Jesus Loves You (Part III)

            The third and final installment of the only series that my blog has ever contained.  This is the third one.  The big one.  This is when people overly romanticize the movie and make it seem greater than it actually is and give it 11 Oscars and use it in sermons just to try and appear like a cool church.  If it’s not brought home in this one, then the whole series is worthless and I sold out after number two and the ending wasn’t thoughtfully considered.  So, no pressure or anything.

            We’re going to be looking at the last word of the phrase, “Jesus Loves You”.  We (meaning I) have already decided that Jesus wasn’t just a historical figure, wasn’t just a good man or teacher, but was an all-powerful God.  We (meaning I and whoever already believed it before reading my blog) have also decided that this all-powerful God kind of is crazy about us.  Kind of madly in love with humanity.  My goal in this one is just to clarify something: that Jesus doesn’t just love humanity, but He loves you. 

            This may not seem to be a huge or significant distinction, but it is a realization that has wildly affected the periods in my life when I actually got it.  It’s easy to lose hold of, but worth holding onto, like Jell-O or a sweaty baby. 

            Here’s the distinction between Jesus loving humanity as a whole, and Jesus loving you.  If you believe that Jesus only loves humanity as a whole, you are going to consider yourself the exception, like you always do with any rule or writing that you’ve ever heard.  Don’t lie to yourself, it’s like how I always feel like I’m the exception to my parents’ rule of not dating in high-school.  It’s different because the world revolves around me.  Thus, I think of myself as the exception and am incredulous when I’m not.  That’s what humans do.  We don’t consider ourselves a part of the system, but outside of it, greater than it or lesser than it. 

            Be honest with me.  If I told you that I loved your family so much and that y’all are so great, would you really care?  Not that you wouldn’t, but would you hold onto that compliment as something that holds great meaning?  Would it weigh more if I narrowed my statement and told you that I loved YOU and that YOU are incredible and that I’m incredibly blessed to know YOU?  That holds more weight.  It’s more vulnerable for me.  Because if I like a family, then I’m not really committing to anything.  It’s vague.  If I like YOU though, I’m committing to acting like it.  I’m committing to showing you why you’re important to me.  It holds more weight.

            This is why we should not be content with theology that says that Jesus loves the world as a whole, that He loves mankind overall.  As long as we believe only that, our views of God’s actions on the cross don’t mean as much.  Maybe I would die on a cross if it meant the eternal future of every single person who has ever lived.  But if I pursue one person, even to the point of death, that means something.  That means that I’m wild about them.  This is why this you is so significant.  I’m never going to marry a woman who just says that she loves my family.  I’m going to marry a woman who loves me.  As arrogant as it sounds, isn’t it truth?  That I’m not going to be blown away that my wife loves my family, because that doesn’t take commitment! Maybe her love for my sisters compensates for her repulsion to me.  I as a human being need to be loved individually and uniquely.  

            And so it is that many people come into church week after week and are never moved by the Gospel, never brought to a saving knowledge of Jesus.  It is because they believe themselves to be the exception to God’s love.  “He can’t love me even with my….” “He doesn’t love me because I……”  “He didn’t die for me because I can’t….”  “I didn’t…..” “I failed.” “I continue to fail.” “I messed up, and the dirt is still on me, defining me like a scarlet letter.” 

            It’s easy to see why God would love other people.  They seem to have everything under control.  The pastor in the pulpit used to deal with things, but became a Christian and now never struggles with failure.  The people in the row next to you grew up in church.  The guy writing the blog refers to his mess-ups in the past tense.  But you must be the exception.  Jesus doesn’t love you because of your condition.  Because of your failure.  Because of your mess. 

            And yet He doesn’t stop chasing you.

            This God of the universe who has made you and knew your failures before you were conceived, who planned out your very being, who mapped out the essence of you, has never stopped chasing you.  This God whose emphasis is on the marginalized continues to chase you, to woo you, to pursue you.  He doesn’t just love mankind as a whole, He’s crazy about you.  He thinks about you.  Not to make this melodramatic or anything, but what’s crazy to me is the possibility of Jesus on the cross saying, “Just a little more, for Ben.”  He’s crazy about you, He can’t stop thinking about you, and you’ll finally understand why people get so hyped about Christianity.  You’ve tried being a Christian in the past and didn’t get anything from it, not because there’s something wrong with Jesus, but there was something wrong in your understanding of Him.  This is why I’m passionate.  This is why I get worked up when I talked about Jesus.   Because Jesus loves me.

