Love

The Jesus Love Revolution

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For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.
—2 Peter 1:5-7 ESV

Whenever I hear some smug sourpuss exclaim, “The word love isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Book of Acts,” I want to scream.

Why? Because the entire book is love! And not just Acts. Same goes for the other sixty-five books.

Sadly, the sourpuss understanding predominates in some of our churches. Too many Christians live as if love were the most foreign word in their vocabularies, and they’ll use any excuse not to say it, much less practice it.

This last year, if a lesson wrought in my life by the Holy Spirit has stuck more than any other, it’s this: Lead with love. Always.

And I’m not talking about tough love, because so-called tough love is the excuse of too many Christians to be tactless and self-righteous. I’m talking about this kind of love:

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends.
—John 15:13 ESV

Look who laid His life down for us, the ones He calls friends. Look who wept bitterly at the tomb of His dear friend, Lazarus. Look who purchased for Himself a Bride, a perfect, perpetual lover, one He bought with His own blood!

We sell Jesus short (and ourselves along with Him) when we give such short shrift to love.

God so loved us that He sent Jesus, whom He loved in divine fellowship with the Holy Spirit, to show us how to love perfectly. By love, Jesus served us, and died on a cross, choosing to prove His love for us and for the Father and the Spirit, by offering up His life. And from that spilled blood rose His Bride, the Church, whose entire language and practice is steeped in love.

No one had seen anything like that Bride. Jerusalem was shaken by this band of people whose first act after receiving the loving gift of the Holy Spirit was to ensure by love that none among them lacked for any good thing. That the orphan and widow, the two lowest forms of life in that society, be loved and served because God loved them beyond what any human could understand. The orphan became the child of God and the widow a bride! Because of love!

That group of believers loved so intensely they thought nothing of their own lives save that they through faith love their Lord unto death, facing a cross of their own for reaching out to anyone who did not already know their Lover. And when they flagged, their leaders roused them with these truths of love:

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
—Ephesians 2:4-7 ESV

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.
—1 John 3:1a ESV

Therefore, my brothers, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm thus in the Lord, my beloved.
—Philippians 4:1 ESV

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.
—Colossians 3:12-14 ESV

And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ,
—Philippians 1:9-10 ESV

You see, when Jesus Christ came, He brought a love revolution. The Jews were scandalized by this rabbi who loved tax collectors, whores, beggars, and even Roman scum who oppressed their nation. He loved the unlovable, and by that love forgave the unforgivable.

His birth was a sacrificial act of His own love.

His first battle with evil proved His unwavering love for the Father and for us, His mission.

His first miracle was an act of love for a couple in love.

His first public reading of the loving words of the Father attested to His love for those society deemed unlovable.

Ford Madox Brown--Jesus Washing Peter's Feet at the Last SupperHe delayed His love for a friend to show an even greater love that proved His love not only for His friend, but to His Father.

By His perfect love, His service to us was our model of love.

He only spoke the truth, and that because of His love.

Love empowered both His death and resurrection.

And when He spoke of the people He would love forever, He spoke of them as a Bride, the very image of love.

That Bride not only shocked the callous hearts of the Jews, people who had once understood the love of God (but who could not see when Love walked among them), she destroyed all pretense behind the false love shown by the pagans. For if the pagans thought they knew love through their religious sexual carnality and temple prostitution, the unblemished love Christ showed through His Bride shook their worlds. This was not a perverted love that loved only the young, strong, and beautiful, but also the old, weak, and ugly. The Church spread like wildfire through the Roman Empire, historians wrote, because the Christians loved people everyone else left to die. And an entire empire stood up and took notice.

Holiness didn’t make the rest of the world stare in amazement. No one was holier than the Pharisees. Doctrine didn’t make people wonder what this new sect was. No one knew their doctrine better than the Pharisees. When the last of the Pharisees exhaled for the final time, all their supposed holiness and doctrine amounted to not one whit of salvation wrought for the Kingdom of God.

Because they had no love.

Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
—1 John 4:8 ESV

In closing, the Bible says this:

Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.
—Ephesians 4:15-16 ESV

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities–all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell….
—Colossians 1:15-19 ESV

If we are to grow up in every way into Christ, then because He is Love, our entire reason for being is to love. For if the universe is held together in Christ, He holds it together in love, because that is what He is, and that is what we are to be as well.

The Peter passage that opens this post says it all. Everything we are about as Christians culminates in love. Love is the fulfillment of what it means to follow Christ. As the Lord of Love replied when asked which command is greatest:

“The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
–Mark 12:29-31 ESV

In everything, lead with love.

Always.

