One-Way Love

The message of God’s one-way love for sinners naturally meets resistance from law-locked hearts. It produces objections in those who are wired for earning and deserving, which is all of us. Sometimes these objections are rationalized forms of the emotional offense taken by creatures addicted to their own sense of control. When our sense of pride is attacked, it defends. Sometimes these objections are projections of fear about what “might” happen if people actually believed the message. Sometimes the objections to grace are simply honest rejoinders to a word that can be very hard to swallow. Two of the most frequent objections I encounter—and I encounter them a lot—are that grace makes people lazy, and grace gives people license to indulge their self-absorption, rather than serve their neighbor. If it is true that Jesus paid it all, that “it is finished”, that my value, worth, security, freedom, justification, and so on is forever fixed, then why do anything? Doesn’t grace undercut ambition? Doesn’t the gospel weaken effort? If we are truly let off the hook, what is to stop us from ending up like George Costanza in the “Summer of George” episode of the sitcom Seinfeld, who receives an unexpected severance package and vows to take full advantage of his freedom only to sit around in sweatpants, watching TV, reading comic books, and eating “a big hunk of cheese like it’s an apple”? Or, as Billy Corgan (lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins) once said, “If practice makes perfect and no one’s perfect, then why practice?” Understandable question. (Tullian Tchividjian)

His Eye Is On The Sparrow

God knows everything about us and our circumstances. His eye is on us, so we are never alone. The great song, “His Eye Is On The Sparrow” tells us, “Why should I feel discouraged, why should the shadows come, why should my heart be lonely and long for heaven and home, when Jesus is my portion? My constant friend is He; His eye is on the sparrow and I know He watches me”.

When you feel all alone, when you feel you are in a dark place, you know that the eternal God, who knows everything, is there with you. And even though you don’t have comprehensive knowledge and have many blind spots in your life, the God who sees everything is helping to navigate the way for us, through life.

