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ON
LOVING
GOD
Psalm 42:4; 84:2 1
John 4:8
Mark
I
have never had a stroke, as far as I know. (To
be sure, I have been concussed four times and fractured my skull once, and
therefore I must have sustained some neurological damage.
Still, I have not had a stroke.) One
aftermath of some strokes is that the stroke-sufferer cannot say what she wants
to say, cannot articulate what she longs to communicate.
Those attending the stroke-sufferer can only guess and guess and guess
again.
Sometimes I feel that I too am not articulating what I long to
communicate, and therefore people are left guessing again and again.
One guess is that I am trying to improve the moral tone of the community.
To be sure, I should be happy if the moral tone of the community were
improved. I am scarcely a booster of
immorality or amorality. Nevertheless,
at the end of the day I am not a moralist, concerned with having the community
conform to a code. I am a minister
of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Another guess is that I am concerned to have religious observances better
attended. To be sure, I should like
to see them better attended; it bothers me that church-rolls carry so many
people who are never or rarely seen at worship.
At the same time, Jesus himself reminds us that the way is straight, the
gate is narrow, and the few who enter upon it and persist in it are few indeed.
Another guess (guessed chiefly by those without church-connection) is
that I am in the business of providing an affordable counselling service.
To be sure, I am glad to offer whatever help I can to any suffering human
being. Still, I’m not a
psychologist.
Then what am I trying to do here? At
the risk of speaking again like the stroke-sufferer who cannot articulate what
she wants to communicate, I shall make another attempt: I AM TRYING TO
FACILITATE AND FOSTER LOVE FOR GOD. I
am trying to move us -- all of us -- to love God.
You see, I have never lost sight of the "great commandment"
reinforced by Jesus himself. When
asked, "Which commandment is first of all?” he replied, "Hear O
Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your
strength. The second is this: 'You
shall love your neighbour as yourself'."
These two are never to be separated.
At the same time, the first cannot be reduced to the second or collapsed
into the second. It is not the case
that by loving the neighbour we also love God.
God insists on being loved for
himself; being loved as God.
The first command ever remains the first: we are to love God.
Actually, we are not exactly commanded to "love God"; we are
commanded to "love the Lord our God". The
difference is crucial. "The
Lord", Yahweh, is the proper name of God everywhere in the Hebrew bible.
The Hebrew name YHWH is
spelled with no vowels. A word with
no vowels cannot be pronounced; and a word which cannot be pronounced cannot be
translated; neither can there be a substitute for it.
Yahweh, "the Lord", cannot be translated into Zeus (the deity
of the ancient Greeks), or into Gitchi Manitou (the deity of Amerindians), or
into Supreme Being (the deity of modernity).
Neither can it be translated into any of the gods which people worship
all the time: the American way of life, Canadian nationalism, or even something
as crude as undisguised mammon. Neither
can Yahweh, "the Lord", be translated into the highest cultural
achievement (however rich) or the profoundest environmentalism (however
necessary). The name of God is
spelled without vowels: it cannot be pronounced or translated.
It admits of no rivals or approximations or substitutions.
We are not to love God-in-General; we are not to love any vague deity.
We are to love "the Lord" our God.
He alone is creator; he fashioned a people to be a light to the nations;
he spoke with Moses and seared upon him what the world will never be without; he
arrested and infused prophets; and he, ultimately, became incarnate in Jesus of
Nazareth. Yahweh alone is God and he
cannot be co-opted by anyone or anything. Him
we are to love. I:
-- But
why? Why
should we love God? Because we are
grateful. Surely our gratitude to
him compels our love for him. He has
made us and ever sustains us. This
is reason enough. Yet this is not
where the Hebrew mind begins. The
Hebrew mind begins not with creation but with redemption: God has saved us.
The Hebrew heart is always moved most profoundly in reflecting upon our
rescue at God's hand.