The Wrong Toy in Your Happy Meal

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My son suffered the ultimate indignity last week—at least from the perspective of a six-year-old boy.

Because our Wednesdays are crazy, we take that day to eat out. I usually bring it home rather than pay for expensive containers of artificially colored and flavored, H2O-diluted high fructose corn syrup. We’ll drink water from our tap, thank you. (I’ve got a bottle of Karo handy if I need a late-night fix.)

The choices in my tiny ‘burg of 2,000 are actually pretty extensive since the Chinese place came to town, but I let my son choose this time. And we parents all know what that means: We’re goin’ to McDonalds.

My son has a McToy fetish bar none. He might play with said Happy Meal treasure for what amounts to nanoseconds, but he’s perpetually itching to see what the Golden Arches is dishing. Surprisingly, he still plays with a little Spyro the Dragon LCD-game he got at McDonalds two years ago, so sometimes Ronald gets it right.

But this time…nope, not this time.

I prolong the agony because I don’t want him rifling through dinner. So we took the plethora of hot bags home, and he pounced on the Happy Meal the second we walked through the door to see what bonanza lay inside.

Wait two seconds…

“Dad, we gotta go back!” he yelled, eyes rimmed with tears.

I fed him my practiced nonplussed expression.

He moaned louder. “But they gave me the girl toy!”

The girl toy. The dread fear of all sub-tween males. The %^$#* GIRL toy.

A man meets the woman of his dreams, marries her, and settles down to bliss. Soon, she’s pregnant. But an unusual illness turns out to be pancreatic cancer. She dies within two months, taking the baby with her.

A couple who’s struggled with infertility adopts an infant boy. Their delight turns to endless days of agony as the boy later manifests an incurable genetic disease so rare that no one tests for it. He’ll progressively become an invalid and die in his teen years. Meanwhile, their health insurance won’t cover the costly therapy needed to prolong his life by five or more years.

A young man starts a company with his best friend. They prosper. But the friend develops a gambling problem that knows no bottom. The man soon learns his friend has embezzled millions to cover his debts. Bankrupt, the company goes under and takes the young man and his family down with it.

Almost two decades ago, I sat on the front porch of a cabin at a Christian camp listening to a boy cry. I didn’t know him. He wasn’t one of the kids that called me “counselor.” But he was hurting, so I hunkered down next to him and listened.

I’d heard anecdotes of warring parents who dropped their kid at camp so they could spend that week shredding their marriage license, but this was the first one I’d encountered in the flesh. He’d received the “Mommy doesn’t love Daddy anymore” phone call just minutes before.

My parents stayed together, so I didn’t possess any firsthand broken home experience. I prayed silently (on the outside, while inside I cried out for wisdom) and listened as this poor kid bawled.

In the end, I told him that I couldn’t identify with what he was going through. I could tell him all sorts of things that might make him feel better for a minute, but I didn’t know what it was like to have parents split up. That was a horrible hurt no one should have to endure.

I charged him with this: One day, he’d be a camp counselor and he’d come across a boy whose parents said to hell with family, and he’d know exactly what to say because he’d experienced that torture, too.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that we need a Gospel that speaks to failure. Everywhere we turn today, we’re treated to a message that screams about seizing our best life now. But no one envisions a best life that includes suffering—now.

Among all the questions why, few of us take the time to ask if our pain is someone else’s gain. Even some stranger’s gain. Man of SorrowsWe consider the horror dumped on our laps and automatically assume that God’s forsaken us, or we’ve somehow forsaken Him. Yet we rarely wonder if the torment we’re enduring is meant to bless someone else.

Hudson Taylor, the great missionary to Asia, buried a wife and several children in Chinese soil, then went back to England a different man. Joel Osteen was recently voted the most important Evangelical in America. If Taylor were still alive today, and you had your choice between receiving counseling from either Osteen or him after a drunk driver plowed into your family’s car and killed your wife and kids, whom would you choose?

The Bible says this of Jesus:

He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
—Isaiah 53:3 ESV

Jesus’ contemporaries didn’t think He had anything to give them, did they? We know better. We go to Him with our hurt precisely because He was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. And His people, who likewise know sorrow and grief, can be the flesh-and-blood shoulder we need to cry on as we cry out to the heavenly Man of Sorrows.

Your tragedy carries meaning for someone else. God never intends for us to squander pain. Be wise in knowing how to use yours to the benefit of another grieving soul.

My son? On his own he decided the best way to deal with the wrong toy in his Happy Meal was to give it to a girl who might appreciate it. He told me that this would ease the disappointment.

Out of the mouths of babes.