One-Way Love

We love the “if/then” proposition: “If” you do this, “then” I will do that; we are inveterate slaves (at worst) or grumpy employees (at best). We militate against the freedom of inheritance and the dependency of sonship. We love living as though “what goes around comes around” conditionality were true. That kind of conditionality makes us feel safe. It’s easy to comprehend. It’s appropriately formulaic. And best of all, it keeps us in control. We get to keep our ledgers and scorecards. The equation: “If I do this, then you are obligated to do that” makes perfect sense to our grace-shy hearts.
Unconditionality, on the other hand, is incomprehensible. We are deeply conditioned against unconditionality because we’ve been told in a thousand different ways that accomplishment always precedes acceptance, that achievement always precedes approval. When we hear, “Of course you don’t deserve it, but I’m giving it to you anyway,” we wonder, “What is this really about? What’s the catch?” Internal bells and alarms start to go off, and we begin saying “wait a minute…this sounds too good to be true.”
You see, everything in our world demands two-way love. Everything is conditional. If I achieve, we reason, only then will I receive everything I long for: love, approval, significance, respect, and so on. Be good. Bring home the bacon. Keep your act together….Then (and only then) will you have what you want. That’s how our world works. But grace isn’t from our world. It’s otherworldly. It’s unconditional. Grace is upside-down, to-do-list wrecking, scandalous and way-too free. It’s one-way love.
Like Job’s friends, we naturally conclude that good people deserve good stuff and bad people deserve bad stuff. What goes around comes around sums up the mechanism at work in the world we’re at home in. The idea that bad people get good stuff is so counter-intuitive as to be utterly implausible. It seems terribly unfair. It offends our sense of justice. Of course, when we talk of justice and good people earning God’s blessing, we’re forgetting that the Bible is a not a record of the blessed good, but rather the blessed bad. No, that’s not a typo. The Bible is the record of the blessed bad. But how can that be? It can be (and is) because a good Someone else earned blessing for the bad. We say that we believe in a God of grace and then live lives completely skeptical of that grace. We’ve forgotten the one-way love of Calvary.
Even those of us who have tasted the radical saving grace of God find it intuitively difficult not to put conditions on grace. Don’t take it too far! Keep it balanced! Tamp it down! we warn. But grace–one-way love–is by its own definition, unbalanced. Grace is a gift, not a wage. It’s a gift of love, and lavish love gifts never sit quite right with the bookkeeping, wage-earning, responsible citizen that resides in our own hearts.
Need proof? We need look no farther than Mary’s profligate anointing of the Savior in preparation for his death (John 12:3f) for a snapshot of our own hearts. She was both misunderstood and censured by those ever-so-responsible disciples in attendance. The giving of something costly to another simply because one loves, without expecting anything in return, is inequity in action. We recoil at it. What could ever be balanced about something as lopsided as one-way love? One-way love has no qualifiers, no conditions, no buts. It’s unconditional, unpredictable, and undomesticated. You can’t put brakes on it because it’s not yours to measure out or control.
Grace makes us nervous, it scares us to death because it strips us of our beloved “you owe me” religion. It snatches control out of our hands. It tears up the timecard we were counting on to be assured of that nice, big paycheck on Friday. It forces us to rely on the naked goodness of Another and that is simply terrifying. However much we may hate having to get up and go to the salt mines everyday, we distrust the thought of completely resting in the promised, unmanageable generosity of God even more.
By nature we’re all perpetually suspicious of promises that seem too good to be true. We’re wary of grace. We wonder about the ulterior motives of the excessively generous. What’s the catch? What’s in it for him? So we try to domesticate the message of one-way love–after all, who could trust in or believe something so radically unbelievable?
Contrary to what we conclude naturally, the gospel is not too good to be true. It is true! It’s the truest truth in the entire universe. No strings attached! No fine print to read. No buts. No conditions. No qualifications. No footnotes. And especially, no need for balance.
If you’re a Christian, you have been given the most extravagant gift ever: the completely sufficient imputed righteousness of Christ. That means that his perfect timecard has your name on it and every single penny that was owed him for a life of devoted labor in your salt mine has been deposited directly into your account. It also means that you’ve been completely forgiven for every single time you lazed out, came in late, left early, cut corners, dawdled on FaceBook, stole paperclips, despised the boss, backstabbed your co-worker, and generally acted like an apathetic, hateful slave. You’re completely, totally, unashamedly forgiven. You’ve been forgiven because Jesus took your record and applied it to himself, receiving in your place every lash of the wrath you had earned and transferring his record to you.
Won’t you suspend your incredulity and conditionality for just one moment and believe? Won’t you stop yourself from saying, “Yes, but…” for just one hour? Sure, it seems dangerous, but doesn’t that ride look like fun? Haven’t you grown tired of the taste of that gritty salt? How many times do you have to say, “the harder I work, the behind-er I get” before you give up and believe?
Who deserves this kind of lavish one-way love? No one. No one deserves it—that’s why God calls it grace: undeserved favor. But if you believe it, your pardon is already full and final. In Christ, you’re forgiven. You’re clean. Now. It is finished. And as scary as it may seem, wading into this ocean of grace will be the most freeing and blissful dive you’ll ever take.
Tullian Tchividjian

Do You Honestly Believe That God Likes You?

The following comes from Brennan Manning’s Reflections for Ragamuffins (p. 4).  It spoke to me and I hope it does to you as well.
…..
Several years ago, Edward Farrell, a priest from Detroit, went on a two-week summer vacation to Ireland to visit relatives.  His one living uncle was about to celebrate his eightieth birthday.  On the great day, Ed and his uncle got up early.  It was before dawn.  They took a walk along the shores of Lake Killarney and stopped to watch the sunrise.  They stood side by side for a full twenty minutes and then resumed walking.  Ed glanced at his uncle and saw that his face had broken into a broad smile.  Ed said, “Uncle Seamus you look very happy.”  ”I am.”  Ed asked, “How come?”  And his uncle replied, “The Father of Jesus is very fond of me.”
If the question were put to you, “Do you honestly believe that God likes you?” – not loves you because theologically he must – how would you answer?  God loves by necessity of his nature; without the eternal, interior generation of love, he would cease to be God.  But if you could answer, “The Father is very fond of me,” there would come a relaxedness, a serenity, and a compassionate attitude toward yourself that is a reflection of God’s own tenderness.  In Isaiah 49:15, God says: “Does a woman forget her baby at the breast, or fail to cherish the son of her womb?  Yet even if these forget, I will never forget you” (JB).
 Beautiful Gospel

