We love because He first loved us: God's love and ours.

Psalm 47
Psalm 47 has all the excitement of a coronation – and the King is the Lord himself.  He is Lord of all the earth, sovereign over creation, sovereign over the nations.  And he loves “Jacob” – the people of Israel who are his people.

Why should God love Israel – or us?  Not because of their great strength.  They were nothing special....  But God chose them and loved them.   But his plan and his love extend to all the nations.  His plan is that The nobles of the nations assemble as the people of the God of Abraham.   

When John says in 1 John 4 that “God is love” that is not a new, freshly invented “New Testament concept”.  It is one that goes back to the beginning. Before Moses says “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength”   (Dt 6) he says “Because he loved your ancestors and chose their descendants after them, he brought you out of Egypt by his Presence and his great strength”  (Dt 4. 37:  the first mention of of God's love ).  God's love  –  “Ahav” – has always been there.  He made men and women for relationship with himself. 

I have been reading the “minor prophets” - the wee, short books at the end of the old testament.  They record God's anger at the mess his people have got themselves into, his grief over their unfaithfulness to him, his judgement and his promise of restoration and healing. For Hosea it was the unfaithfulness of God's people worshipping idols.  For Amos and Micah, it was oppression violence and injustice.  For Haggai it was the self-seeking complacency that left the temple in ruins.  For Malachi it was giving God second best.  

And that is how he loves, in response to the fact that his people broke their covenant with him.  They went far away from him, worshipping the grotesque fertility gods of their neighbours.  They oppressed each other.   God wanted them back.  He wanted them cleaned, set free, and treating one another with justice. 

See also
Jeremiah 31. 3
God's everlasting (through all generations) love (Hebrew "ahav") and covenant-keeping (Hebrew "chesedh") … not extinguished even by the nation's sin, offers hope of national restoration.  

Zeph 3. 7
The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves.   He will take great delight in you; in his love (Hebrew "ahava" – feminine form with same meaning) he will no longer rebuke you,  but will rejoice over you with singing.’   There is a tenderness in God's love.  Look how he longs for us to be walking with him.

The love of God is not a hard-nosed, cold determination to pursue us and possess us – it's not a psychopathic love that turns to hate if it doesn't get what it wants.  Stalking, bullying, and physical violence sometimes follow when that happens.  In south east Asia it often leads to acid attacks against young women.  God's love is tough enough to do what it takes to win us back to him – but at heart it is tender and sacrificial. 

Remember from last week?  Esteem?  Enjoyment/yearning for presence?  Extravagant sacrifice? Expectant hope.  God comes to us what that sort of love. 

• We are his creatures; we bear his image; he esteems us.
• He made us for his presence and when we put ourselves at a distance, he yearns for us.
• He goes to extravagant lengths to save us
• He believes in us. 

1 John 4. 7-21
“This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins”

Because God is love, all true love is “of God”, comes from Him.  People who don't follow Jesus can be show much love.  That is because we are created in God's image so when anyone shows love it can only come from God.  But true, real love starts with God, reaches out to us, and takes root in our lives as we respond to God's love by loving him and loving others.  That's the love that shows we are “born of God.”  (verse

This is how we know what love is like.... v 9-10,  love is not just described but defined:  love is God sending his son for us.  Love is reaching out to the beloved.  Love is forgiving sins whatever the cost.   But why does a loving God need a sacrifice?  That is the wrong question.  For John, sacrifice and love explain and illustrate each other.   A loving god aches to heal the hurt so a loving God bears the wounds inflicted on him by mankind.  

See also
John 3. 16.       For god so loved the world...
1 John 3. 16.     This is how we know what love is....
Romans 5. 8    God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Ephesians 2. 4f    But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions – it is by grace you have been saved.

And that is how God wants us to love one another.

“We love” John says “because he first loved us”.  Some Greek manuscripts actually say “we love him” or “we love God”.  Although it's not in the best manuscripts, that seems to be the point.  We love – God  first and then one other – because He first loved us.  