The F-World

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As a musician (I'm a drummer and guitarist), I've got an ear for challenging or snappy music. As a writer, I've got an appreciation for witty or deep lyrics. It should be no surprise then that most contemporary music bores me to tears. It lacks charm, and most of it suffers from a dearth of both musicality and lyrical excellence. Doesn't matter what the genre is.

If I have any musical weakness, I'm overly fond of jangly, "sunshine" pop with monster hooks that'll have you singing along all day.  That Rickenbacker 12-string sound brings a smile to my face. Think bands like The Association, The Zombies, The Byrds, and—of course—The Monkees. Think AM radio's golden age. That style of music largely passed into lore. No one writes music like that anymore. Worse, no recent band has the cleverness to pull it off consistently.

I don't buy a whole lot of music like I once did. The last CD I purchased was Derek Webb's She Must and Shall Go Free, which has a sort of folk and roots rock feel. Good music, stunning lyrics.

The other day, I followed a link looking for some trivial fact and it led to a site that played a random selection of "baroque pop," contemporary sunshine pop music that has the feel of the real thing. The song was by Belle & Sebastian, a band I'd not heard before. Not only was the song "Another Sunny Day" absolutely right on sound-wise, but the lyrics abounded in perfect touches.

So I did something I've rarely done: I downloaded the song from iTunes. Played it over and over at full volume. For about a half hour I was immensely pleased by the find.

Only one problem…

When you get to be my age, lyrics run past you and you don't get them with the same precision you did as a teenager. I caught that first stanza, but a couple jumbled ones followed. The British accents didn't help. So being the kind of person who cannot gain full satisfaction from something without knowing every trivial detail about it, I summoned the lyrics from one of a bazillion lyrics sites.

Awesome lyrics, clever and witty. And I'm reading and…oh.

The effenheimer. The F-bomb. Right there. Third stanza. And not in any grammatical usage that I've ever encountered before.

Ugh.

How I'd missed it the first hundred times I played the song, I can't say. After seeing it there in the lyrics, it was if the singer now shouted the word right in my ears, helped along by the background chorus who repeats it with the same emphasis.

Dang. The Monkees wouldn't have talked like that. And where was the "Explicit Lyrics" tag at iTunes? Nowhere to be found. I guess in the bizarre context used in the song, someone deemed it "Non-explicit."

That's what Apple gets for cozying up to Bono. What's an F-word between friends, right?

Because I write for a living, I'm attuned to the issue of censorship. I think I can also make a case that the F-word has legitimate uses. Kevin Carter's Pulitzer-Prize-winning photoI just don't want to hear it in my sunshine pop.

In fact, I don't want to live in a fallen world. I don't want to hear the "old familiar suggestion" coming out of the mouth of a twelve-year old girl. I don't want to hear about fathers decapitating their toddlers. I want to close my ears and scream at the top of my lungs to drown out the news telling me that the sex slave trade is alive and well  in the world, mostly populated by teenagers and tweens.

But we live in a fallen world—the F-World, for want of a more clever ID. Everything around us reeks of sin, as if some quark-sized evil implanted itself in every atom in existence.

Yet consider how easily we Christians believe two lies:

  1. We can play with that evil and not have it consume us from within.
  2. We can keep that evil at bay and never have to confront it. 

I see far too many Christians making excuses for the sins they justify in their own lives. We might even come up with clever renderings of particular Scriptures to cover our shame, but in the end, it's only amplified.

Or we'll scoff at some contemporary leader we don't like who goes down in flames, while we pat our man on the back. Then we're shocked—SHOCKED—when our man's feet prove to be clay.

So many of us navigate the F-World poorly. We mindlessly jump from church to church, forever running from whatever it is that we despise in its operation, unable to come to grips with the truth that the Church must live in the F-World until Christ returns. Or we do the opposite and embrace every piece of garbage the F-World throws at us as if its manna from heaven. Both are foolish. Both come to ruination.

I hear Christians talking all the time about the F-World. Why then do we seem to be more at the mercy of the F-World than at the mercy seat of Christ? For all our theology on a fallen world, we lurch from extreme to extreme in the ways we deal with it. One day we're burning all our hard rock albums because they're evil, and the next day we're buying them all back off eBay because to the pure all things are pure. 

It's bad enough that our incoherent message on how to deal with the F-World confuses the lost, but it confuses Christians even more. I've been a Christian for thirty years and I can honestly say that I don't think I've met another Christian who understands the tension of living in the F-World to the point that he or she deals with it as Christ did. Finding that narrow path must be far more difficult than we believe.

Bunkers or Excess. In the F-World, neither one makes sense. 

{Image: Kevin Carter's Pulitzer-Prize-winning photo of a vulture stalking a starving Sudanese child. Shortly after winning the prize, Carter committed suicide.}