English Poet Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven”

“The Hound of Heaven” was first published by English poet Francis Thompson in 1893.

You can listen below to Richard Burton’s reading of it, followed by a short excerpt from Ravi Zachiaras on Thompson’s being addicted to opium and being the object of God’s pursuit.





Justin Taylor

What Happens When You Emphasize God’s Love in the Wrong Way?

Geerhardus Vos, writing in 1902:

Whatever may be charged against the intellectualism of the period when orthodoxy reigned supreme, it can claim credit at least for having been broad minded and well balanced in its appreciation of the infinite complexity and richness of the life of God. The music of that theology may not always please modern ears, because it seems lacking in sweetness; but it ranged over a wider scale and made better harmonies than the popular strains of today.
On the other hand, it is plain that where the religious interest is exclusively concentrated upon the will and entirely exhausts itself in attempts at solving the concrete, practical problems of life, no strong incentive will exist for reflecting upon any other aspect of the nature of God than His love, because all that is required of God is that He shall serve as the norm and warrant for Christian philanthropic effort.
It is a well-known fact that all heresy begins with a partial truth. So it is in the present case.
No one will deny that in the Scriptural disclosure of truth the divine love is set forth as a most fundamental principle, nor that the embodiment of this principle in our human will and action forms a prime ingredient of that subjective religion which the Word of God requires of us.
But it is quite possible to overemphasize this one side of truth and duty as to bring into neglect other exceedingly important principles and demands of Christianity. The result will be that, while no positive error is taught, yet the equilibrium both in consciousness and life is disturbed and a condition created in which the power of resistance to the inroads of spiritual disease is greatly reduced. There can be little doubt that in this manner the one-sidedness and exclusiveness with which the love of God has been preached to the present generation is largely responsible for that universal weakening of the sense of sin, and the consequent decline of interest in the doctrines of atonement and justification, which even in orthodox and evangelical circles we all see and deplore.
But this by no means reveals the full extent of the danger to which the tendency we are speaking of has exposed us. It is impossible for any practical displacement of the balance of truth to continue for a long time without endeavoring to perpetuate and justify itself by means of a corresponding reconstruction of the entire doctrinal system. Thus what may have been at first no more than a matter of relative emphasis inevitably tends to become a question of positive theoretical error, such as makes the return to normal conditions in practical religious life more difficult than before.

From Vos’s essay, “The Scriptural Doctrine of the Love of God,” The Presbyterian and Reformed Review 13 (1902): 1-37.
Justin Taylor

God Loves Sinners

Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now.
-- Galatians 4:28-29

This is a slap in the face of the Judaizers and their justification by circumcision heresy. "You think you’re Abraham’s heirs?" Paul says between the lines (and through them previously). "You think you’re repping Isaac? You with all your covenantal zealotry and your legal p's and q's minded and your pharisaical rigamarole and your detached foreskins think you're Israel? You're children of the flesh. You’re not of Isaac; you're of Ishmael."

This is astounding news. Because this is what Paul is saying: It’s the Galatians – Gentiles brought out of hedonistic paganism! with no prior covenantal cred, much less heritage – who are the children of promise, brothers of Isaac!

Isn’t this amazing news? God takes sin-hungry, idol-crazed, Law-ignorant morons like me and you and, through Christ's righteousness, says "You're Israel. You're my chosen people. You're Abraham's heirs."

