BORN AGAIN:

Why Christianity May Not Be What You Think It Is

Jim Barringer

Prologue: How to Read This Book

Two things about this book make it different from any Christian book I’ve ever seen, so I guess I should warn you ahead of time what you’re getting yourself into.

First, there are a lot of interconnected themes in this book.  Frequently, I’ll raise some point and then explain that I’ll discuss it more in a later chapter.  I mention the idea because it’s important, even if the time to explain it isn’t until later in the book.  Other times, I’ll be in the process of explaining an idea, and then take a short breather (I call it an excursus) to provide information that will help you understand what I’m discussing.  If you have ADD, you will probably love this.  If you have OCD, you will probably hate it.

Second, I refer to the Bible a lot, but I usually just give the chapter rather than the chapter and verse.  This is intentional; it’s because when you pick up your Bible to read that passage, I want you to start at the beginning of the chapter and read it all.  I think it’s very dangerous for us to read a single Bible verse and think that we’ve learned something.  We need to know a lot more: who is being spoken to?  What are the circumstances?  Is there anything said before or after that verse that would help us understand the verse better?  It’s not just out of laziness (although, to be quite honest, it’s much easier to write this way); it’s to help you better understand the Bible on the whole, rather than just hitting you with a few scattered verses.

This book is real, and it is raw.  I tell stories about myself that are embarrassing or cast me in a bad light, because that’s authentic.  I sometimes type while very excited, and I sometimes get passionate about defending or attacking certain ideas. If you want a bland, level-headed book, go read systematic theology.  The Bible is real to me, and it evokes strong feelings in me.  We’re talking about life, death, love, purity, holiness, and a God who is bigger than the universe because he made the universe.  Those are loaded ideas.  Forgive me if my excitement shines through.

I’m not writing this because I want any kind of fame or money for myself.  I probably will not end up with any.  I’m not doing it because I enjoy writing – although I do.  I’m writing it because, long ago in Palestine, Jesus said that the only way to enter the kingdom of God was to be born again, and I want to know what that means.  If you want to know as well, come along with me.

Chapter 1: Jerusalem, Night, 27 A.D.

The command to be born again

It reads like a scene from a movie. The setting: Jerusalem, at night, during passover week. A powerful Jew named Nicodemus comes to Jesus under cover of darkness. He has heard something about this Jesus, and wants to know more, but can't risk the backlash if his fellow religious leaders find out he is socializing with the man they think is a heretic.

Nicodemus introduces himself, and says, "We know you must be from God. No one can do those signs and miracles that you do unless he's from God." Jesus answers, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the Kingdom of God unless he is born again."

Nicodemus is just as baffled by this answer as you and I would be; it seems to come from nowhere, has no connection to what Nicodemus has just said, and on top of that, it doesn't even seem to make sense! "How can a man be born when he is old?!" he blurts. "Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb!"

I don’t think we can overstate the importance of learning what Jesus meant by this phrase.  In that one sentence, he explained what was necessary for a person to enter the Kingdom of God (I’ll explain that phrase a little later).  Consider all the things he didn’t say.  He didn’t say that you get into the Kingdom by going to church, by obeying rules, by reading your Bible and praying every day, or by being a “good person,” whatever that means (and we’ll discuss this in chapter two).  He said that the one and only way into God’s house was to be born again.  So…what does that look like, and how do I do it?

For starters, let me review what happens to us after we are born. We learn things. We learn that we can cheat as long as we don't get caught. We learn that no one will mind all that much if we take revenge on someone who treated us badly. We learn that there's really no punishment for saying one thing and doing another. We learn that, most of the time, nobody will stop us if we walk all over them. We learn that, to quote the great philosophers Iron Maiden, "Only the good die young; all the evil seems to live forever." And, worst of all, we learn the survival skills that we need to make it in a world so messed up: lying, cheating, taking advantage of people, insincerity, guarding emotions, and all kinds of other things. You are born, you are broken, you adapt to your brokenness by breaking yourself even further.