The evidence that our faith is for real, is found in possession of the Spirit and acknowledging  the  truth about Jesus!  (v 13-18). Is is alos found in love – for the invisible God, demonstrated in love for visible brothers and neighbours with often visible faults and weaknesses.
With all our strength. Sacrificial love that bears the pain, takes the initiative, heals the hurt.
With all our heart. Esteem,  Enjoyment, Extravagance and Expectancy in our relationships with each other, and in the way we live in the world.

We finish with two “Jesus” stories: one an encounter with Jesus, the other a parable Jesus told :
Luke 7. 36-50: a woman weeping at Jesus' feet, drying his feet with her hair, pouring her precious ointment on his feet, in an extravagant expression of love, and Jesus says “He who is forgiven much loves much. “
Matthew 18. 23-35: a man owes ten thousand talents (one talent was twenty years wages for a labourer.  So the guy owed about 3 billion pounds! Silly money!)  and is forgiven.  But he then goes and starts beating up one of his mates who owes him a hundred denarii – maybe £4500 (A denarius was a day's wages so a hundred denarii was four months wages: a fair amount of money but nothing in comparison!) God's love and forgiveness is meant to make us love and forgive. 

The New testament will never allow us just to say “Thank-you” for this love.  It is never enough to love God back, in response to the love he has show to us.  Consistently, God's love shown to us in Christ woos us to love him in return – and always to show that by loving one another, loving our enemies, loving the lost and the broken.  

Galatians 3. 20  I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

© Gilmour Lilly February 2016

Deuteronomy 6. 1-9

Love the Lord your God...

Twice in the last couple of months, God has spoken to me about my relationship with him. The second time, I was watching a video on the computer, with David Carr, a pastor from Birmingham, who was talking about love for the Lord and love for others.  He linked loving the Lord with loving others and said that when you do love others they will respond to you.  And I sensed the Lord speak to me, challenging my about having “lost my first love” for him.  That's what brought me to this text.

Deuteronomy should really be called “These are the words!”  That is its Hebrew title (taken from the first words on the book!)  And that is important – because we need to hear Deuteronomy as “The words of Moses” - his big “pep-talk” to the people.  It's also important because “These are the words” was a common way to begin a covenant document.  So Deuteronomy is not only Moses' pep-talk, but, as God's prophet, his words are the covenant that God makes with his people and renews when they mess up. 

So we hear the first and greatest commandment in this context:  they are part of Moses' pep-talk, the lynch-pin of the covenant God is making with his people.  Before anything else really – before any other demands, any other rules, Moses tells the people – speaking for God – “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and strength.”   They once asked Jesus “What is the greatest commandment?”  that question, (Matthew 22, 37-40) and that is how he answered.  But he also added, the second is Love your neighbour as yourself.  (Lev. 19.18)

That's the first thing God wants from us: our love.  All the other stuff follows on from that:
worshipping God alone (6. 14), 
avoiding images the pagans worship (ch 7), spiritualists and fortune-tellers (18. 9-13),
eating the right food (ch 14.1-22)
paying tithes;  keeping the festivals (ch 16) giving the right sacrifices (ch 17),
forgiving debtors and freeing slaves – caring for the lest and lowest (ch 15),
dealing properly with serious crime (19. 21),
marriage and divorce,
and even care for animals (22. 6f) and health and safety (22. 8)

God wants the love of our heart, soul and strength.
Heart means the centre of you – not just (as in English) emotions but thinking, remembering, wanting, happiness, anxiety.  All of these things that are deep inside up, the OT includes under the heading of “Heart”.
Soul means “whole person”. In Hebrew thought you don't have a soul, you are a soul. “Soul” is related to the word “to breathe”.  It includes the drives, experiences and functions that makes us human.
Strength is force, abundance, or muchness.  It's connected with the word for a glowing, red-hot stick from the fire, that can burn what it touches.  It has energy that reaches beyond itself.

