If you are tired of the guilt trip you usually feel at church, here’s a different perspective
I am counting the
days until I fly to Fort Lauderdale to see Mom for Christmas. Yes, I speak with
her every day, sometimes twice a day. But as you know, phone calls just aren’t
the same as being with someone you love. I look forward to seeing Mom’s smile,
to holding her hand, to going for a drive along the beach with her. Spending
time in the presence of someone we love enriches our relationship with them.
I believe the love I
feel for Mom, is a sliver of what God feels for each of us. I believe God longs
to share that love with us. Which is why we are called to spend time in God’s presence
daily. We experience God’s presence when we meet him in our prayers, in church,
and hopefully in one another. If I could make one wish for each of us, it would
be that at some point during the next four weeks of Advent we would experience
how much Jesus loves us.
During my morning
devotions, I read these two verses of Psalm 117:
Praise the Lord, all you nations;
extol him, all you peoples.
2 For great is his love toward us,
and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.
extol him, all you peoples.
2 For great is his love toward us,
and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.
Praise the Lord.[a]
Psalm 117
That’s it. That’s the entire length of the 117th
Psalm. As I thought about today’s faith column, it occurred to me that if I
were to capture one sentence that sums up the entire message of the Bible and
God’s purpose in our lives it would be this: “For great is his love toward us,
the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.”
The Christmas season often reflects the message of John
3:16: For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that
whoever believes will not die but have everlasting life.
But why did God need to come into the world as a vulnerable
infant child? We are told that it is to become the sacrificial lamb, to atone
for our Original Sin, carried by each person since the creation of the first
man and woman. That we carry this original sin, can make us feel as if we carry
an original guilt, leaving many people feeling resentful and to view God as
holding a long-standing grudge.
I’d like to consider that perhaps God has not been seeking
to punish us for all these millennium, but rather he has been pursuing us with
a love and faithfulness that motivates every interaction between God and man in
the Bible.
After the Fall, God
came to Adam and Eve in the garden. They had chosen to do the one thing that
God asked them not to do. The knowledge that they sought in their choice to eat
of the tree of Good and Evil suddenly made them acutely aware of their
nakedness.
Nakedness was not
the sin. Awareness of good and evil created an awareness that their
disobedience was. And so, they hid from God as he walked through the garden.
They hid, not because they were ashamed of their God-created bodies, but
because they were ashamed of what they had done and sought to hide themselves
from God.
Of course, their
awareness enabled God to see what they had done. Yet, God still pursued them.
Not to punish them, but to ask why? Yes, there will always be consequences to
our actions, especially those that cause harm to ourselves or others. Yet, God
pursues us and seeks to continue the relationship. Adam and Eve turned their
backs on God. And yet, God pursued them. God is always seeking us, out of love,
out of a desire to reconcile us to himself.
The first act of
reconciliation is the same love and forgiveness that motivated God to send his son,
Jesus Christ, to earth, not as a Messiah King to enslave us or rule over us. If
the Messiah had been born to royalty as expected, it would have maintained the
distance that already existed between man and God.
Instead, God sought
to break down the barriers between us and him. Jesus came as one of us, born to
a working-class family, in a working-class neighborhood, raised as a carpenter.
He freely chose all of this, in order to better experience what it meant to be
fully human, to understand our daily struggles.
The entire Bible is
a journey from the encounter in the garden, forward, of God’s pursuit of each
of us. Not to punish, but to heal, to reconcile, to demonstrate a love that has
no limit. Because God loves us so dearly, he pursues us and eventually chooses
to become human, to be with us, here on earth, as in Heaven.
If we can see Godpursuing us throughout the Bible, then we can believe that pursuit did not end
on the last page of the Bible, but most surely God’s pursuit of us, his
unending love for us, continues today and will extend through every moment of
the future.
The Christmas story
is the culmination of God’s pursuit of us, God becoming man. But it is also
just the beginning of the greatest love story of all time. I have decided that
every day of Advent, I am going to pray for each of us to experience God’s love
in a beautiful and tangible way, so that we can know that God’s love for us is
as real as our love for one another.
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