Christmas

Born Is Now Emmanuel

The Great I Am

Anticipation

Love Is About Sacrifice and Service

Jared C. Wilson post:  Love Is Never a Waste

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.
— Galatians 6:9

You recall the time Peter came up to Jesus and basically asked, “When can I stop forgiving someone who keeps wronging me? After seven times?” (I can almost hear him hoping, Please tell me after seven times.) But Jesus responds to him, saying “No, not seven times. Seventy times seven times.”

For those of you doing the math, that comes to 490. The bad news (or good news, depending on which side of the forgiving you’re on) is that this is a symbolic number that basically means forever. Jesus was saying to Peter, “No, you don’t give someone seven strikes. You just keep forgiving them . . . forever.”

Now, Jesus is a smart guy. In fact, if we believe he is who he said he was, we know he has all the omniscience of the God of the universe. So he knows this is a tall order. He knows it doesn’t make sense in our world of betrayal and pettiness and vindictiveness and pride and arrogance and egotism.

So why does he do this? If he knows our capacity for love and forgiveness is finite, how can he call us to persevere in these things toward others? The short answer, I think, is because God himself perseveres in them toward us.

Jesus goes on to tell Peter a story about a servant who was forgiven a huge debt by his master. The servant goes on then to punish a third party who owes the servant much less. When the master finds out, he has the debt-pardoned servant thrown in jail and tortured. And Jesus says—this is the scary part—that that’s what will happen to us if, spurning the grace given us by God, we withhold grace from others.

Because God’s love toward us is (a) freely bestowed despite our sin being worthy of eternal punishment, and (b) relentlessly patient in its eternal perseverance, we have no Christian right to say to others who have wronged us, even if they continue to wrong us, “You have reached your limit with me. My love for you stops now.” Doing so fails to truly see the depths of our sin in the light of God’s holiness. And if God, who is perfect and holy, will forgive and love we who are most certainly not, on what basis do we have to be unforgiving and unloving to others?

I am guessing most of us agree in theory. There aren’t too many Christians who will say, despite Jesus’s instructions, that it’s okay to hate your enemies and curse those who persecute you.

It’s when our loving forgiveness appears to have no discernible effect that we grow weary in doing good. Love is not producing the desired result.

Most of us know 1 Corinthians 13 really well, but let’s revisit a piece of it again:

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 . . . Love never fails.

That’s some scary stuff right there. For we who are used to thinking of love as romance or warm-and-fuzzies or butterflies or sex, Paul has Jesus in mind as the model of love when he tells us, “Love is about sacrifice and service. And it keeps going. It never fails.”

How can this be? We think of those who have tried to love someone back from the brink only to see the person eventually go over. Certainly love fails in these circumstances, right?

I don’t think so. I think that’s true only if we are thinking of our love in terms of a results-based value. But that is not what Jesus is telling Peter. And that’s not what Paul is telling us.

Jesus does not offer Peter a loophole. There is no Forgiveness Contingency Plan. There’s no limited time warranty. Whether the person you’re loving embraces your forgiveness or not, you keep forgiving. Whether the person you love is changed by your love or not, you keep on loving.

In this sense, I don’t think “Love never fails” means “Love always gets the result the lover wants.” I think it means what it says: Love is not a failure. Love is not a failure regardless of the results.

This is why: Because God is not a failure, and God is love. When we are loving someone with a persevering, sacrificial love, we are reflecting the eternal goodness and grace of God himself. We are glorifying God, and there is no higher calling than that.

None.

We love—not because it will “change the world” (although it may)—but because God loves us (1 John 4:19).

You would think this might incline us toward a begrudging love, then. “Oh, well, if it’s just for God, maybe I should stop hoping for change in the person I’m loving.” But Paul says love “always trusts, always hopes.”

Always trust that God is not content to honor your sacrificial love with a sympathetic pat on the head. Always hope that God is using your sacrificial love to change hearts and minds. (Maybe yours.)

Love always perseveres. Love never fails. So don’t give up.

Whoever you are, wherever you are: Don’t give up.

To the parents trying to love a wayward child back from the world, to the husband trying to love his wife back from drug addiction, to the wife trying to love her husband back from pornography or adultery, to the girl trying to love her friend back from bitterness, to the guy trying to love his friend back from despair: Don’t give up.