So what is this thing we call “love?” 
The Christian faith's greatest theologian, Paul describes what a loving lifestyle is like in 1 Corinthians 13, which is all about actions and attitudes towards one another. It is about decisions we make, to behave and think in a particular way, in our interactions toward other people. We would all do well to dwell deeply in these words and put them into practise in all our relationships including our marriages.  Paul tells us how to love with all our strength: how to reach out to others in love.  But Paul says you can do all sorts of sacrificial things and still not have love.  He recognises that love is an experience as well as a decision.

But what does it mean to lvoe with our hearts?  What is love in the deepest, inside part of us? 
Biologist Helen Fisher talks about lust, attraction and attachment, as three separate systems driven by different hormones.
Another biologist Jeremy Griffith defines love as "unconditional selflessness" that assures co-operation and survival.
Psychologist Robert Sternberg talks about intimacy, passion and commitment: and recognises that these are present both in sexual and non-sexual relationships.
Philosopher James Giles says it is about vulnerability and care.  He also talks about love as an experience and as anticipation. 

C S Lewis and others talk about the four Greek words for love – agape is selfless love, philia is brotherly or friendly love, eros is sexual love and storge is the love between one who is dependent and one who provides (child and parent). But in the Old Testament, ONE word is used for all of these loves.  It's the same word in Deuteronomy 6. 5, (love the Lord...) and Leviticus 19. 18 (Love your neighbour...); the saem word for sexual love – Isaac loved Rebecca (Gen 24. 67) and Isaac loved Rebecca (Gen 29. 18;  Jacob loved Rachel...)   the same s word for family love (Gen 37. 3 Jacob loved Joseph), friendship (Ruth 4. 15 (Ruth loved Naomi, David loved Jonathan, 1 Sam 18. 1) and the same word for God's love (Ps 47. 4 , Ps 146. 8;  Isa 43. 4,  Jer 31. 3.)   Same word, over and over.  God's love for us, our love for God, and for our neighbours, the love between husband and wife, parents and childes, and friends.  It's this Hebrew word Ahav  ....  So I suspect the Greeks were not fully right.  While the four loves are different in intensity and how they are expressed, they also have common ground, some things that are the same in all of them. 

What is happening on the inside of a person, when they experience  this thing we call “love?”  I want to suggest four things that are common to very kind of lvoe – although they have different expression and different intensity in different relationships...  

1. Esteem – admiration, respect for who the other is.  In other words, something makes you value the other person – whether that person is your wife, your best friend or your newborn baby.   You admire their beauty, their rippling muscles, their sense of humour, or just value the fact that they are your flesh and blood. They matter to you.  This person is important.   Paul says love doesn't boast about self nor dishonour others.  Love treats people with respect that areise from Esteem. 
2. Enjoyment of, or yearning for, presence.  You want to be with the one you love.  When you are with them, you enjoy their presence.   When you are separated you miss them.  If your husband or wife is away for a few days, don't you get excited when you know they are coming home?  When you have to leave your baby with someone  for a few hours, don't you think “Will she be OK?”   In Rom 1:11 and Phil 1:8 Paul longs to see his Christian friends.
3. Extravagant, generous sacrifice.  Yielding yourself and what is yours to the other.  In love, you want to give.  That balances out the other thing about enjoyment: you don't simply want your life to be enriched by having the other person around, you want to bless and enrich their life too.  And it means that you will be ready to change your life, surrender your preferences, for the other person.  Love is not self-seeking, says Paul.
4. Expectancy, hope for future accomplishment.  A belief in what your partnership can do and be.  That may be a young couple getting married and hoping to have a family who will all, of course, be beautiful, successful and good. Or it may be four lads from Liverpool starting their own rock group.  Paul says love believes and hopes.

So we can think about how these traits work in our human relationships; in the life of the Church, in our families.  We can think about how they work in loving our enemies; and in loving our selves.. But we need to recover these traits in our love for God.  These are the heart things: Esteem, Enjoyment, Extravagance, Expectancy.  Awe and wonder at who he is; yearning for more of his presence; surrendering our lives to him, and living hopefully, by faith.  These things need to be there in our relationship with God.   And when they are, the foundation is laid for healthy loving of others, including our neighbours as ourselves.

