Mercy: not getting something you do deserve.
Grace: getting something you don't deserve.
These are text book definitions for most Sunday schoolers. But, how often do you encounter these two qualities in people? How often do you express them towards people you love? How often do you express them towards people you don't love? Either in part or in combination. These qualities--two qualities that are not only imperative to a complete knowledge of crazy love, but also crucial to the foundation of my faith--are tremendously challenging to me. For whatever reason, the mantra of an "eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth" is far more easily ingrained in my mind and I can't figure out why. The more confusing thing is that I don't have a hard time extending grace and mercy towards other people. It's not that I'm perfect. Far from it. I just have an easily forgiving heart. I don't hold grudges. I tend to take the blame and bear the burdens of everyone else in addition to my own. Try as I might, though, I can't self-diagnose why I operate this way towards myself.
Maybe a good place to start is to try to explain why it's relatively easy for me to give grace and mercy to others. Simply, I have a heart for people that can only be explained through God. By any wordly standard, the fact that I am not only willing but able to experience discomfort or pain or to sacrifice my own desires to ensure another's needs are met above and before my own makes absolutely no sense at all. But the Lord calls us to it in so many passages in the Bible I could devote an entire series of blogs to writing about how we are called to be gracious and merciful towards one another. For the sake of brevity, however, I'll use two of my favorite passages:
"So speak and so act as ones who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgement is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgement." James 2:12-13
"Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Each of you should use whatever gift he has to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms." I Peter 4:9-10
Each of these models of human behavior run hard against the grain of conventional ways of thinking. However, the directives could not be more clear: mercy and grace towards others. Paul takes Mercy a step further. Calling us to extend it above judgement. The more I've thought about this, the more I've recognized that the times in my life or the moments when I want to pass judgement on someone about anything (whether it be the shirt they have on or how they choose to live their life) it's usually less to do with them and more to do with me. Me being either defensive or jealous or selfish. Judgement is a fantastic mechanism for shifting the focus (and often blame) away from ourselves and on to other things. But mercy is victorious above judgement in every situation--whether it be work, or play, or love. Mercy is a wonderfully freeing attitude, perhaps this is why Paul ties it to the law of liberty. As good as the "just desserts" approach can feel sometimes, I rarely find any lasting pleasure in dealing someone what I think they deserve if they mistreat me in some way or another. Yet, as often as I am able to rise above and extend mercy, my mind and heart are at ease.
Interestingly, in the second passage, Peter qualifies the grace. It's not human grace or your grace or any grace stemming out of your own ability or willpower. It's God's grace in it's many forms. What is God's grace? This is something I can tell you, but even after twenty years of being a Christian can't understand. God's grace is loving us more than we deserve. God's grace is giving us access to Himself--a perfect, holy, righteous being. God's grace is promising us eternal crowns of life should we choose to love him and walk in His ways. God's grace is doing what's best for us despite our failed attempts to do what we think is best for ourselves. The terms gracious and graceful are tossed around lightly, but what does it mean to be truly grace-filled I wonder. I think about this a lot when I walk by the same homeless men that stand near my office every morning. There is no limit to God's grace, how does this translate into my own life? It's easy to be grace-filled towards those people you love, but what about those people that you don't? What about towards people you don't even know? This is what we are called to as believers. Ongoing, constant, limitless grace not just towards our friends, but towards enemies and strangers.
Oddly enough, this tandem of mercy and grace, once you embrace it, offers a more complete and knowable joy than living life in the other direction, focused on revenge and selfishness. Letting go of judgement, letting go of anger, and hatred frees you from living life in a self-focused prison. Crazy love kind of ideas to anyone who hasn't experienced both of these qualities in full measure from the Lord through his son Jesus Christ. So this is where I'll run in the second part of this post. Experiencing mercy and grace in my own life, because, frankly, I'm not very good at it. But if I claim to be good at showing mercy and grace to others, I must first realize and understand both of these illogical, irrational, crazy love gifts from God in my own life...
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
defining love, part two
In the first part of this post on love, I went straight to 1 John 4 to say that God is love, and pointed out that, because God is the very definition of love, it's impossible to fully understand love. I believe that. However, in the Bible God offers three very clear explanations of God as love and, by extension, a model of love, even if we can't fully understand it or express it.
The first and most well-known example of God as love and as a model of love is John 3:16:
"For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life."
This verse probably deserves a post of its own. I don't have children yet, but I can't imagine giving up my only child, my child who I love more than I can explain in words, to save people other people I love, let alone people who don't know me or love me back. But that's exactly what God did for all of us. He sacrificed that we might not die.
The second part of God as love and as a model of how we are to love is service. One of the most poignant examples of service found in the Bible is when Jesus washes his disciples' feet...
"Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with towel that was wrapped around him...'Do you understand what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to was one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you." John 13:3-5, 12-15
It's hard to explain or understand the significance of this event given the fact that the majority of people I come into contact with every day wear shoes. Think about spending a week walking around in a cornfield bearfoot and then going to the White House for dinner and having the President of the United States wash your feet for you as you sit at his table, and you can beging to have some idea of what was going on here. What is more important than the act of service, however, is the attitude of service. Jesus is humble. He is serving not out of any motivation for self-promotion. He is serving as a demonstration of his love.
