Love is the Answer

Recently I have been seeing the power of Love.

When someone is being harsh, the best way to disarm them is to not react out of offense but respond out of love.  When we react to something, we are defensive and it is this reactionary stance that gets us in trouble.  Bad theology is birthed in reactions to extreme situations.  But responding to a situation is steady, slow to anger, patient, un-offended and more rational.  This is not to say that love is not direct or sharp.

God is not like other gods, He is happy.  He is undisturbed.  He is Love.  He’s doing alright.  And He most certainly is not “pissed off” (pardon my language if you don’t like that term).  God loved the WORLD so much that He sent Jesus to destroy the effects of sin, how much more must He love those who are His children?  It would be easy for us to find two-thousand and nine things that the Lord must be upset about with the church in 2009 and write a book called “2,009 Reason God Might Hate the Church in 2009″.

But that is not our job.  Rebuking the Church, convicting people of sin and fault-finding are not in our job description.  It says in John 16 that it is the HELPER who has it in His job description to convict of sin…and wait, He only convicts the world of that.  The Lord, the One who has absolutely every right to rebuke anyone He wants, does not rebuke us.  Rather, He loves us.  And when He actually did rebuke the 7 churches of Revelation 2, He did it differently for each church.  We cannot fall into the religous pride trap that would have us rebuking the whole Church for one thing.  The two churches in Revelation 2 who were farthest apart were only 120 miles from each other, if these two churches could not be put under a blanket Word from the Lord, than neither can the Church in America – much less the Global Church.

Love is not being harsh when everyone else is applauding unrighteousness.

Love is not exposing someone when they mess up, knowing that people may blame you for their actions.

Love keeps waiting when it was “too long” about three hours ago.

Love speaks a soft word to comfort the shamed and a loud one to confront the shaming.

Love doesn’t need its actions to be requited in order to accomplish what it intended with those actions.

Love talks about how great “they” are, while still being aware of its own contribution to the accomplishment.

Love uses “I”, “me” and “my” much less than “you” and “your”.

Love acts like you would expect love to act like.

Love can take hits, be unoffended and break you down without offending you.

I’m growing in Love.

More Than Understanding, Experiencing

Knowledge puffs up, love builds up.

It was pointed out to me recently that one of my biggest problems is that I am an “ametuer theologian”.  This is a problem because I don’t really know enough to explain something fully to someone, I just know how to parrot revelations that I have heard to people and “bottle them”  as if they were my thoughts.  Now, I know that I’m smart.  I know that I can get revelation from the Lord myself – some evidence of that is on this very blog.  But I have learned to rely more on being able to repeat things that I hear than get new stuff for myself.

Because of my time spent at IHOP, I thought I knew the end-times pretty well – I taught it 2 summers in a row for goodness sake.  But then I got confronted about about it and realized that I couldn’t actually tell you where most of the things that I “knew” were in the Bible.  I didn’t get it for myself from the Word, I heard it and trusted someone else’s study-life in the Lord.  And then a doozy of an email was sent out by Mike Bickle in which he said “neither the IHOP leadership nor I are mature enough in our understanding to entertain debates and casual arguments that will arise…”  There are other things that Mike said, but essentially he said that a lot of the end-times “debating” that I relied upon as the basis for my beliefs are “empty” and do not prepare us for whatever is going to happen.

Understand me, I am not down on IHOP.  I appreciate what they bring to the Body.  What I am saying is that when I read Mike’s dream, I felt my internal turmoil subside.  The same person that confronted me on all of this told me that I don’t need another alternate teaching to regurgitate, I need to encounter the Lord.  So I set my compass to get a touch from God.

What I have found since then is that I am enjoying life so much more.  I am like a paranoid kid that thinks his Dad is around every corner just waiting to catch him and tickle him.  I was at a Bobcats game and got ambushed by the Presence of the Lord.  I was at the grocery store and impacted a worker’s life with insight from the Lord into his life.  I was able to just sit on my couch and enjoy the Lord, not reading, not praying, just BEING.

Jack Deere has a great saying, he says “I’m already not living as much of the Bible as I know.”  Meaning that getting more imformation in my head is not going to help me, applying what I know is a big enough task.  This is coming from one of the men in my life that I respect the most and feel like has been transformed into Christ’s likeness, Jack is also probably one of the smartest men I know.  Jack told me once when I asked him what the best translation of the Bible was, “the one that says ‘Love your neighbor’.”

The Pharisees didn’t catch what Jesus was throwin’, because they did not have love.  We, too, become mostly motivated by the religious spirit when we cease to do things out of love.  We cannot give love if we are not first the recipents of love.  I can write you a check for $50, but if you do not take it to the bank and make it part of your account, you cannot give it away.  Likewise, God can throw love at us, but unless we internalize it, we will not benefit from it, nor will we be able to give it out.

As Alyssa Barlow said the other night “all we need to to wrecked by His love again.”