But how is this love to be ignited and maintained in our relationship with God? God says “Shema, Israel: Listen....”  The answer is in the text.

Firstly we need to be the “our” in “The Lord our God”.  Israel had seen God at work in their life together.  They knew themselves to be his people.  God draws us into a relationship with himself and calls us His people.   The first of those times recently when God spoke to me about my relationship with him, was the day after Glen Frey, of the Eagles, died. He wrote the song “Desperado.”  I used to associate that song with people who are living messed up lives, far away from God.  But I was listening to  the day after Glen Frey died, and it struck me as being about me:   “You better let somebody love you before it's too late.”  It's possible to be too busy, too angry, too afraid to get close to God. We need to opt in – to choose to love the Lord.

Secondly, it is a response to who God is.   “The Lord our God is one.”  He is one, not many. He is unique.  He is not one god among many.  He is the one true God.  In the pagan world with many gods, that was a game changer, and it still is.  The pagan gods were often kind of like us – only with superpowers.  They squabbled among themselves, they fell in love.  But The Lord our God isn't like us.  He is holy and mysterious.  We love – because he is awesome, powerful, mysterious, indescribable!  We love because he is faithful, reliable, just, fair, and holy.  The ultimate duty – to love God – is founded on the ultimate truth: God is ONE.

Arthur Aron says we are biologically wired to fall in love, if we (1) Reveal to each other intimate details about our lives for half an hour. And (2)  stare deeply into each other’s eyes without talking for four minutes. And I think that is how to fall in love with God, too.  (1) revelation: read God's word, absorb the truth about who God is.  And  (2) Contemplation.  In contemplation we are not looking for revelation.  We are connecting with what is already revealed.  Paul says “we all beholding the glory of God are being transformed from one degree of glory to another.  So, gaze at the truth you have learned about God.  Gaze at it in silence and fall in love with Him! 

© Gilmour Lilly February 2016

John 9: The Sixth Sign

John 9

A disturbing question. v2. Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?

This Jerusalem resident is one of my favourites. He is the complete opposite in many ways of the disabled guy at the pool of Bethesda. He's strong, independent, feisty, and courageous, as we shall learn. Sitting at his usual corner, listening intently to the voices that passed by, he probably heard the question – some guys asking their Rabbi who sinned, him of his parents.

That may seem odd to us – but it was part of the world-view of Jesus' time. Disease, particularly something like a child being born blind, was seen a s a punishment for sin. So the disciples' quesiton was “did his parents sin, or maybe he sinned in the womb?” That may seem strange to us – but that's what people of Jesus' day believed. The same idea is still around today. The Hindu doctrine of karma: punishment for sin in a past life. And I have heard people say, " I wonder what I have done to deserve this?"

We understand the idea of mistakes and consequences: stress, diet and substance abuse can all affect our health; and our exploitation greed and aggression can affect other people. We live in a fallen, broken world, where suffering is all around us. But the idea that disease is a direct punishment from God, is one we must consign to the dustbin of history. The point of the book of Job is that God throws out such a shallow and simplistic theology of suffering. And Jesus dismisses it too. It's a horrible idea.

A disturbing answer? v3. Neither, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.

But... if Jesus is suggesting that God just randomly sends disease for his own glory, well, that's even worse! (“Even more worser” as my youngest once said.) But that's what some of us believe. We allow ourselves to live in a boxed in world, where everything happens in a predetermined way for a purpose. The inevitable result of that thinking, is that if God has sent along our illness, it must be for the purpose – so who are we are we to argue with that by asking God to heal us?

But that is not what Jesus says and it is not where Jesus' thinking leads. Look carefully at the words the disciples used and Jesus uses. "Who sinned that this man was born blind..." (v. 2) "… that God's works might be displayed." There is the same word, the same sentence structure, in both the question and the answer. Neither is talking about purpose but about consequence. The disciples aren't suggesting the parents sinned deliberately to cause their child to be born blind. Rather, that his blindness was a consequence of their sin. And Jesus isn't suggesting that God send the disease in order to bring about his glory, but rather that the consequence of the disease could be his glory.

