeper knowledge of and intimacy with God. When I'm trusting Him, I'm free to truly receive and experience His love and grace and power, and I'm free to respond authentically to it. What more could I desire?

Not knowing

My sister brought up a really good question Wednesday morning when I was talking with her briefly online. Well, she didn't actually pose it as a question in so many words, but it was a train of thought that had no conclusion, which is essentially a question :)

Basically, she wondered how it was possible to have a relationship with God when there is so much we don't know about Him. As in, how can she get up in the morning and have a conversation with Him when she's been up late into the night wondering about His very nature and character?

That's a hard question. But I want to turn it around. How can she hope to learn more about His nature and character if she doesn't get up and have a conversation with Him? If that seems harsh, think about what it would be like if God were just another human being. You could stay up all night with your mutual friends discussing His character and nature - wondering whether He is trustworthy, whether or not He loves people, whether or not He is merciful or just, and so on - but if none of you are really sure, or you all have different opinions, than honestly the best way to get to know what He is like is to interact with Him.

I wouldn't have married Paul if I'd just heard about him and talked about him with other people. Yes, a lot of them would have said wonderful things about his nature and character, but I wouldn't have been convinced that they were true unless I had spent time with him personally, getting to know his heart and being able to observe his love, compassion, and wisdom in action. I think it's similar with God. I have to interact with Him and get to know Him personally to grow in my certainty that He is who He claims He is in the Bible: a good God, a righteous God, a God of love and mercy and grace, who is infallibly faithful and true. And as my personal relationship with Him grows, so does my confidence in His character and nature. No skeptic's question could shake me now, because I know Him so deeply and thus trust Him without reservation, just as I know Paul so deeply and trust him so much that no one could make me question his faithfulness to me (it wasn't always this way with either God or Paul - trust - which is faith - takes time to grow).

It was the collective mound of evidence that led me to start wanting to get to know God intellectually, and the hope of peace and love that led me to start wanting to know Him emotionally, but now that I know Him it is He Himself that keeps me wanting to know Him more. My faith is grounded in reason and a search for truth, and can provide a reason for itself, but it is centered on personally knowing God and His love. And so while discussing and debating His attributes is a very good thing to do - it sharpens my mind, challenges my faith, and opens my eyes to truths I'm missing or lies I've believed - the only sure way to get to know Him is to spend time with Him like I would spend time with anyone I wanted to get to know more deeply.

Rich, emotional, genuine passion: the unconditional love of God

What exactly is unconditional love?

Unconditional love is love that keeps on loving someone even if they hurt them, reject them, disappoint them, anger them, or even betray them. It is love that loves someone even when that person doesn't seem to deserve that love at all, or be worthy of it in any way. Rob Bell once said, "Agape [God's love] doesn't need a reason." (I read this quoted in Feel by Matthew Elliott, whose book inspired this post, so I don't know the original source.)

Does that mean that unconditional love has no regard for who the beloved is as an individual? If I love you no matter what, does that mean that your personality and actions and character mean nothing to me? More importantly, if God loves us unconditionally, does that mean He loves us as general amorphous beings, not finding anything special or delightful in the individual aspects of our personality, character, body, emotions, mind, or so on? If God loves me without any reason at all, then I am totally and utterly worthless in reality and in His eyes, and His love would seem to be more of a duty - or a way to make Himself look good - than a genuine, heartfelt, sincere love. And if that were true (which I do not believe), life would be so incredibly empty. Can you imagine living your whole life for God and never once receiving sincere love from Him? Never once experiencing His delight in you as His beloved child?

And yet that is the logical conclusion of thinking that God's love does not respond to or delight in anything in us. Have you ever thought about how He created you wonderfully, taking the time to form you before you were born, making you specifically as an individual in precisely the way that pleased Him? Have you ever read Ephesians 1 and wondered at how often God's pleasure is referenced? He redeemed us because He loved us with a love that delights in us and longs to find even more pleasure in us as we learn to walk with Him in righteousness and returning love. He compares His relationship with us, His Church, to that of a husband and wife, and He gives us the Song of Solomon to show us what that kind of love ought to look like. This is passionate love, delighting in the beloved, treasuring every aspect of her even as she feels unworthy to be so valued and cherished.

That is the love with which God loves us. He made us, and even though we are tainted with sin, He loves us each individually for the specific qualities that define who we are - that He gave to us. To put it very simply, VeggieTales had it right when they said "God made you special, and He loves you very much." All the worth we have, all the reasons God has for loving us, are things He gave to us in the first place, but they are still a part of who we are as unique beings. I mean, He created us, after all! But He loves each and every one of us as He created us, regardless (and here is where the unconditional part begins to come in) of how we have squandered or despised or destroyed the person He made us to be. Yes, He loves everyone - but He loves each of us as an individual because of all the things that make us the individual that we are.

