Mess of Me

We are the children of the quick fix. A people who are striving to get their needs met, but let's be honest, we don't want to do a lot of work. As a society we have worked for centuries to build a community which can synthesize life, in order for us to escape reality and our actual God given needs and desires. We have the desire to be in community with each other, but we don't want to face our own shortcomings or put the personal time in to building meaningful relationships; so, we pick and choose the aspects of our life we want, and post them on a social networking site (like facebook, twitter, or myspace) so that others who agree with our opinions can be our friends. God gave us the desire for a completely intimate connection with another human being, but I don't want to wait to get married to have sex; therefore, we choose to manufacture desire and intimacy with pre-marital sex or pornography. This is part of the reason drugs are so abundant in our culture, we're trying to synthesize a feeling or reaction.

This idea leads us to the untruth which we discussed on Sunday. We are given the need to love and be loved by our Creator, but we mess up our lives and we want a quick fix to get God to love us. So we try to get our lives in order or pray for a certain amount of time or memorize a series of Bible verses or forward certain e-mails or attend church long enough or a number of other things to get God to love us, and sometimes it feels like it works. Unfortunately, we also believe the opposite, that if we can get God to love us or love us more, than we can also do things that will make God love us less. However, the truth is God loved us before we were even born. Before we even knew what love was, God loved us, and there's nothing we can do to make Him love us more or less. Although, it's important to pray, study the Bible, attend church, grow closer to God, and those sorts of things, those should be a reaction to the love God's given us, not an attempt to trick God into loving us.

The hard part about all of this, is that it goes against our human nature. We can't believe that after all the things that we've done God would still love us, but that's the crazy kind of love we're talking about. Not only did God love us, but he gave up His own life, so that we could be closer to Him. The other reason some of us can't accept this love is that we didn't earn it, and our pride gets in the way. If there's nothing we could ever do to earn God's love, than we can't be worth God's love. Well, that's the beauty of grace, we get what we don't deserve. We don't deserve such an amazing love, but we serve a God who is amazing and loves us uncoditionally. This is why we often try to find a quick fix to earn God's love instead of humbling ourselves and embracing the perfection of love and grace.

Yet, there is still good news for those of us who have messed up in our lives (I'm guessing the percentage is pretty high), God has provided us a quick fix, a way for us to start over again. In a conversation with a highly spiritual man, Jesus explains that in order to enter into the kingdom of God one must be born again (John 3). Jesus promises us a fresh start for our spirit, a new birth with a clean slate. There is still hard work that must be put in so that we can live a life that is in accordance to God's good, perfect, and pleasing will, but we no longer have to manufacture love, because we can rest in the fullness of His love that has already been given to us. What a radical idea that even while we wound Him, the God of the universe still sent His love in human form to die for us. Why would we ever try to create love when we have already been given such a perfect, beautiful love?


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Pray
That God's love will become evident to you, as you learn to rest in it.