We live in a fallen world where suffering in general is the consequence of the fall. Where bad stuff happens. Bruce Milne says “there is a dimension in suffering which defies 'explanation'...” The nearest we come to understanding the mystery of suffering is at the cross – and even there, even Jesus asks the question “Why?” (Mt 27.46)" No wonder – with ideas like “somehow we deserved this” or “God sent it for a purpose” – we have problems with the healing ministry.

See God work

“The Message” helpfully translates v3 – “You’re asking the wrong question. You’re looking for someone to blame. Look instead for what God can do.” Jesus isn't interested here in the question “Why?” he is interested in demonstrating the works of God. The positive consequence of the man's blindness is that god's works may be brought into the light, plainly seen, And that is what Jesus is all about: verse four says “We must be working the works of him who sent me, as long as there is daylight to work by!” For Jesus, the right question isn’t “Why did this happen?” but “How can the works of a loving Father be worked in this situation? So Jesus spits on the ground and makes a wee paste of mud, puts it on the man's eyes sends him off to wash in the pool of Siloam and he comes back his eyes open seeing! The outcome of all that can be that God's glory is seen.

The story tells us about healing; Bruce Milne says “the existence of human suffering and blindness is a call to work.” We are called upon to engage in a broken, darkened, struggling world. We are called to do the Father's works – to make them visible – with Jesus, in the power of the Spirit.

Now I see

At first, as the man walks around town, people are nudging each other and saying things like “What happened to him – I'm sure that's the blind beggar guy, and it looks like he can see as well as I can” and “Nah – it's just a look-alike.” Being the kind of outgoing guy he was, when he heard that sort of thing, he was straight in there: “No, really it's me; I'm the same guy! The guy they call Jesus did it, with a bit of mud; sent me to wash my face in the pool of Siloam, and it worked!”

In an effort to understand what is happening, some of them go to the rabbis and law teachers, and eventually take the man who had been blind along. What's the official line on all this? Well, the Pharisees give the man a grilling – loads of questions: who did this? How did it happen. He must be lying, bring in his parents: they will soon discredit this rubbish... Well, the parents confirmed his story – although they seem a bit scared of the authorities and they would rather let their son speak for himself. He's well able to do that.

The whole story and many of the details shout – repeat like a football chant – the glory of God, revealed in Jesus, and who Jesus is.

• Siloam means “Sent” – and John sees the co-incidence: Jesus is the one the Father sent into the world.
• He cheekily breaks the Sabbath by making some ointment. What he uses – dust – reflects the creation of the world and suggests a new creation.
• One of the marks of the coming kingdom is the receiving of sight by the blind (Isaiah 29. 18 , 55. Five)
• In the background, the feast of feast of Tabernacles (full of lights) is being played out.
• Jesus says he is the light of the world (v5). Those who trust him do not walk in darkness.

You can hear it coming across in every action: Jesus! Messiah! Jesus! Creator! Jesus! Light of the world! Jesus! Son of God! The works of the father are being seen; the son is being identified for who he is. The one who restores physical sight can open our eyes to spiritual truth as well.

Are we blind?

The Pharisees can only see the world through their own narrow lens: their eyes are already blinded to the realities of who Jesus is. Jesus has broken the law (healed on the Sabbath) so he can't be an good. But the man replies “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!” (I love him!) When they keep asking him questions he comes back at them with “Why the questions: do you want to become his followers too?” (v 27) Eventually they get so angry they throw him out of the synagogue and cut him off from the worshipping community.

When Jesus hears about this he goes looking for the man, introduces himself to him, and invites him to take a step of faith. It's simple. The blind man can now see, spiritually as well as physically.

Jesus says, “For judgement I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” The Pharisees – religious, intellectual, respectable people – are shown to be blind – and not only blind, but guilty, because they don’t admit they are in need.

So there two ways to respond to Jesus, the light of the world. You can put your faith in him – which begins be admitting you are blind, don't see, don't understand. Or you can remain blinded by your own presuppositions, and turn away form the light.

© Gilmour Lilly February 2016