Loving Like God

The following is a small but necessary side trip from our main theme – God’s kind of Love, and relationships that come from God, but I am hopeful that it will prove helpful for those who have a heart to love like God in relationship to others.

Over the past 40 years of attempting to live this out, I have come to think of myself as a lover in training. I commend this identification to you as well.

That said, there is no challenge as lovers in training so difficult and demanding as loving and being caught between two people who don’t get along or are incompatible. If you love and encourage the one, you offend and discourage the other. It is the most conflicted situation that we, as lovers in training are likely to encounter.

Here again, this is where lovers in training need to turn to the cross, and even Jesus’ garden experience the night before the cross. Jesus was caught between us and His Father, with whom we were/are incompatible. For Him to drink the cup was to associate Himself with our incompatibility. “My God, My God why hast Thou forsaken me… ?,” Psalms 22:1. This is the price of being caught between two people who don’t see eye to eye. It is the highest challenge to our faith, and the one where, more than any other, we need to identify ourselves as lovers in training.

Love!

• By Jay Ferris, originally posted on April 10, 2011

This morning, as I thought about the aversion to meaningful/lasting relationships, the following two verses of Scripture came into alignment for me:

“Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.” Mark 10:15 KJV

“Moreover your little ones, which ye said should be a prey, and your children, which in that day had no knowledge between good and evil, they shall go in thither, and unto them will I give it, and they shall possess it.” Deuteronomy 1:39 KJV

This verse from Deuteronomy pretty well nails the problem – “… knowledge between good and evil.”

Let’s call it “childhood wounding.” It seems that it is happening at a younger and young age as we see the end of the age approaching. There is all kinds of child abuse, all of it in the context of relationship. We hardly need to go into the details to make our point here. For the present it is enough to say that “wounded” and “offended” people are very reluctant to re-engage intimate relationships, whether with those who have hurt them in the past or those who are likely to hurt them in the future.

The Kingdom of God is all about relationship(s). If we cant get past our wounding, our offendedness, our “…knowledge of good and evil,” we are just not going to enter in. This is the conversation I would like to have here for the next few weeks – months.

We need to get real about the offenses and the wounding, and discover how to move beyond all that. Otherwise the best we are able to do, where “entering in” is concerned, is some kind of Christianized religious white wash.

Love!

For more reading on this subject, see The First Commandment With Promise

By Jay Ferris, originally posted on March, 2011

“…and kings will shut their mouths because of him. For what they were not told, they will see, and what they have not heard, they will understand.” Isaiah 52:15

What was it that had not been told? What was it that they had never seen? What was it they had not heard? What was it that they were to understand? For that matter, do we understand it yet?

Before Jesus died – before He had the skin torn off His back – before he had His beard ripped out, and a crown of thorns planted into His skull, He had said:

“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
John 15:13

Until the day that Jesus died, no one had ever seen a love greater than that! What kings got to see on the day He died was a love that was good for enemies:

“For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!” Romans 5:10 NIV

The King of all kings was about to found a kingdom on a love that was good for enemies. No one had ever seen, heard or understood anything like that before, and that is what we need to understand!

• By Jay Ferris, originally posted March, 2011