In the Beginning…

It’s really a heartbreaking set of circumstances, and it’s not at all what God had in mind had when he made the world.  You may remember the first chapter of Genesis, when God creates the world and everything in it.  What’s his reaction?  He says, “This is good.”  The chapter concludes by saying, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”  God only makes good things.   I don’t want to open a theological can of worms by saying that God cannot make bad things – although there are certain things that God can’t do, believe it or not, and we’ll talk about those in chapter two.  However, whatever the reason, God only makes good things.

Picture the scene in your head, now.  The earth is practically brand new.  God has just fashioned millions, tens or even hundreds of millions, of species of plants and animals, all of them unique.  Where there was once only formless void, there is now a brilliant yellow sun illuminating a dazzling blue, white, and green marble hanging in space.  On this marble, fish ply the newly formed seas, butterflies dance through the air, and the first man and woman groggily open their eyes after the first ever surgery.  This…is good.  There is nothing about it that is not wonderful, pure, and perfect.  There is one tree, however, which God tells this first man and woman, Adam and Eve, not to eat from.

You know the rest of the story: given a choice between obeying God and doing their own thing, Adam and Eve chose rebellion.  It’s tempting to wag your finger at Adam and talk about how much better you could have done, but if you look at your life, you’ll see that you’ve done the exact same thing.  Given the same choice, you and I have chosen rebellion more times than we could ever count.  Regardless of that, when Adam and Eve chose themselves over God, something about creation was irrevocably broken.  The perfect creation that God had made was polluted by the presence of this thing called sin: a rebellion, a rejection of God’s will in favor of a person’s own will.

This basically means two things for us.  First, it means that we are not who we were meant to be.  There is some part of us – let me call it the heart – which is fundamentally separated from the good way that God made it.  It’s like a fun house mirror; it acts in a skewed parody of the way a normal heart is supposed to work.  Second, this means that our relationship with God is broken.  God made us, right?  That means that he alone knows what it means to be a human, what a human is supposed to think and feel and do, right?  So if we’re separated from God through our rebellion against him, then really, we’re separated from the only source of our identity.  In trying to create an identity, to replace what we’re not getting from God, we make all kinds of ridiculous masks to wear, false selves to present to the world, and mistaken ideas about what “real life” and “real success” look like.  In trying to unbreak ourselves, we merely break ourselves further.  Hold on to this idea about God being the only source of our identity.  It’ll be a main idea for the whole rest of the book.

Meanwhile, Jesus steps into this mess and says that the two most important commandments in the whole world are to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. To the broken heart, with its lunchbox full of survival skills for making it in an angry world, this makes no sense at all. Love does not get me ahead in the world; on the contrary, it often allows other people to take advantage of me and walk all over me. Everything that we have learned from the time we were born until now tells us that we can't possibly live that way. That's why Jesus says we have to be born again.

Literally, he's saying that you have to erase everything you have ever learned about life. You have to go back to the point of knowing absolutely nothing. Shed those survival instincts, get rid of the self-reliance, stop feeling like you have to stick up for yourself. You don't get to decide what's right and wrong, you don't get to judge people, you don't get to hang out with the people you like and ignore the rest. Before Jesus told you otherwise, everything you learned told you that you were in control of your life, that you held the reins of your destiny, that who you were and who you could become belonged to you. Those beliefs, those instincts, are weights around your legs dragging you back. Jesus tells you that you are the one who is responsible for messing up your life, for all the things that are wrong with you; that you broke yourself, and cannot fix what's wrong. So, you have to erase everything that's broken...in other words, everything. And then someone has to fill you up with things that aren't broken, which is exactly what God promises he will do when you tell him you're willing to be reborn.