The only way this isn't good news is if you think you're hot stuff.
And you are not hot stuff.

The heights of profundity and the depths of knowledge max out at this: God loves sinners so much that he forgives and saves them through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Jared Wilson

When People Are Broken

I loved this excerpt intro'd and shared by Justin Taylor so much I have to reprint it:

From a lecture by Gordon Fee, recounting the morning that he sat in his study to work on 1 Corinthians 13:4 for his commentary:

I remember the morning when I came to this passage: “Love is patient, love is kind.”

It’s actually a verb: “Love does patience.” Or better yet, the KJV: “love suffers long.”

Patience is what you show when your computer doesn’t work.

Long-suffering is what you show when people don’t work, and you’ve been around them a long, long time. That’s what it means to suffer long.

And I looked at those words and then realized that Paul was here describing God’s character. Those are exactly the words he uses of God back in Romans 2 [v. 4].

Then it dawned on me:

the first (long-suffering) is the passive side of His love;
the other (kindness) is the active side of His love.

And then I started to cry for a long time. It took me a long time to return to my computer. What if God was not like this toward us?

Jared Wilson

Holy Love Wins

Thanks to Trevin Wax for this quote from Timothy Stoner’s The God Who Smokes: Scandalous Meditation on Faith (p. 30):

The love that wins is a holy love.
The love that won on the cross and wins the world is a love that is driven, determined, and defined by holiness.
It is a love that flows out of the heart of a God who is transcendent, majestic, infinite in righteousness, who loves justice as much as he does mercy; who hates wickedness as much as he loves goodness; who blazes with a fiery, passionate love for himself above all things.
He is Creator, Sustainer, Beginning and End.
He is robed in a splendor and eternal purity that is blinding.
He rules, he reigns, he rages and roars, then bends down to whisper love songs to his creatures.
His love is vast and irresistible.
It is also terrifying, and it will spare no expense to give everything away in order to free us from the bondage of sin, purifying for himself a people who are devoted to his glory, a people who have “no ambition except to do good”.
So he crushes his precious Son in order to rescue and restore mankind along with his entire creation.
He unleashes perfect judgment on the perfectly obedient sacrifice and then pulls him up out of the grave in a smashing and utter victory.
He is a God who triumphs . . .
He is a burning cyclone of passionate love.
Holy love wins.

Justin Taylor

God Yearns After You with Jealous Envy

James 4:5 in the ESV says “[God] yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us.” B. B. Warfield preferred the marginal reading of the Revised Version: “That Spirit which He made to dwell in us yearneth for us even unto jealous envy.” Both translations have God yearning jealously over his people. Warfield preached a sermon on this passage entitled “The Love of the Holy Ghost” (HT: Fred Zaspel).
Here is a moving section from that sermon:

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See us steeped in the sin of the world; loving evil for evil’s sake, hating God and all that God stands for, ever seeking to drain deeper and deeper the cup of our sinful indulgence.
The Spirit follows us unwaveringly through all.
He is not driven away because we are sinners. He comes to us because, being sinners, we need Him.
He is not cast off because we reject His loving offices. He abides with us because our rejection of Him would leave us helpless.
He does not condition His further help upon our recognizing and returning His love. His continuance with us is conditioned only on His own love for us. And that love for us is so strong, so mighty, and so constant that it can never fail.
When He sees us immersed in sin and rushing headlong to destruction, He does not turn from us, He yearns for us with jealous envy.
It is in the hands of such love that we have fallen.
And it is because we have fallen into the hands of such love that we have before us a future of eternal hope.
When we lose hope in ourselves, when the present becomes dark and the future black before us, when effort after effort has issued only in disheartening failure, and our sin looms big before our despairing eyes; when our hearts hate and despise themselves, and we remember that God is greater than our hearts and cannot abide the least iniquity; the Spirit whom He has sent to bring us to Him still labors with us, not in indifference or hatred, but in pitying love.
Yea, His love burns all the stronger because we so deeply need His help: He is yearning after us with jealous envy.