The third part of God as love and as our model of love is obedience. As with service, this isn't obedience out of compulsion. It's obedience out of genuine and complete devotion to another. There are several parables on obedience in the New Testament and several examples of obedience and the consequences of disobedience in the Old Testament, but the simplest and most powerful example of obedience in the Bible is Christ:
"Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, how, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." Philippians 2:5-8
Christ, God in human form, was obedient to the Father. Not obedient to the point of giving away an old piece of clothing or buying your friend lunch or cleaning up the kitchen after the dinner because your mom asked you to. Obedient to the point of death. Obedient in humility. Obedient not to be exalted, but because he loved all of us enough to sacrifice himself for us.
Taken together, these three examples of love leave us with a sort of incomprehensible, non-sensical picture of an idea that gets thrown around so carelessly and easily in everyday life. Love isn't that electricity that runs up and down the back of your neck when you meet someone you think you want to know forever. Love isn't some sort of fuzzy, make your head spin, make your heart race kind of emotion. Rather love is an active and ongoing choice. Love is sacrificing yourself and your desires no matter how much it hurts you because you know it helps the one you love. Love is serving in humility. Love is obedience as the perfect expression of your devotion. Love is totally and completely unselfish. How does this connect back to crazy love? It's crazy to try to think about how much God loves us. It's crazy to think that God is this perfect expression of obedience, sacrifice, and service, because this combination of sacrifice, service, and obedience runs against the grain of most definitions of love.
Ultimately, we can't experience or express this kind of love apart from Christ. Because this love isn't within human capacity, it's out of God's enabling. Merely thinking through my day today, who and what I was obedient to, what I sacrificed for, who I served, I have a long way to go in knowing and understanding this kind of love. But I still want to. I want to give and receive this choosing, self-sacrificing, perfect, holy kind of love in every kind of relationship I have. Because, to go back to something I said in part one of this blog, without this kind of love, this divine love, I am nothing.
The first and most well-known example of God as love and as a model of love is John 3:16:
"For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life."
This verse probably deserves a post of its own. I don't have children yet, but I can't imagine giving up my only child, my child who I love more than I can explain in words, to save people other people I love, let alone people who don't know me or love me back. But that's exactly what God did for all of us. He sacrificed that we might not die.
The second part of God as love and as a model of how we are to love is service. One of the most poignant examples of service found in the Bible is when Jesus washes his disciples' feet...
"Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with towel that was wrapped around him...'Do you understand what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to was one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you." John 13:3-5, 12-15
It's hard to explain or understand the significance of this event given the fact that the majority of people I come into contact with every day wear shoes. Think about spending a week walking around in a cornfield bearfoot and then going to the White House for dinner and having the President of the United States wash your feet for you as you sit at his table, and you can beging to have some idea of what was going on here. What is more important than the act of service, however, is the attitude of service. Jesus is humble. He is serving not out of any motivation for self-promotion. He is serving as a demonstration of his love.
The third part of God as love and as our model of love is obedience. As with service, this isn't obedience out of compulsion. It's obedience out of genuine and complete devotion to another. There are several parables on obedience in the New Testament and several examples of obedience and the consequences of disobedience in the Old Testament, but the simplest and most powerful example of obedience in the Bible is Christ:
"Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, how, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." Philippians 2:5-8
Christ, God in human form, was obedient to the Father. Not obedient to the point of giving away an old piece of clothing or buying your friend lunch or cleaning up the kitchen after the dinner because your mom asked you to. Obedient to the point of death. Obedient in humility. Obedient not to be exalted, but because he loved all of us enough to sacrifice himself for us.
Taken together, these three examples of love leave us with a sort of incomprehensible, non-sensical picture of an idea that gets thrown around so carelessly and easily in everyday life. Love isn't that electricity that runs up and down the back of your neck when you meet someone you think you want to know forever. Love isn't some sort of fuzzy, make your head spin, make your heart race kind of emotion. Rather love is an active and ongoing choice. Love is sacrificing yourself and your desires no matter how much it hurts you because you know it helps the one you love. Love is serving in humility. Love is obedience as the perfect expression of your devotion. Love is totally and completely unselfish. How does this connect back to crazy love? It's crazy to try to think about how much God loves us. It's crazy to think that God is this perfect expression of obedience, sacrifice, and service, because this combination of sacrifice, service, and obedience runs against the grain of most definitions of love.
Ultimately, we can't experience or express this kind of love apart from Christ. Because this love isn't within human capacity, it's out of God's enabling. Merely thinking through my day today, who and what I was obedient to, what I sacrificed for, who I served, I have a long way to go in knowing and understanding this kind of love. But I still want to. I want to give and receive this choosing, self-sacrificing, perfect, holy kind of love in every kind of relationship I have. Because, to go back to something I said in part one of this blog, without this kind of love, this divine love, I am nothing.
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