I thought a lot about this a while back, but it keeps coming to the forefront of my mind. We use a lot of adjectives to describe God. Just. Graceful. Wrathful. Righteous. And even loving. But the book of John tells us that God is love. This is so much different from loving. I can be loving. Well, I can try. But to be love...unfathomable. It means, to me, that anything consumed with love is consumed with God. Well, the sad truth is that there are so many people who don't know God that love more deeply than I do. What's that say for me? It's depressing sometimes to know I'm not able to love the way I know I should. It may stem from a lack of trust. You can't love if you don't trust. I've always struggled with that...a trust in people, and some days a trust in God. But the beautiful thing is is that God is still love. And Love is unchanging even when, and especially when, I'm not.
These last couple years have been hard in the area of trust. But I'm reaching a point where I'm learning to come back to that. I'm trying, successfully or not, to become trusting in God to become trusting in my friendships. To many people think that if you do all the right things, you'll become closer to God. I've become convinced that the opposite is true: draw closer to God and everything else, "The right things", come as second nature.
As a last tying thought, there's a story in the book of I Samuel of the Ark of the Covenant being stolen. It's a great story you should read for yourself. Really, both 1 and 2 Samuel are my favorite of the Old Testament. But in this story found in chapters 4-7, the Israelites go to get it back from the Philistines. Before this, God had said that if anyone had touched the Ark that they would be killed. That's pretty harsh. So these guys get it on to these oxes, and one of them starts to stumble. One of the men reaches out to save it, has the best intentions, and God kills him right there. For a long time this story troubled me. His friends were rightfully angry. They watched their friend go up in a fire of wrath because he tried saving something sacred to him, and their culture. Then I realized the scary but amazing thing God was teaching us. His love goes beyond our good intentions. He kept His promise. He kept His integrity. If He had just said "Oh, well he meant well so I'll let it pass" how would we trust any other promise He made? What if He was a God of exceptions, and not integrity? That mans life was taken to show us how powerful, and dangerous, love really is.
One of my favorite quotes is "Even the road to Hell us paved with good intentions." So here's to not only have good intentions of Godly love, but good action of Godly love. To make my love the same kind of noun that God's is.
No comments:
Post a Comment