Hearts and Other Messy Insides

Specifically, his promise (found in Ezekiel 36) is that he will remove from you your heart of stone, and replace it with a heart of flesh. Stone is cold, hard, and dead. When people live with hearts of stone, that's what they tend to look like as well. Maybe they even truly want to be good people, but they simply don't have the ability because their heart, the very core of them, is sinful, corrupt, and ruined. God, on the other hand, offers the reward of a heart of flesh. What he has to do in order to give it to you, though, is to tear out your old, stone heart - all the things that made up the old you, all of the things you thought you knew about life and how to handle it. You can't have those things anymore; God is going to remove them. He will replace your stone heart with a heart of flesh - warm, beating, alive, and most importantly, holy. You will be born again: able to live freely without the baggage that used to hold you back.

It's so crucial for all of us to understand that the old person has no place in the new heart. A lot of people claim to give their lives to God, but they insist on carrying along these relics of the old person. That's why so many churches are cold, hard, and dead - that's exactly what happens when people who still have hearts of stone try to play the God game. That's why it's so sad that many Christians are angry, prejudiced, and hostile - those things are part of the old self, and we're supposed to be rid of them! The problem is that many who claim the name of Jesus have not been born again at all. They have not gone back to the state of knowing nothing, and allowed God to write love in their hearts. They have tried to shoehorn God in to what they already know about life, to go to church on Sunday while still living from the old brokenness every other day of the week. That's not what Jesus is talking about. He's talking about being completely reborn. He didn't say that phrase so that 21st-century evangelicals would have a catchy nickname for themselves. He said it because that's the only way to enter the Kingdom of God.

This thought is not new to me.  The entire Bible speaks about it.  In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old has gone; the new has come” (emphasis added).  It’s not just that your soul is eternally safe; it’s that the old in you, the stuff that made you need salvation in the first place, has to go.  Paul goes at it again in Galatians 2, saying, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”  The old me is gone, he says.  I’m not who I was.  The problem is, as I look at my own life, I can’t say that Paul’s statements are always true for me.  There’s still an awful lot of the old me left.  And I’m having major problems being who I want to be, because I still have all this other stuff holding me back.  I suspect you can identify with me on that one; you’re probably not exactly who you want to be, either, and maybe you’ve spent your whole life blaming yourself and feeling like you weren’t good enough, the same way I have.  In reality, it has nothing to do with how good we are.  It just means we’re still being born again, and we need to find out what that means so that we can continue the process.

This book had its origin on a plane ride.  I’m a bit of an introvert, so I love plane rides; they’re a great excuse to spend several hours reading or in thought without feeling like I’m wasting time.  This particular plane ride was taking me to Houston from Orlando, where I had just finished spending a week with my then-girlfriend (hopefully, by the time you read this, my wife) Andrea.  I’m very hard on myself almost all the time, so I was mentally replaying the things I did and said during the week that were stupid or inconsiderate or whatever, just generally attacking myself for not being able to do better.  I felt like God should be ashamed of me for the way I just continued to rebel, continued to do my own thing, because I really should know better by now.  Probably you’ve been there at some point.

The plane was doing its best to outrun the dawn; we had left Orlando at 6:30 in the morning, so I had a great bird’s eye view of a prolonged sunrise, and as I stared at the amazing colors that God wrote into the sky, I had a thought.  Maybe it was from God; maybe it was just me asking myself a question, but the question was: “Do you think you’re the only person who’s ever struggled to get it right?  Are you the first one to take time, and a couple of tries, to get all this figured out?”

Pondering over that question brought me to an unpleasant realization: Being born again is not fun or easy.  I was saved when I was 21, so I have to undo two decades of instincts, habits, learned behaviors, and everything else that had ruined me until I realized I couldn’t do it alone anymore.  Letting God erase all that and take me back to square one is going to take time!  It’s going to be difficult!  But it’s also necessary, because as Christ said, it’s the only way to see the Kingdom.

