Hi guyz and girlz. Greetings from Dwellingup (I’m camping down here for a couple of days). Well... this is it... we’ve reached the last day and the last sharing from the 40 DOL series. I trust everyone has been challenged and encouraged by the words and the life of Jesus as we’ve explored them over the last 6 weeks. Anyway, todays sharing is gonna be really long... this is what I was planning to share at combined cell...
Maybe I’ll start with a story about two people I know. I knew the girl first so let’s start with her. She came to Australia to study but while she was here she was invited to a Christian conference and had an awesome experience with God and decided to give her life to God. She started going to a church and served with heaps of energy and passion. One day when she was in her final year of studies she was at uni having lunch in a café and reading her Bible when this guy came up to her and asked her if she was a Christian. He had recently become a Christian as well. He told her about how he used to play at a really high level of sport then how he got involved in drug use and getting drunk and started getting into fights. He told her how he’d got to his lowest point before deciding to start reading the Bible and going to church to see if Jesus could change his life.
This girl and this guy got to know each other a bit better and met up together a few times and pretty quickly feelings started to grow between them. Not too long later they met up with her pastor and told him that they were going to start dating. Then she got some really bad news. One of her close family members had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and was slowly dying. She was broken. How could this God of love allow this to happen? Why did it have to happen to her? Why not someone else?
The guy tried to be there for her during this time. He would drive her to uni and then asked her if she wanted to move in with him and his parents. By this stage she had given up on God, after all, how could a God of love allow this to happen to her family member, so she decided to move in with the guy. They soon stopped going to church and gradually he started going back to his old ways. He started drinking and they would have terrible arguments in the house. When her close relative finally died things got worse. When they were arguing she started slapping and punching him and eventually he started pushing and even hitting her too. They moved out of the parents house so they could have some more space but they continued arguing most days and she would sometimes get a knife from the kitchen and threaten to stab him or kill herself.
Of course her friends tried to help. Sometimes they even confronted the guy and told him how bad he was to be treating her like that. She even decided to leave a few times but then he would start crying and telling her how much he loved her and that she couldn’t leave. And then she would realise that she really loved him too and remembered all the good times they’d had together. She was hurting inside and so was he.
Then her mum came to Australia determined to take her home. The guy really wanted to get on well with the girls mum so he arranged a holiday for them all and they had a great time together spending heaps of time at the beach enjoying the sunny weather. But the cost of the holiday just added to the big credit card bills that had accrued and when they arrived back in the city another argument broke out and this time the mum was involved and was pushed into a wall during the yelling. After the mum left the house she hatched a plan with the girls friends to go to her house and take her to the airport to fly straight back home so she could finally escape this situation.
I was asked by the friends to be one of the people who went to the house with another of the friends to get the girl and take her to the airport. When we go there everything was normal and peaceful and after talking for 15 minutes the girl finally agreed to at least come out and have coffee with us. During the next couple of hours told us that she knew that they were not in a good relationship, she knew that she was not good for him and he wasn’t good for her, she knew that the best thing was to leave BUT she didn’t know who she was anymore and wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. She ended up deciding to stay with the guy so at 1am we finally took her back to their house.
So this is how I end up at outside her house at 1am in the morning after giving her the option of leaving. While she had been gone the guys parents had found out what was happening and were waiting outside the house furious about what was happening. There was a big argument during which the dad said:
“I know they’ve got problems but when you see them together it’s obvious that they are in love.”
“To me, that’s not love.”
“What right do you have to stand here and tell me what love is? I’ve lived more that twice your lifetime and experienced marriage. I’ll tell you what love is!”
*** Pause story ***
Hmmm. He had a good point. What right did I have to tell him or anyone about love? Clearly we had different views about what love is...
So then the question is What is Love???
Scholars and song-writers and poets and philosophers and relgious people have tried to answer that question for thousands of years resulting in many different views on what love is. But they’ve all been asking the wrong question. If you just focus on the love, you miss the point. Love is the symptom, not the disease (but this is one disease we should all want to catch hehe). Love is about people, thoughts, actions, decisions, desires, feelings... to know love you need to know someone...
The right question is not ‘What is Love?’ but ‘Who is Love?’
The Bible clearly tell us the answer in 1st John 4:8:
“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”
God demonstrates what love is because of His character. God defines what love is because of His being. Every choice that God makes is a choice of love. A scale of love should start at zero and finish with God because there is no greater example of love than Him. He is the yardstick that we can measure all other examples of love against.
One of the problems Josh and I have as your zone sups is that we aren’t as perfect as God. Actually, as I think a bit more about it, that’s the only real problem we have. If it wasn’t that we aren’t as perfect as God we would be perfect. Right??? If only we could live up to Gods definition of love:
1st Corinthians 13:4-8
"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."