Think of the Ten Commandments. The
Ten Commandments are not an abstract moral code; neither do they enjoin
conformity to a code. The Ten
Commandments describe the shape, the pattern, the direction and
the freedom of the life of that man or woman who knows that God has rescued
her and is therefor
everlastingly
grateful to God. The preface to the
Ten Commandments is crucial: "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of
the (ii)
Yet we love God for another reason: God's love for us creates in us and
elicits from us our answering love for him.
I love my children (who are now adults.)
I am overjoyed to find them loving me.
I like to think that I could continue to love them even if they never
loved me, even if they answered my love with arctic iciness.
But how difficult it would be, because what a heartbreak.
I want my love for them to create in them and elicit from them a love for
me; their love for me would then magnify my love for them, and my magnified love
for them would in turn swell their love for me as the spiral of love became more
intense and more wonderful.
A minute ago I said I should like to think that I would continue loving
my children even if they never returned my love, but I am not sure that I could;
at least not sure that I could for ever. But
God can, and God does. God's
love remains undiminished even though there are countless hearts which remain
cold and stony. What such people
have not yet grasped is this: they were made for love.
They were made to love God. They
would be most authentically human, most richly human, most nobly human, if only
they surrendered their indifference or defiance.
For then they would find that God's great love had begun to create in
them and elicit from them a love for God through which they became most truly
themselves.
Obviously I am speaking here of human self-fulfilment.
We have to be careful in speaking of self-fulfilment, since what passes
for self-fulfilment in our era is, at bottom, selfish-fulfilment.
When people complain that they are not fulfilled they usually mean that
they can't get what they want. Seminars
which provide techniques for "self-fulfilment" give people the tools
whereby they can finally get what they want.
What's more, since I am a fallen creature
and therefore sin-riddled, fulfilment of my sinful self could only result in a
monstrosity better left unimagined. (Secularites
who prattle glibly about self-fulfilment never seem to grasp this point; never
seem to understand that fulfilment of the depraved self results in intensified
depravity.) At a much profounder
level, however, to love God is the true fulfilment of my self, since to
love God is to know the remedy for my sinful self.
The psalmist is correct when he writes, "My soul thirsts for God...
my heart and flesh cry out for the living God".
To have our thirst and our outcry met is surely to be fulfilled,
most profoundly fulfilled. It should
not surprise us, then, that we are most profoundly ourselves when we most
self-forgetfully love God. After
all, we were made "in the image and likeness" of God, and God, John
says so very pithily, God is love. We
have been made by love for love.
The answer to the question, "Why ought we to love God?” the answer
to this question has been rather long. But
the length of the answer is nothing compared to the depth of the reality: we are
to love God inasmuch as the God who is
love has created us and has rescued us. In
addition, he has fashioned us in such a way that we can become what we are
created to be only by giving ourselves up to him and loving him with an ardour
which reflects the ardour of his love for us.
Paradoxically, it is as we love the God who is not
an extension of ourselves that we most profoundly become ourselves. II:
-- The
next question can be answered more briefly.
The next question is, “How
ought we to love?” The answer is
stated in our text: with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.
Fancy preachers (or fanciful preachers) finesse the four words,
"heart", "soul", "mind", "strength" and
develop a four-point sermon. The
truth is, there aren't four points here. There
is only one. "Heart",
"soul", "mind", "strength" are virtual synonyms in
Hebrew! Each word means the same as
the others. When Jesus insists we
are to love God with heart, soul, mind and strength he is increasing the
intensity until we understand that we are to love God totally, with everything
in us. We are to love God without
hesitation, without reservation, without qualification, without calculation.
Our love for God is to be whole-soulled, admitting no rivals.
To say that we are to love God with all that we have and are is not to
say that we are to love nothing else and no one else.
There is much else that we are to love: our neighbour, to say the
least. We are to love children,
parents (scripture insists that neglect of parents is heinous), spouse.
We are to love much else, yet love nothing else pre-eminently.
Our love for God must come first.
Since the commonest metaphor for faith, in scripture, is marriage, it is
fitting that we discuss our love for God in terms of marriage.
Everyone knows (or should know) that exclusivity is of the essence of
marriage. Regardless of our
society's preoccupation with inclusivity, exclusivity remains of the essence of
marriage. The relationship we have
with our spouse we are to have with no other man or woman.
