Living Loved????

     I have, I think, written before about the sum of our life in Jesus being to live loved, listening and saturated (by Holy Spirit), but that phrase has come back to me again and again in recent days because of my (our?) subtle tendency to return to performance-based living.
     I continue to be amazed at how easy it is, even 7 1/2 years into this journey, to occasionally revert to behavior that is based upon a paradigm of needing to earn/deserve what God wants to freely give. Last week I wrote about how God wins us and woos us into trusting Him, and I continue to see Him do that, of course, even as I still sometimes suffer amnesia as it relates to His unconditional love for us.
     God's unconditional love for us means that it's never a question of deserving or earning by doing in order to receive from Him. I can always receive from Him the very best by simply asking, resting and trusting. Yes, real love sometimes says "No" or "Not yet" to what we ask, because love will supply us what we really need, not just what we want or think we need! But the question of deserving is once for all settled by the infinite extent and unconditional nature of God's love for you/me. Clearly, then, the  more we can learn to live fully aware of God's love for us, the more likely we are to live lives that are maturing, peaceful, wholehearted and a genuine blessing to others.
    But we do forget! And I wonder if sometimes the reason you and I "forget" how to live loved is that our church culture (every form of it) has in it a subtle tendency to shift our focus away from Papa's love (and His sovereign working out of that love in human history) and back onto us. It seems that I often hear subtle distortions that say something like this, "Yes, you are loved unconditionally and live only by grace, but if you really want to position yourself to be blessed by God you need to do _____." For some reason those of us who live under the New Covenant (by grace, always by grace, because of love, always because of love to which we respond and which we receive but cannot strive for), seem to think we still live under the Old Covenant ("If you do ____, then I will do ___.") This Old Covenant thinking is apparently fed by the common failure to read the Old Testament through the filter of the New Testament. And the problem with it is that an emphasis on "I must/should..." inevitably leads into self-focused and self-conscious behavior and us away from simple childlike trust that alone leads to wholeness and maturity.
    Another subtle thing that seems to feed this tendency to forget God's love is that Christians sometimes seem to imply that God somehow needs us to do things. "If we don't pray then He won't work." "If we don't, He won't" Even if we don't say these things this blatantly, such thinking seems to color our view of things, doesn't it? But not only is such thinking totally at odds with how God really works (Ephesians 1:11 says, "God works everything out according to His predetermined purpose." (italics mine), it also shifts the focus back to our responsibility and then back on to performance. 
     But God doesn't need you or me to do anything to accomplish His perfect will. Yes, He does invite us to join Him in what He is doing. But we are joining Him because He wants us to share in His joy as He works, not because He needs us to accomplish what He is doing! I pray you can see the difference that this little tweak in thinking will make in how we view our walk with Him. It releases us to enter into His joy by following Him while also freeing us from the self-focus that inevitably comes from a warped sense of responsibility. The joy of doing God's will is that it is God's will, and He will accomplish all that He intends. When we understand that we are simply joining Him in His inevitable and unshakeable purposes, we are free from self-focus, measuring the wrong thing, jumping to conclusions, etc. No wonder, then, that Jesus was, because of His awareness of Abba's love, constantly watching for what His Father was doing! (John 5:19)
     "But wait," you say! "What about the principle of sowing and reaping?" "What about "as each part does its work" in Ephesians 4:16? "Don't these suggest that there is doing involved?" Yes, but when we live loved, the motive for doing is different: I am doing, sowing--whatever--from a place of deep awareness of Father's love for me and others, not from a fearful place of false responsibility and striving. This type of thinking keeps me focused in utter fascination on a loving Father's face, whereas the other type of thinking causes me to always be checking progress and performance. I highly recommend the first one!
     Perhaps this tendency to forget God's unconditional love is why Paul prayed that very familiar prayer for the Ephesians, "And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge –that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God." (3:17b-19 NIV). Paul knew, as experience teaches us, that we need constant infusions of Papa's love, poured out by His Spirit, imprinted on our lives in a million ways, to keep us on the journey towards wholeness and destiny. 
     And how encouraging it is to know that God is still answering that prayer! God's love for you and me is not passive. Rather He is pursuing us with His love, chasing us down with goodness and mercy (the real meaning of Psalm 23:6). And His unrelenting persistence in loving us in this way, will, I pray, eventually win our hearts!
     "Papa, love us away from self-focused performance into the joyful dance of childlike trust, I pray!"


Tom, one of Abba's dearly loved children