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Love: the more excellent way

Peace with God Through Faith

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him, we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character. Character produces hope, 5, and hope does not put us to shame because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit given to us.

For while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.[1]

 

Love is not about a feeling or a fleeting emotion. It is more than that. It is the active presence of God's grace in a world gone mad with selfish vanity and sin. I remember my first love. She was a beautiful blonde in junior high. It was perfect, I thought, until it wasn't. The loss of that relationship and the dear John letter that I received from her in my locker made me feel rejected, depressed, and hopeless. It wasn't very comfortable. Even though we had only a half dozen dates, I thought it was something that would last forever.

 

Looking back on that relationship, I realize that I had experienced the emotions of what I thought was love. I now know that I knew nothing about love. I still know nothing about anything, and that's okay. That's where I am at this point in my life. The good news is that God knows everything and knows that I will experience love loss numerous times in my life, and still, the experience of God is that God has loved me before I was even conceived in my mother’s womb.

 

A lot can happen inside the womb of our mothers in those nine months. One of the things I am pretty sure that happens is that God speaks to us. It's the most accessible we are to God. We are nurtured in the womb's water; through that water, we are fed and grow physically and spiritually. We are programmed with everything we need to survive this world outside of the womb.

 

I remember hearing the first time my daughter cried after she was born and the way that she peed on the doctor as he held her up and declared, "Dad, it's a girl." As if I could not see her anatomy. Over the past seventeen years, I have seen her grow, transform, have her heart broken, and watched her fall in love with Jesus. The day she took her baptismal vows and was confirmed in the United Methodist Church, I beamed with pride as if I were watching her being born all over again. I have never been as proud of her as I am today. Sometimes, she frustrates me and says the wrong things angrily, but her love for me and her mother gives me hope in a God who loves me unconditionally.

 

I have no idea how her life will unfold, where she will go to college, or who she will choose to love for a lifetime, but I hope that all the love her mother and I have poured into her will return to her 100-fold. More than that, I have hope that the love that God has poured into her in the water of the womb and continues to pour into her will cause her to grow in the grace of Jesus.

 

A wise seminary professor once said, "You can't pour out what hasn't been poured in." Sometimes, in this world, we allow our cups to become empty. We forget that the source of our strength comes from God and that when our hands are clenched, holding onto everything that we fear to lose is when we fall; we break under pressure. Diamonds are formed under pressure, heat, and time. What gives a diamond value is not the diamond itself but the belief that it has worth. They say a good engagement ring should cost three months' salary. My wife's engagement ring cost $100. Twenty-two years, and we are still trying to figure out this concept of loving one another unconditionally. We may have this figured out the day we enter eternal rest in Heaven's womb.

No matter how many times I have failed my wife and our marriage vows, she still hasn't put me out of the house, yet she has every reason to. Something keeps pulling her back, which isn't the $100 ring.

 

When we were married, we didn't have a wedding ceremony; we had a worship service where we took vows, held hands, and exchanged rings. We served Holy Communion to 200 guests in a 100-degree sanctuary at Trinity United Methodist Church, Olean, NY. That Church is sacred to us because it is where we both grew up in the faith as adults trying to figure this God thing out. We know nothing but have had everything. In good times, bad times, for richer and poorer, in sickness and in health, God has never left us, and I am confident in this: God never will.

 

A friend said, "God hasn't brought us this far to drop us on our heads." He was referring to his circumstances, but that is true for Mary, Kiah, and me today. The servant leadership we are in as a family reminds me that this thing we do was God's idea, not ours. Mary and I learned a month before marriage that I would become a pastor. Neither of us wanted anything to do with the United Methodist Church in ministry. Mary's reservations were that she didn't want to be a pastor's wife; mine were because of my experiences with the Church growing up. However, this is where God has placed us for ministry, and we will honor that call.

 

I have been prone to saying, "Any idiot can get people to come to a circus, but the trapeze artist causes them to stay." The Church is like a circus filled with the glitz and glamour of preaching, baptisms, mission, and ministry, but when it reaches the end of its life cycle, there is nothing left but a building and empty pews, it dies in silence. There is a tradition that dates back hundreds of years, and when a church closes a door, a nail is nailed to the front doors of the sanctuary. This is where the expression 'dead as a doornail' comes from.

 

In college, I had the privilege of hearing Richard Owen Roberts preach. He was billed as a revival preacher but was a professor of the things of God in God's world. He taught at Wheaton College and pastored a church of eight on the south side of Chicago. He had a new book that had just come out called Salvation in Full Color. It was a collection of great awakening preachers that had been edited for reading in the vernacular of our 20th-century Western culture. He spent three hours unpacking some of these sermons and the context in which they were preached. Many people got up and left after the first hour or so. My college roommate and I stayed for the entire preaching event. He concluded by talking about the lifecycle and death cycle of the Church of Jesus Christ. He commented that the Church he loved and pastored for 45 years would close when he died. At first, I thought, "how arrogant!" "Who does he think he is? Does he think that he is the only talent in the bucket?" Then he said, "The people of that church will close the doors and nail them shut and go onto another church where they will take the seeds that I have planted over these forty-five years, and there will be a resurrection in the churches that they find themselves in."

 

Nothing is wasted with God. The tomb could not hold Jesus; a building that once held sacred worship with baptisms, holy communions, and professions of faith could not hold God. Every death has a resurrection—hope for a new opportunity for the gospel to take root. For over two thousand years, the Church has gotten it right, and the Church has gotten it dead wrong. However, there is hope that God is still reconciling and nurturing the Church in the water of the womb. We can't always see what God is up to, but God, like the prophet Isaiah wrote, "Is doing a new thing." I don't always understand why, but that is not my job as a pastor. It is not my wife's job as a pastor's wife or my daughter's job as a helper in Sunday School. The call is to love more excellently by giving all that has been poured into us through our baptismal covenant, the profession of faith, and the giving and receiving of Holy Communion. It's not about us but about God, which gives me hope that God does what God does and asks me to love and be faithful to the call on my life and that of my family.

 

I want to close this verse from Charles Wesley's greatest hymn, Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.

 

Finish, then, Thy new creation;

Pure and spotless let us be;

Let us see Thy great salvation

Perfectly restored in Thee;

Changed from glory into glory,

Till in Heav'n we take our place,

Till we cast our crowns before Thee,

Lost in wonder, love, and praise.

 

I pray for no more and no less than these words, which speak volumes about the faith experience of Christians. It is the best thing hoped for, as well as the continued work of God in this world and the world to come. Someday, when I get to glory, I will get to ask the great question, "Why?" I suspect God will reply, "Why not?" It's not for us to know; it is for God and God alone. I know nothing about love, but God does, and that makes all the difference.

 

 


[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Ro 5:1–6.

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