“In these bodies, we will live, in these bodies we will die. Where you invest your love, you invest your life.” -Marcus Mumford
We are all the objects of a relentless love of the Father. The beginning of our ability to communicate this message to a world that needs to hear it begins when we understand the passage in Romans 5 where Paul writes, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. (Insert your name here.) For one will scarcely die for a righteous person-though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die-but God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Did you hear that? While you were still an enemy of the cross, the love of the Father still relentlessly pursued you through the death of Jesus. As I write these words, my heart is flooded with emotion at the reminder that even when I was bowing before inferior gods, full of sin in my life, God loved me with a love that is unexplainable.
Paul further explains the inability to understand the depths of the love of God when he writes his desire that God “grant you to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith-that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that SURPASSES KNOWLEDGE, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” In our attempts to understand in our simplicity the dimensions of the love of God, we are left dumbfounded in that His love is beyond our ability to comprehend.
If you get nothing else from these ponderings, please hear that you are loved by the Father, and through this love, you and I, though at some point enemies to the gospel, now experience adoption as sons and daughters. And this, my friends, is the best news imaginable.
With this understanding, however, there is a responsibility. Our responsibility to the Father is not the cause by which we are loved, but rather the effect and response by us as the recipients of this love. Or to put it another way, we are not loved because we do, we do because we are loved. As the object of the love of God, we are called to submit our lives to His Lordship. To be faithful to the Great Commission to make disciples of all nations, AND to teach them to OBEY all that Christ commanded us.
In my last post, I shared the two greatest commandments from Christ: to love God supremely, and to love our neighbors. This leads me to a question. Are you a hoarder of God’s love or a sharer? In our Christian culture today, we have a tendency to spend the majority of our time “hoarding” Christian things: more knowledge, more connection through worship, more discipleship, etc. And while these are extremely important to our growth in Christ, we have to see that as we grow in knowledge, worship, and discipleship, we are commanded to “go and make disciples of all nations.” To share the love of God to those who have yet to experience it.
So where are you investing your love? As you are allowing me to think out loud through your reading of this blog on my ponderings of worship, how are you being challenged to demonstrate the love of God in the context of the city and culture that you live in? My heart breaks to know that there are many who do not understand how deeply they are loved. May our indifference towards the lives of unbelievers never be the barrier by which this misunderstanding exists.
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