There is one other critically important point, and it will underscore everything that we talk about for the rest of the book: God is in control of this process.  Romans 8 says that, if you are saved, God has predestined you to be conformed to the image of his son.  Don’t get confused by the use of the word “predestined,” as he is not talking about salvation here.  He is just talking about the whole dead heart / new heart thing.  Now that you have a new heart, it is predestined – guaranteed – that God will transform you so that your life more and more closely resembles the new heart you have.  The old selfish and broken ways that you used to live will begin to vanish, replaced by pure life from the new heart.  God guarantees that he will make this happen!  Philippians 2 also says, “He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.”  This is another guarantee!  God is the one who began the work in you; when you called out to him, he is the one who replaced your old, dead heart with a new and beating one.  You didn’t do that yourself!  God began the work, and he promises you that he will be faithful to complete it.  You don’t determine your success or failure; you cannot possibly cause God to fail, because you’re not that strong.  You do, however, determine the speed of your success, and your happiness in the meantime, depending whether you swim with the current of what he’s trying to do in you or against it.

And, of course, the process takes a different length of time in each of us.  You don’t struggle with the same things I do; maybe you’ve been saved for longer or shorter than I have, so you have more or fewer of those old instincts to erase and overwrite.  Maybe you never knew that you had to be born again, that the change you had to go through was so drastic.  I don’t know where you’re coming from, but I know what Jesus said, and I know that God’s promises are always true, so let’s start there and see what happens.

The Nitty Gritty

Over the course of this book I’m going to highlight three main ideas.  I have hinted at or established them already in this chapter, but I want to collect them in one place so I can refer back to them regularly.

1.  After your first birth, you tried to create your own identity, and looked to all kinds of sources other than God for input on who you should be and what you should do.  Since you were created in God’s image, looking for your identity someplace other than God is sin and rebellion.  Being born again starts with turning back to God for answers to questions of who we are.

2.  A key part of being born again is living in community with God and with other people.  This is why Jesus said that the two most important commandments were to love God and to love others as yourself.  The dead heart cannot do either of those things, but the reborn heart can, which is why it is so important to practice them.

3.  God’s ultimate goal for you is to conform you to the image of his son (Romans 8:29); that is, to continually make you more like him.  Being born again initiates this process, and being born again is also the lifelong, day to day process by which God reveals your imperfections and then works them out of you so that you more closely resemble him.

Let me preface this book by saying that I don’t mean to sound as if I have this all figured out yet.  The reason I sound so strident at times is that I’m talking to myself as much as I’m talking to you.  I’m saying these things, writing these things, so that I myself can undergo the transformation that I’m talking about, because I see how beautiful it is to be reborn, and it’s something I want very much for myself.  I’m not trying to lecture you; I’m trying to help all of us be conformed to the image of Christ.

Chapter 1.5: What chu talkin’ bout?

The meaning of rebirth, identity, the Kingdom, etc.

I used some terms in the previous chapter that some Christians will know, other Christians will not, and most non-Christians probably will not, so I think it will probably help us all if I go back and fill in the gaps.

The first of the three points I raised is that all of us, in our brokenness, tried to create our own identity for ourselves.  What do I mean when I say identity?

Your identity is basically all of the aspects of your personality and your life.  It is who you are.  There are a few core elements.  Your actions and the reasons you do them are part of your identity – the most visible part, in fact.  Note I said the reasons as well, because those matter.  You could be nice to people because it’s habit, or you can be nice to people because you genuinely believe it’s important to be nice to people; there’s a big difference.  Your priorities are also part of your identity, as are your values, the assumptions and prejudices that govern how you treat other people, your desires, your goals and dreams, and basically everything that makes you different from every other human on the planet.

From the moment they’re born, everyone on earth, until they learn better, tries to fashion their own identity.  They imitate people who are successful or popular, take cues from movies or magazines or co-workers or pastors or musicians, they build their own system of beliefs and values and assumptions that oftentimes looks very little like the way God wants our identity to look like.  Isaiah 53 says, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray; each of us has turned to our own way.”  That’s what happens when we try to create our own identity.  God has a certain way that he wants our lives to look; in other words, he has an ideal identity prepared for us, but until we hear the gospel of Christ, we rebel against God’s identity and attempt to make our own instead.  I will talk more about God’s ideal identity in the next chapter; for now I am just defining the terms.