My wife occupies a place in my heart and life which no one else can
occupy. But this is not to say that
others have no place in my heart and
life. They do!
It is just that the place which others occupy (and even occupy at my
wife's urging); the place which others occupy cannot encroach upon the place
which she occupies.
The older marriage vows contained the line, "...and forsaking all
others". These words did not
mean that the newly-married couple forsook absolutely everyone else, dismissing
friends, relatives, needy human beings, henceforth to live in a shrivelled,
miserable universe of two. "Forsaking
all others" meant that they forsook having the kind
of relationship with others which they now had with each other.
Exclusivity is of the essence of marriage.
Where this truth is doubted or denied, the marriage is destroyed.
If you understand this then you understand what prophet and apostle mean
when they tell us that God is jealous. To
say that God is jealous is not to say that God is insecure or suspicious, like
the insecure and suspicious husband who rages if he sees his wife talking to
another man at a social function. To
say that God is jealous is simply to acknowledge that exclusivity is of the
essence of our love for God.
Our Israelite foreparents in faith, always earthy in their expression of
spiritual truth, used to say, "
If we become most profoundly ourselves through loving God, then we debase
and denature ourselves through deflecting our first love from God to something
else, anything else. For God is a
jealous God, we are told again and again. God
is not insecure or suspicious; he does insist, however, that he be acknowledged
as God.
If we refuse to acknowledge the exclusivity of our relationship with him,
we destroy the relationship. III:
-- With
what result
do we love God? What is the outcome
of our love for God? One result we
have already discussed at length: insofar as we answer with love the love that
has made us and redeemed us we become most truly ourselves.
Another result is that we love our fellow-believers who, like us, aspire
to love God without hesitation or reservation.
In his first epistle John writes, "Everyone who believes that Jesus
is the Christ is a child of God; and everyone who loves the parent loves the
child." To be sure, we are to
love the neighbour (the neighbour being, according to the parable of the Good
Samaritan, any suffering human being). Nevertheless,
we are especially to love fellow-believers, fellow-lovers of God.
In the year 1663 one of
Another result of our love to God is that we rejoice to see God's name
glorified and God's truth exalted. One
afternoon a parishioner came to see me and
told me that she would do anything to help me in my work, anything she could do
to free me for my work because, she said, what issues from this pulpit honours
God. I trust it does.
Of this much I am certain: through the work which she does, through the
service which she renders, that woman herself honours God every bit as much.
Myself, I rejoice to see and hear God glorified, the gospel commended,
his truth enhanced, his love owned, his mercy confessed, his faithfulness
welcomed, and his people cherished.
Another result of our love for God is that we, his people, are humbled.
One day I overheard a conversation between a friend of mine and another
woman. The second woman mentioned
that she had been asked to do something, to render some service in the
congregation, and then added that she regarded it beneath her.
"I'm not that small", she said in conclusion.
My friend quietly replied, "What you really mean is, you aren't that
big; you aren't big enough." God's
love, poured upon us, never demeans us, never shrivels us.
God's love dignifies us and renders us big.
So big, in fact, that no service to him and his people will ever be found
too small. Our love for God humbles
us without humiliating us. No
service is beneath us. After all, we
are only loving him whose love for us washed dirty feet and endured the contempt
of the cross.
The final result of our love for God is this: our love for God will be
consummated by what God has prepared for all who love him.
Paul insists that what God has prepared for all who love him cannot be
described, cannot even be imagined, so glorious is it.
Our love for God will be crowned so gloriously as to leave us speechless
yet forever adoring. Nonetheless,
that love of his which he has already shed abroad in our heart is surely a clue
to it. Then for the full splendour
of what he has prepared for us we can wait confidently now, just because we have
already tasted and enjoyed that love which has quickened ours.
Then we shall continue to love him. We
know why we are to love him. We know
how we are to love him. Do we know how much? Let Bernard of
Clairvaux, a medieval thinker and hymnwriter, have the last word today:
"The measure of our love to God is to love him without measure." Victor
Shepherd
September 2004
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