It could be that the word LOVE is the most over-used word in our language over the last 100 years. What pictures come to your mind when you hear that two people LOVE each other? A television sex scene? An afternoon soap opera? A teen soap opera? Maybe your favourite magazine where you keep up with who loves who these days? What about the latest ET news?
Please . . . give me a break!! If these things are our standard of what true love is then we are all standing neck-deep in the nasty stuff! If these are the standards of what real love is, then I say there is no true hope for our relationships, our families, or our futures. There must be a better anchor in the storms of life than what this temperamental crap dishes out to us as reality!
A long time ago I heard someone talking about God, and they said, "he likes me very much". At the time I thought that was an odd thing to say, because as a Christian I believe that God "loves" me very much. To me, this would seem to be a more affectionate term to use. Over the last few years, though, I've come to see the statement in a new light, and I realize that this person was right on the money about God "liking" us.
Jesus made a statement to his followers one night over dinner, "I no longer call you servants . . . . but instead I call you friends". And he was saying this right in the middle of teaching them about how they can know God!
To me, the idea that I love someone - say a family member - almost implies a sense of duty. It's a bit like saying your marriage vows at the altar and then following thru as a commitment to those vows. But to really like someone implies that I would like to spend time with them, that I could enjoy the things they enjoy, (imagine God liking what you like), that if I have a choice I will gladly spend every day of the rest of my life with you.
I think we all know what's it's like to love someone (or be loved) out of obligation; but to know that a particular person actually thinks I'm terrific, fabulous, cool, smashing, super, etc, well that's very different!!
Probably the ultimate test of someone liking me or not is how much they are willing to spend time with me.
This is actually quite easy for me to picture this, because I've known for a long time that God and Jesus enjoy my company, but I appreciate that others may have no idea how this could work. Perhaps you've been hoodwinked with the concept of "survival of the fittest", and changed it to "survival of the purest", or holiest, or spiritually talented, etc. Maybe we've been fooled into thinking that God would only be interested in spending time with really good people, or saints, or church leaders, or the Mother Theresa types.
But is this true?
It's so important to come to grips with this because you may never be a Mother Theresa, or a Billy Graham, or a famous spiritual leader, or priest, or nun, etc.
I read a story once where there were 2 brothers living with their parents. The older brother, from a young age, convinced his younger brother that his parents didn't particularly like him very much because he was adopted. He also convinced his brother to never talk about this in front of his parents because they would only distance themselves further from him, and he should be content to just accept the facts as they were; that he was in fact loved by his parents, but not liked as much as him. None of this was true, however, and somehow the parents never became aware of the lies their youngest was living with and thereby confronting the untruths. It wasn't until his mid-teens that it all surfaced. The two brothers had actually forgotten about the original conversations they had when they were children, but the truth now had a much more difficult task to be pushed home.
This is very similar to many of our ways of thinking: we are almost conditioned to think that God's special love and attention is reserved for people who actually "work" for him, or those who live in other poorer countries and feed the hungry, etc. Or maybe you've come to believe that a fancy suit and a nice car is evidence that God likes successful people more than battlers.
The Bible says of Jesus, "He won't brush aside the bruised and the hurt, and he won't disregard the small and insignificant." (Isaiah 42 The Message). Another translation says he won't snuff out a flickering candle, or crush a bruised branch. That sounds to me like Jesus may just be a little bit interested in the survivor, and not just in the 'fittest', or the ‘holiest’, etc.
I believe that not only does my heavenly father love me, but he actually likes me very much indeed. And if you knew me the way God knows me you would know that I’m not all that holy, or spiritual, or pure at times. And I don’t believe that it’s simply a choice God makes that he has to stick with me to the end, but rather he actually thinks I’m worth spending eternity with, and letting me into his life and feelings for me. When I look at the New Testament in this light I see that so much of what is written is written to draw me into friendship with Jesus. The kind of friendship that overlooks faults and failings, that wants to pick me up when I fall, that wants to reassure me that I am loved and believed in.
Let me finish with a little mind twister that I heard recently:
If God is love, then according to the New Testament in
1 Corinthians 13:4, “Love is patient and kind”.
That would mean that God is patient and kind.
Does that make sense? Or am I being a little too simplistic here? If this is too simple to be true I’m sticking with it anyway! I wonder if for some of us the problem is not whether or not God loves us, as much as we don’t think he should (or could) love us?
We’ll talk again . . . Dave Morrie Dick
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