Don’t give up, don’t give up, don’t give up.

Whatever happens, whenever it happens, your love is not in vain. You are not alone, for God loves you and has approved your love through the sacrifice of his Son. Cast off despair; cast all your cares on him.

Love never fails. Love is never a waste.

Finding Rest

Steven Dilla post:  Restful Meditations :: Advent’s Hope

Focusing our hearts on Christ, the hope of Advent, expands the holiday experience beyond mere merriness. In the gospel our hearts find rest from pain and hope for renewal.

“Jesus, my feet are dirty,” prayed Origen in the third century. “Come even as a slave to me, pour water into your bowl, come and wash my feet. In asking such a thing I know I am overbold, but I dread what was threatened when you said to me, ‘If I do not wash your feet I have no fellowship with you.’ Wash my feet then, because I long for your companionship.”

Origen’s prayer captures the spirit of Advent: looking back at Christ’s work on our behalf, looking forward at the completion of his fellowship, and longing for his presence and power today.

Another third century prayer, an anonymous Syriac Christmas liturgy, gives words to this hope:

The radiance of the Father’s splendor, the Father’s visible image, Jesus Christ our God, peerless among counselors, Prince of Peace, Father of the world to come, the model after which Adam was formed, for our sakes became like a slave: in the womb of Mary the virgin, without assistance from any man, he took flesh.

Enable us, Lord, to reach the end of this luminous feast in peace, forsaking all idle words, acting virtuously, shunning our passions, and raising ourselves above the things of this world.

Bless your church, which you brought into being long ago and attached to yourself through your own life-giving blood…

Bless your servants, whose trust is all in you; bless all Christian souls, the sick, those tormented by evil spirits, and those who have asked us to pray for them.

Show yourself as merciful as you are rich in grace; save and preserve us; enable us to obtain those good things to come which will never know an end.

May we celebrate your glorious birth, and the Father who sent you to redeem us, and your Spirit, the Giver of life, now and forever, age after age. Amen.

Christ, may our hearts find their rest in you, the hope of Advent.

Listen: Greensleves by Vince Guaraldi Trio.

All-Sufficient King

Steven Dilla post:  O Come, O Come, Emmanuel :: Advent’s Hope

“Caesar is Lord,” the people would shout as his chariot traversed the streets. Rome’s elite culture—from philosophy to viaducts, engineering to economics—was unsurpassed and almost universally recognized as the hope of the world. It was stunning when the empire fell into decline.

In the end, Caesar proved not only unable to save his kingdom, but even himself. The fall of Rome plunged civilization into what historians have long-called the Dark Ages. For hundreds of years battles raged endlessly, pestilence and plague spread freely, and chaos seemed to gain the upper hand all too regularly.

The period isn’t significantly brighter in church history. Scripture was largely inaccessible, starving the Church of sound doctrine and increasing the growth of folk religion, superstition, and far worse. (The devastating interpretations of Scripture that lead to the crusades fomented during this time.)

“O come, Thou Wisdom, from on high, and order all things far and nigh,” wrote an anonymous monk sometime before 800 C.E. The words to “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” cry out from the depths of the Dark Ages—longing for God’s presence, Emmanuel, to rescue humankind.

In some ways the unknown author behind this song is an outlier to his or her world; the lyrics demonstrate intimate knowledge of Scripture in a time of illiteracy. In other ways the lyricist was shaped firmly by the Dark Ages—depravity writ large—and its revelations of humanity’s limits. Even had there been a vision for restoration present, no one on earth would have been sufficient to breathe it to life.

O come, Desire of the nations, bind
in one the hearts of all mankind;
bid every strife and quarrel cease
and fill the world with heaven’s peace.

“Jesus is Lord,” is a revolutionary claim. It not only upends global empires, but whatever we would enthrone on our hearts to save ourselves from the insufficiency of our world.

In Advent we await the coming of the all-sufficient King; he is the wisdom we yearn for and the power we need. He is God, and his presence brings healing to our world and restoration to our hearts.

Listen: O Come, O Come, Emmanuel by Francesca Battistelli (4:20)