Loving Like God

Hebrews 11:1 tells us that “Faith is the substance of things hoped for…”

Hope is the raw material without which faith has nothing to work with – to make substantial. Elsewhere we are told that this “… faith works by love…” :-) (It doesn’t work without love either.)

What I want to focus on in the next few posts is the matter of hope. What are you hoping for, or more importantly, what is God hoping for? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all get on the same page as God where this matter of hope is concerned?

Next time, I would like to take a look at hope from the vantage point of Romans 8:20:

“For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope…”

Again the question…What is God hoping for? :-)

In the wake of a conversation today I want to return to a couple of very big words: “Kingdom,” and “Church.”

The “Kingdom” of God is in The Spirit. It is not in the flesh. In fact The Kingdom of God is in the DNA of Jesus. It controls who we are and what we are to become. God is not counting on our flesh, God is counting on the DNA of His Son in us.

The word “church” has been so misunderstood and misrepresented it’s no wonder the world is in such confusion and the nations so offended. Our concern for the present here is not so much about the word “church,” but about Who is making the call.

We who name the name of Christ have no business calling ourselves anything. We are first and last, lovers in training. We need to focus on that/Him, and let the world call us what it will.

What the world needs to see is the first fruit of the Spirit – Love. This is what Jesus prayed and died for, and this is Who Jesus is in true believers by His Spirit. All the rest is talk.

By Jay Ferris, originally published Feb, 2011

“Getting it right” has to do with getting Him right.

What I hope to do here is to take a step back to a question that was asked of me about 10 years ago now. Here it is in context:

I had just arrived late for a leader’s gathering in Charlotte, NC. I couldn’t help but note a rather common, almost pleasant look on the faces of those already present – like a group of cats who had just shared a canary. Before I could take my seat, the presiding leader asked, “Jay, what does the Church in this city look like?” I hesitated a second or two and then responded,

It looks like the sum total of all of those who belong to Christ in this city, who know who are theirs in Him. Everything else is show business.

I share this by way of further introduction to what I would like to blog about here. The kind of intimacy that we are looking for is not likely to be found until we accept Jesus as Lord of relationship. We need to know and receive one another as from Him. What God calls church, is not about “let’s make a deal” on a human level.

In a subsequent leader’s meeting, but still back in that same time frame, I added that there are places in all of us where we’ve never been. We can’t get there alone because, if we did, it wouldn’t be the same place as it would be if somebody was there with us. The problem is that there is so much garbage between here and there, and we’re afraid to go there, either alone or with someone else. We need to have a place to put the garbage. That is a place only Christ can provide, and has provided. ‘Behold, The Lamb of God who takes away the ‘garbage’ of the world.’

Christ is not only our garbage man, but He wants to make garbage men out of us for the sake of those He has given us to love. We don’t have to take away the garbage of the whole world, but we are called to, and can, take away the garbage of those He has given us to love in Him.

Having said that, which I know sounds very nice in theory, I must quickly add that in my experience, it only happens in the intimacy that is possible when He is Lord of relationship. Unless we discover who we are in Him, and in relationship to others in Him, we dare not get that close.

Jesus wants to give you, and has, in fact, promised to give you significant others in Him! Keep your eyes open, because you never know when He’s going to give you the gift of another person. Opening the package can easily take a lifetime. Oh yes, the package can only be opened in the presence of God’s kind of love, the kind He demonstrated on the day He said, “I love you”…when all His expectations of us were nailed to the tree.

We need this revelation if we are ever going to love like God.

• By Jay Ferris