He delights in you, you know. All the little things about who you are - the way you laugh when you see a baby smile, maybe, or your desire to protect the people you care about, or your joy in nature - bring Him pleasure, and He loves you because of them. He created you with those things according to His purpose, for His joy. You are His great treasure, for whom He died and with whom He desires to spend all eternity! And no matter how far you fall, or how many mistakes you make, or how long you rebel, or how hard you have to struggle, He will never stop loving you.

Taste and see

I have so much to write about that it's overwhelming! But here is one small thought while I have a moment.

Sometimes I don't experience God's help and love and comfort because I push it away. I tell Him and myself that I don't deserve it, or that I don't need it (because I don't want to admit that I'm hurting and weak). So then as I sit there in my hurt, which is often self-inflicted, I start to question whether God cares about me. Obviously He does! He only feels distant because I am afraid to draw near to Him, because I am afraid to have weaknesses and needs and thus am afraid to receive His love.

"Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good;
Blessed is the man who trusts in Him!" - Psalm 34:8

If I refuse to eat or even taste the food that is offered to me, how can I judge whether or not He is good? And every time I have chosen to trust Him, I have seen that He is indeed very good, and that with trust come blessing and joy.

Why?

Why is it so hard, sometimes, to believe the things that God has said?

Why is it so hard to believe that He loves me when I see that He suffered and died for me, out of love, so that He could be reconciled to me and I could be His child?

Why is it so hard to believe that I am covered by the righteousness of Christ and set free from the condemnation and wrath of God when He has told me so many times in His word?

Why is it so hard to believe that He looks at me as His beloved and precious treasure when I have felt His arms holding me with comfort and strength in the midst of my bewilderment and sorrow?

Why is it so hard to believe that I am forgiven and that He is not angry at me when time and time again He has been there for me and with me in the darkness and the pain?

Why is it so hard to believe the truth that could set me free from the lies that torment me, when I have no reason not to trust that my God is unfailingly faithful and true?

"God is not a man, that He should lie... has He spoken, and will He not make it good?" (Numbers 23:19) But I still find it so hard, sometimes, to believe the things He says.

As if every promise from Your Word is not enough

If you listen to Christian radio on a regular basis, you're probably familiar with Laura Story's song "Blessings". I know I've heard it many times! Today I listened a little more closely to the lyrics, though, and all of a sudden this song that had just been another nice song had me almost crying as I drove to work.

"We pray for wisdom
Your voice to hear.
And we cry in anger when we cannot feel You near.
We doubt Your goodness,
We doubt Your love,
As if every promise from Your Word is not enough.
And all the while You hear each desperate plea,
And long that we'd have faith to believe"

It is so true! When I'm struggling with sins I can't conquer, or feelings I can't control, or desires I know I shouldn't have but can't get rid of, I start to get angry with God. I'm like, I have come to You about these things so many times, so why am I still struggling with them? Are You still there? Do You still love me? And I do this despite the countless times that I have felt Him holding me in the midst of sorrow and protecting me when I have felt utterly alone and helpless. The testimony of the Word and of my own life is that God is unfailingly faithful, unconditionally loving, and unalterably righteous, and that He will never leave me or forsake me (Hebrews 13:5), and it seems to me that trusting Him to be those things will cause joy to bloom even in the most barren and desolate times.

By faith...

I've been thinking about some things my fiance said this morning about faith. He read Hebrews 11 (the "faith chapter") and found it really encouraging and inspiring because there are so many examples in there of people who had faith in God in hard times when they couldn't see what lay ahead. God calls us to have faith in Him - to trust in Him when we don't understand why He is allowing things to happen the way they are, and to choose to obey Him even when we can't foresee or are anxious about the consequences of that obedience. He calls us to lay aside fear and instead live by faith (the two don't dwell together very comfortable, in my experience).

In return, He gives us these assurances (among others; these are the two we talked about): that He will reward those who seek Him and that He is not ashamed to be our God. The first gives me confidence that I can leave my future in His hands and focus on following and knowing Him rather than on making sure my life is and will remain comfortable and well planned-out. The second gives me incredible joy! When we come to Him in faith, even though all our insecurities and flaws and sins trail along with us, He will not turn us away or hide His face from us. He loves us! He is not ashamed to call us His children.

And He tells me I am His own...

Hymns and contemporary worship songs are often so rich with both meaning and beauty, pairing the truth of the Word with music. So I don't mind at all when one gets stuck in my head because I can get so much out of having those words going around in my mind all day long :) Today this old hymn went around with me for a while:

"I come to the garden alone,

While the dew is still on the roses,

And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,

The Son of God discloses.

And He walks with me, and He talks with me,

And He tells me I am His own;

And the joy we share as we tarry there,

None other has ever known.

He speaks, and the sound of His voice,

Is so sweet the birds hush their singing,

And the melody that He gave to me,

Within my heart is ringing."

Thinking about that kind of intimacy with God brings tears to my eyes because it is so amazing! He tells me I am His own - He accepts me, and wants me, and chooses me, with all my sins and flaws. He speaks to me, He puts a song of joy in my heart, and He pours His love and grace over me in more abundance than I can fathom! How wonderful is our God!