Jesus Loves You (Part II)

            This is Part II of trying to break the phrase, “Jesus loves you” down and giving it some weight rather than having it be the cute cliché that many people see it as!  I’m going to be looking at the word “loves” today and breaking that down and why it’s significant and relevant to our lives.  If I was good with technology, maybe I’d say “click here for Part I”, but I kind of just put letters in blue and underlined them and you can try clicking as much as you want, but nothing’s going to happen.  I apologize for the inconvenience.  Maybe if you take the time to click over one blog post, you could read it.  I also apologize for the passive aggressive attack on you to compensate for my technological impairment.

 

            So far we know that Jesus isn’t just a historical figure, and is more than a man.  He’s a divine being with the capacity to love in a personal way. But what does that mean?  Jesus loves you.  We all know about love, and those of us who grew up in church know that pastors always diss the dating-relationship kind of love and then say how God’s love is better than your loser boyfriend or girlfriend kind of love.  You’ve probably heard that, and if you’re like me, it doesn’t do a whole lot for you.  When you’ve been single for 17 straight years, there’s nothing better than the perfect, imaginary relationship that you’re going to have someday (not dissing you, future wife!  Just using literary hyperbole in order to prove a point!).  So what does it mean that Jesus loves us? 

            I think one of the best ways I can put this into something that’s relevant is to dispel what you functionally think of this love.  More often than not, we live life like Jesus tolerates us as long as we’re good.  We live like Jesus resents us for asking Him for stuff, like He rejects us for failing again.  Like it was never really His choice to die on the cross, that if He knew who He was dying for that He’d go back and never make that whole propitiation, justification thing happen.  What a waste of time for a bunch of losers.

  

            It is for this reason that we go crawling through life, never praying, only reading our Bible out of our self-righteous duty, only going to church to appease Jesus, who commands us.  Who demands of us.  Who expects from us.  And just like that, we’ve put Jesus into the background and put our acts and our duties and our righteousness in the foreground.  It’s then that we screw up and feel like Jesus doesn’t love us anymore, because the only reason that He tolerated us was because we were being good.  We wonder why so many Christians get discouraged and depressed and don’t feel like trying to remain holy anymore, it’s because we’ve misspoken the whole Gospel!  We say that salvation is by grace alone, and then act like you better be good, because God’s got a short string and could blow up at you at any moment. 

            Which is why Jesus’ love for us should be REVOLUTIONARY.  It’s why Jesus love for us should be MIND-BOGGLING.  Every single facet of God’s holiness should scream to our insufficiency and worthlessness, but every single facet of God’s love screams to our heart.  One thing that I can promise you is that you will never, ever, ever have a worthwhile relationship with God if you always think of God as a mountain that needs to be climbed in order to reach righteousness.  God is not a mountain to be climbed or a bar to be exceeded, but is a Father in pursuit.  He’s not a standard of goodness, not a line that needs to be crossed, but a being who is chasing your heart out of the overflowing love that He has for you. 

            There’s a verse in the Bible that says that “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free”.  And to be honest with you, I’ve never ever gotten that verse.  It kind of seemed pointless to me for a while, because it seemed really obvious.  “It is for eggs that I went to the store to get eggs”.  “It is for pizza that I ordered a pizza”.  Well of course it’s for freedom, what else could it be, right?  Recently though, I feel like maybe I got a breakthrough.  This verse is significant because of the end goal that is implied.  It is for FREEDOM.  God didn’t set us free so that we’d like Him more.  It wasn’t to gain some street cred among the angels.  It was for our freedom.  This is what SCREAMS of God’s love for us.  That His end goal in dying on the cross, His end goal for coming down to the earth, His end goal in His pursuit of us is for our benefit!  Now, does it glorify God to set us free?  Yes.  Is the chief end of creation to glorify God and lift Him higher?  Yes.  But for what reason did Jesus die? For what cause did He sacrifice Himself?  It is for our freedom that Christ set us free.  It’s for our well being.  It’s for our benefit.  He chased us because He loved us, and He loved us because He is good! 

            So may we be covered in His love for us, may we realize that we are sufficient in His grace, that He loved us so much that He couldn’t sit idly by.  May we know Jesus’ love for us and may our futile attempts at being good enough drift into obscurity. 

