The Power of Love
Alfred Hitchcock reputedly once said, "When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say 'It's in the script.' If he says, 'But what's my motivation?', I say ‘Your salary.’” We love to poke fun at actors who ask this seemingly dramatic and pretentious question of their directors. All of us “normal” folk just have to get on with our work, so why shouldn’t they? But today it’s the right question. What is our motivation? What compels us in our Christian faith? What keeps us going?
We emphasize grace all of the time, but there is actually something behind grace…grace happens because of the love of God. Our motivator, the thing that moves us and sustains us is the love of God. “God is love,” as John so aptly puts it. But if we were to stop there with that statement it wouldn’t be enough. It’s an abstraction. God is love is not just a tenet of belief, something you hold to despite any evidence to the contrary. And there is a lot of evidence to the contrary when you look around at the world and see all of the brokenness and pain. That old objection from our skeptical selves comes, “How can a loving God allow all of this?...this war, this heartbreak, this death?” God himself knows that an abstract statement that he is love is not enough. He knows it must be experienced to ring true for us, which is why he gave us the Scripture. By the power of his Holy Spirit he moved on his people to write down their experiences of his love. They couldn’t help but do it, frankly. As Huey Lewis sang, “That’s the power of love!” When you experience true love, you can’t hold it in. It makes you want to sing it from the rooftops! That’s what the Bible is on the whole…it is God’s people telling their stories of how God proved to be love for them.
The Bible begins with creation, and so shall we. No one and nothing would be here were it not for God’s love…his desire to create the universe so that he could love and care for it. Love is the creative force in all of existence. It never leaves someone the same – it is constantly expanding and giving life wherever it goes. Continue to think about love in your life. Love opens us. It creates safety, which creates space and freedom for us to move about and try new things. Without love we would be like the Croods (in the first movie), living in a cave, constantly afraid of dying…surviving, not living. Love lifts our eyes up from our own navel gazing (as Martin Luther called it) and opens the world up to us. Love begets love. And all of it, all the love you know in your life, comes from THE Love – God’s love that brought everything into being.
Then the Fall. The original temptation of humanity came against God’s love. In Genesis 3, Moses tells the story of the devil convincing the Adam and Eve that God’s love was not in fact enough – he told them that God lied to them and that there was more that they could have – he told them they could be like God. Humanity believed the lie against God’s love and the relationship they had with God and tried to gain power for themselves. The problem with that was that in doing so, they actually rejected the true power in all of existence, they rejected God’s life-giving love. The result was the destruction of their relationship with God and with each other. All the creative effects of love vanish. Their world contracts and shrinks. They fear, they hide, they accuse, they blame. We still see this play out on an everyday basis. We still thirst for power, we still think that we can be God, but the irony of that quest is that it often comes at the expense of others. It often comes at the expense of any relationship with God, and certainly comes at the expense of our relationships with other people. After all, we are all competitors now trying to become our own gods, and we suffer for it. When we reject our relationships with God and others, it hurts us – we need others – we need other people and most importantly we need the love of God. Without God’s love in our life we are lost. He is the true power in the universe, and he is the only thing that brings peace, the only thing that fulfills.
Thankfully, that all happens in the 3rd chapter of the Bible and there 1,186 more chapters to go. And they all join in one chorus to say one thing…God loves you! He shows it through redemption. What was God’s response to our rejection? Love. John says in his first letter, “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (3:1). Because of His unconditional, undying, never-giving up, always searching, always expanding love God sends his Son, Jesus. Jesus is the physical manifestation of God’s love. He is God incarnate come to earth to save us from our rejection of him. We pushed away, but God comes after us – he does not leave us to our own self-destruction. He comes to us to save us and to make us his children. God’s love preaches good news to the lost and the broken, to the skeptic and wounded, to you and to me saying, “There is none too poor, too dirty, too broken, too naked, too stupid, too drunken, [too angry, too anxious, too anything] to be thrown outside [my] love” (Give Me Your Hand by Enter the Worship Circle).
God’s love comes and heals the sick and sets the captives free. His love comes and takes the blame for our rebellion, our rejection of his love. He dies on a cross like a criminal even though he was innocent – cursed, so that we might be set free, so that we might be brought back into relationship with God, with each other and with the world around us. He then rises again from the dead three days later conquering death so that, as John says, we could become children of God. God’s love breaks into our broken lives and re-creates us into something new, so that now we are not just the height of his creation like Adam and Eve, but now we are made his own children. His love has lifted us up to be his very own forever. We are the most important things in all of existence to him.
How does this impact our everyday? It gives us hope. John goes on in his letter to say, “Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself [and herself] as he is pure” (2-3). We still experience brokenness; we still see and feel the echoes of that original rejection of God’s love by Adam and Eve. It is in those moments that we can know the truth of God’s love for us. We have the testimony of others who have gone before us to remind us of how he came through for them, of how his love proved true. Those moments when we think we deserve nothing but rejection ourselves, those moments when we feel nothing but shame and guilt, those are the moments that God’s love is most real to us. Jesus came to break into those moments – he came to find you in that place – that place alone in the darkness, when you want to run and hide in your cave. He is there holding onto you. He is telling you, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” He is not turning his head away, but he is holding your face in his hands and giving you kisses like the most loving parent you could ever imagine. He is saying, “This does not define you. You are my child. You are my beloved.” Our hope is in His unconditional love – his amazing and life-giving grace. As a result, we are purified because we stand in him. We stand as children of God, saved from our attempted rejection of love. Praise God his love is stronger than us. Despite our worst efforts we are loved beyond imagination. This is the kind of love that the Father has given to us, and this is the motivator, the enabling word in our lives. Amen.
Recommended Reading
