God's Love Plan

[HKHaugan]

Faith 12 Faith, God's Love Plan

Love. Sometimes it’s vented in romantic sentiment as in the song and movie theme ‘A Many Splendored Thing’ or in its rejection that ends up on Elvis Presley's ‘Lonely Street’ and ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ Note that every song ends up in feelings, feelings that fantasize, feelings built around wishful thinking, an imaginary unresolvable ideal, feelings that end up in self-definition. The world around us defines love as a thing, a quality, a force that is illusive but longed for regardless. Like a breeze coming through the trees if only I can catch it. Consider how much time and energy the world around us puts into this pursuit. The bottom line is that this is what the Bible calls idolatry; worshiping emotions, concepts, wishful thinking and not God. Let's be really honest. Love has no trustworthy definition outside of God.

One wise rabbi said the problem with human beings is that they love things and use people instead of loving people and using things. How do we make the shift? Scripture tells us God is love. Therefore how God thinks and acts defines love. God’s love is why we are here. The very fact He made us to be images of Him says it all.

Immediately, as His images, we know that His love is a shared and sharing experience. He is a relational God. He makes life, He gives life and He shares life. He thinks, He feels and He acts. He believes, He trusts and He has faith. He is belief, He is trust and He is faith. Those three are what makes us His images, spiritual beings living in a physical body. He is His qualities and His qualities are His nature. His nature is grace, love, faith, creativity, rightness, sound mind and a mass of personal direct applications that touch His whole Creation and us, His images, in particular. He shares it all with us and calls us to do the same. Now we're getting close to understanding His love.

Further, the word grace enters the picture. It is by God’s grace that He creates, sustains, maintains and shares with us all that He is. When we start with His grace, His intentional attitude of acceptance, it's right there that we can begin to understand the meaning of love. He holds nothing back of Himself. Jesus is the full expression of His grace and His love. This is why Jesus is the way, the truth and the life; love in the flesh.

Then we see something more. Jesus says He and the Father are one and when you see Him you see the Father. The writer of Hebrews says Jesus is the exact image of God and John writes in His Gospel that Jesus is God. So it makes sense when Jesus said that we are to love one another the way He loved us. What He showed by His life and death is far deeper and more intensive than the mushy movie sentimentality flooding the world. It covers every area of the way we approach every contact we have with people and how we handle the environment in which our relationships take place. The real world, the invisible one that the planet was created for, the human relational environment, is the one God loved.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through Him (John 3:16-17).” So God has a broader view of what the word love means. His Word shows us that He has a plan of love with a way to love so that we can experience that love. His plan is to restore us, reshape us, regroup us and refill us. His plan begins with faith.

First, He restores us. Like a broken mirror, the image of Him in us is shattered due to sin. Add the world’s pressures and our mind, heart and spirit have been shattered. He puts us back together with and by His love. The spiritual capacities we were born with, like faith, hope, kindness, courage and compassion, are filled with His Spirit and redirected by His lead.

Second, He reshapes us. He gives us potential in a renewed relationship with Him, the potential to be something more than the secular world sees, more than living for self, living just to survive. He sees us growing to be creative like Him, discovering innate talents, skills and all that we have by natural birth as we let the Spirit be our guide.

Third, He regroups us. He puts us in spiritual families to be a new kind of family. He sees us growing toward others, with others and for others. In the process we extend ourselves to help others realize their God-given potential. He sees us as outgoing, sharing, interested in opening up to seeing the potential in others and encouraging them to develop who and what they are in the Lord. In a relationship with Jesus those capacities re-energized with His Spirit open us up to the vast possibilities to be bring the world we live in back to Him.

Fourth, He refills us. What we lost in Adam and Eve’s self-centeredness we regain in opening up to the Holy Spirit’s work through His Word. He refills us with His Spirit to recognize, realize and relate. We recognize it in Christ. We realize it in His presence in our heart and we relate to Him and others in it. We learn not only to love but why, who, what, when and where to share that love. “For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do (Eph.2:10).”

John's Gospel sums it up this way, “Whoever believes in Jesus is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God (John 3:18-21).”

Did He let Moses just grow up to be a better Moses or did He bring Moses into the world to lead a people through faith out of slavery into freedom? Did He just let Saul be a better Saul or did He transform Saul into a Paul who through faith, brought the Gospel to the whole world? Did He just let Peter be stronger as a disciple to feel good about himself? No. Peter was transformed to stand up in the market place through faith and proclaim Jesus as Lord. Does Jesus tell the disciples they are His friends so that they could just be in a closer relationship with each other and Him? No. He gave them His love, His presence and His Spirit to go out into the world through faith and make disciples of all nations.

The Army commercial that encourages enlistment, “Be all that you can be.” The idea of course is that if you join the Army you can be all you can be. But if you belong to Christ you have an eternity of being all that you can be in Christ. He has given each of us a destiny of potential development that has purpose not just for here but also for eternity.

The way to be all that you can be is letting Jesus be first in every next moment. Then and only then do we really begin to understand who God is, who we are, who others are, why we are here and the eternity for which He is preparing us. Jesus is returning. Restored, reshaped, regrouped and refilled by the Holy Spirit through faith---that’s God’s love plan for all humanity in every generation.

And His plan has an eternal future:

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." He who was seated on the throne said, "I am making everything new!" Then he said, "Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true (Rev.21:1-5 NIV)."