Fortunately, God lives up to His definition of love. I want to focus on the “always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” for a bit. God “trusts” us with the ability to make the right decisions now that we are Christians. God “hopes” that we will make the right one in every step of our walk with Him. And God “perseveres” when we fail and continues to “trust” and “hope” that we will turn back to Him. That’s why God hasn’t given up on the girl in the story because He is a God of love. He lives up to His definition of love in the way that He treats us and our decisions.
But wait, there’s more... God’s definition of love is evident in every one of His choices, decisions and actions... even His plan of salvation...
Everybody who was at baptism would have heard me share the exhortation. I said something about how amazing God’s love for us is:
“There we were, separated from the perfect God we now know because even the slightest stain of our smallest sin was too horrendous to be near His Holy presence. Nothing we could ever do would bridge the gap between our imperfection and God’s perfection. So what did He do? He sent His son Jesus to earth to live and demonstrate a perfect sinless life for 30 years and then He allowed Him to die a painful death on the cross. And then He offered to swap our life with Jesus’. He takes our sin, we take his perfect life. His death on the cross pays the atonement for our sin and now we can carry Jesus’ perfect life to God and say “here is a life without flaw so that now I also am perfect and I can come into Your presence.”
Afterwards I realised that I’d left something out. That God’s love is actually much bigger than what I had said. I realised that God’s love doesn’t just stop with our salvation but is even more amazing in what He asks us to do next... He gives us the gift of sharing and displaying His love to the lost... He entrusts us with the responsibility of their salvation!!! Crazy hey! But can you see the love in this??? Can you see the “always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres?" I think it’s amazing that our God who has seen humanity fail so many times, who has seen me fail so many times, decides to display this love by “trusting” us with other peoples salvation, “hoping” that we don’t fail in our task and “persevering” in His plan even when we do fail. God trusts us. God trusts Christians all around the world. God trusts YOU!
God trusts you to live in the way that He created you to live and to be a discipler of nations through your life and actions. I don't know about you but to me this is an amazing encouragement. If God trusts us to do it, if He trust us to live in this way then surely it is possible. If God believes in me, maybe I can believe in myself too... not to achieve things in my own strength but through Christ who strengthens me! If God trusts that I can be a light to reflect His glory and salt flavours that taste of His majesty and a person set aside for Him in holiness, maybe I can believe that my life can be turned around. Maybe I can believe that I am who He says I am.
So let’s go back to the story...
Earlier I said that the girl no longer knew who she was anymore, that she was hurting inside, that she had given up on God. Well, that night she decided to stay. She went back to the same old situation even with the option in front of her of freely leaving the guy and making a new start in her home country. So after talking to both the guy and the girl for another two hours we left and at 3am had to explain to the mum why she didn’t come back with us.
But the story doesn’t end here...
The night before combined cell I got another phone call from the girls friends saying that she had finally decided to leave and asking for my help to take her to the airport. They wanted me to come just in case the guy found out and things became violent again. So we took her to the airport with her mum. We waited with her while they bought tickets and saw them off into the departure gate. I went to combined cell the next day with the plan of sharing how God had “always hoped, always trusted and always perservered” in her life until she made the right decision.
But the story doesn’t end here either...
Two days later I found out that before the plane left she had got off and gone back to the guy again. I think I got a little taste of what God feels like when He “always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” but we break His trust, fail and continue to fail. I can only imagine what the girls mum feels like at the moment. She had this amazing plan for her daughter, to free her from the bondage of the situation she was in, to give her the chance of a new life if only her daughter would take it. She was there when her daughter checked in her baggage and walked through the security check into the depature lounge waiting to board the plane to her new life. She was there when her daughter turned her back and went back to the same old life, same old problems. Remind you of anyone?
But the story still hasn't finished...
And the truth is that I don't know what the ending will hold. I wish that I could tell you that it ends with flowers and roses and a happily-ever-after. But only time will tell. What I do know is that God hasn't changed. He is still the God of love and He isn't going to change any time soon. He is still there for the girl and the guy ''trusting, hoping and persevering," waiting for them to come back to Him. And here's the cool thing: He's still there for you and He's still there for me and He will continue be there for you and me.
But let's not wait and continue to live in our old life of old mistakes. God believes in you and trusts you to live in His ways. Let's live in His new life NOW. Let's live in His promises NOW. Let's decide to live according to His plan and not our plan NOW. Let's not stop with 40 days of love but let's continue to grow in God's love AND in love with God for the rest of our lives. Times may come when we stumble or fall or lose energy or feel emo, but God wont change and we can continue knowing that our Father in Heaven loves us, trusts us, hopes for us and isn't going to change.
Much love :-)