Jesus Loves You (Part I)

            I apologize for a multiple-part blog.  It gets pretty intense and people wonder why I’m long winded.  Someone once wrote to someone else and apologized “for writing such a long letter, I didn’t have time to write a short one”.  So I’m going to write a lot because being concise is hard.  I appreciate your grace.  I think some of these ideas have the potential to change your (and my) life.  So don’t walk in here for a theology lesson, but to apply truth to your life.

Jesus loves you.  Perhaps one of the weightiest ideas of all history has been condensed to a trite cliché that people mainly use as a passive aggressive way to vent their anger at the car that’s cutting them off.  The same phrase that has the ability to change everything about a person, the whole lifestyle, the whole mind-frame, the whole outlook, has been transformed into something different, lesser, worse. 

I know this is so because for the past couple days I have been contemplating this phrase and its relevancy, and not once have I been reduced to tears.  Not once have I dropped to the ground in sheer awe of the magnitude of such a phrase.  Not once have I called a friend and just wept with joy at the power of this statement.  Why is this so?  I’m claiming that this phrase could be the most significant piece of knowledge in all of human history, and yet I’m coming at it as if it were a science project or a math problem.  Why am I seemingly unmoved at what I call the most powerful piece of knowledge there is?  I think it’s because we as a church and a body of believers have taken the single greatest piece of knowledge there is, “Jesus loves you”, and have made it a trite cliché to say when people are depressed.  We’ve stamped it on so many T-shirts, mints, bouncy balls, and cross necklaces, that it has become almost irrelevant. So my goal with this writing is to go through the phrase “Jesus loves you” one word at a time and try to convince you of its significance and worth!

The first word is “Jesus”.  I think this is the part that turns most people off from the concept completely.  Who’s Jesus?  If I held a sign on the street saying that “Joan of Arc loves you”, people would think I was crazy, she’s dead and thus unable to love.  If I posted a Facebook status that said, “Bill Gates loves you!”, people would deny it.  Either Bill Gates is a creeper, or I’m lying about the affection that he has for you.  You’ve never hung out with Bill Gates, so for him to express his undying love for you would be taking things slightly fast.  A DTR or conversation over coffee would have been nice before he starts telling everyone how deep his affection is for you.  If I told you that the Tooth Fairy loves you, you’d think I was ignorant.  Because the Tooth Fairy doesn’t exist (sorry to my large 4-year old audience; you had to know at some point), she is incapable of love (sorry to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson for designating the Fairy a “she”.  Nothing personal).  It’s nonsensical and absurd to tell someone that Joan of Arc, Bill Gates, or the Tooth Fairy loves you. 

Which may be why this phrase has lost some of its potential impact.  Without clarifying the nature of Jesus, Christians have told thousands of people that a historical figure loves them.  A dead man can’t love.  Neither can a distant and unknown or imaginary one.  And so why is the historical figure of Jesus separate from other historical figures?

The answer is a doozy.  If I sound crazy for writing all this, I apologize.  Sometimes you look at the words you’ve written and feel like a lunatic scribbling conspiracies on his walls.  What’s different and better about Jesus that makes him capable of personal love?  Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that he wasn’t really just a historical figure.  Not that he didn’t exist, but that he has existed for quite some time.  Not that he didn’t live on earth with the rest of us, but that he also made the earth, and life, and the rest of us.  I don’t think Jesus was just a historical figure like Joan of Arc or Napoleon, I think he was and is a preeminent figure, an everlasting and all-mighty figure.  Not just a God that makes but that also loves.  If Jesus was God, that’s significant.  If Jesus was a God who loves, that changes everything.  If Jesus was God whose only mission on the earth was to love and die on account of love, then I should be on the ground sobbing right now.  If there is a God who not only loves but also sacrifices Himself to show love, that means that love isn’t a cute cliché, a nice idea, or a happy thought.  It means that love is powerful and real and can actually change things.  If love prompted God to die, then perhaps love has the power to do the same for me.  Perhaps this love that has been shown can also be received and can also be emulated.  Which changes everything for me.

Because of the fact that Jesus is a preeminent, all-powerful, all-loving God and not merely a historical figure, I have HOPE.  The fact that Jesus died on a cross puts some weight to the phrase “Jesus loves you” as the fact that He rose puts credibility onto it.  This phrase suddenly doesn’t become trite, but instead turns into the most powerful phrase of history.  The God of all power sacrificed His power for love.  The God in control gave up everything.  This is hope.