The next of those terms is “born again,” or “rebirth.”  Being born again is when you realize that you have messed up your entire life, that the identity you have created for yourself is sinful and miles removed from what God wants out of you.  Along with this realization comes another, namely that you are incapable of fixing things on your own.  God’s standard is simply so high that there is no way to live up to it; you will merely spend the rest of your own life messing up again and again.  At this point, you repent, which is acknowledging that you are a sinful person and telling God that you want no part of your sin anymore, that you want to live differently.  At that moment, God changes something at the very core of you, so that you no longer desire to rebel against him, but desire to follow him instead.  Parts of you will still desire to rebel; these are what the Bible calls “the flesh,” the relics of the old self.  God will spend the rest of your life purifying you from those, so in that way, being born again is both a process and an action.

The third term is “Kingdom of God.”  Jesus said that no one can enter the kingdom unless he is born again, and now that we know what it means to be born again, we get to figure out what we’ve just gotten ourselves into.  Simply put, the Bible talks about two kingdoms: the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world.  Your citizenship, which kingdom you belong to, is determined by where you get your identity from.  If your identity comes from God and you are following him – if, that is to say, you have been born again – then you are a part of the kingdom of God.  God is the ruler in your life.  Simple, right?  Everyone who is not a part of the kingdom of God is rebelling against God’s authority, pursuing and creating a different identity, which they are assembling from various influences within the world: the politicians, magazines, and other things that I talked about a minute ago.  The world, and the people and institutions that are a part of the world, are what determines that person’s identity, so he or she is a member of the kingdom of the world.  Being born again is the way you change citizenship.  Why do you want to be a part of the kingdom of God?  First, it’s so that you can enjoy the identity that God made for you during this lifetime.  Second, it’s so that you can spend get an eternal reward from God at the end of your life, and spend the rest of eternity in his presence (chapter seven will deal extensively with this).  Without God as the ruling authority in your life, you’re separated from your true identity and you’ve got no hope of an eternal reward.

Even though being born again is both a single moment in time and also a lifelong process, that single moment, when you repent from your rebellion and accept God’s authority in your life, is when you enter the kingdom of God.  That is when you get that guarantee from Philippians 2, which I talked about last chapter, the guarantee that from that point onward, God has his hand firmly on you and will complete the good work he began in you.

The last of these terms, the most complex by far, is “heart.”  I don’t mean the squishy blood-pumper in your chest.  Your heart, for this purpose, is the place where all your desires, thoughts, emotions, and motivations come from.  The contents of your heart, then, are what determine your identity.  What the heart wants is what you become.  Jesus touches on this same idea in Luke 6 when he says, “Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.”  The things that you say, the things you do, those are all a reflection of what is in your heart.  Proverbs 4 says, “Above all else, guard your heart, because it is the wellspring of life.”  It’s the place where your identity comes from.

It’s significant for our purposes because, like the two kingdoms I talked about, everyone has one of two hearts.  I actually don’t know whether we’re born with a broken heart or whether we break it ourselves.  See, I did say in chapter one that God only makes good things, and I believe that.  I’m not sure he would make an intentionally broken person.  Also, if we’re born without broken hearts and only break them when we rebel against God, then that explains a lot about what happens to children who die before reaching the maturity to understand the gospel.  Paul does say in Romans 7 that there was a time in his life when he was “alive without the law,” but that when the law came, that’s what caused his death because it made him aware of how much he was rebelling.  When in Paul’s life was he alive without the law?  This could probably be a book in itself and I expect to get a lot of questions about it.  Let me just say that I absolutely do not believe that a person is “born good,” born with a basic tendency to do good things, and is only corrupted by an evil world.  I believe that, no matter how good a person’s heart, they will ultimately rebel exactly as Adam and Eve did.

Truthfully, it doesn’t matter all that much, because the moment a person first rebels against God, the heart proves itself to be corrupt.  That person has a rebellious heart, the “heart of stone” or “dead heart” (same thing) I spoke of in the first chapter.  Nothing good comes from this heart.  It’s predisposed toward sin, the same way that lions are predisposed toward eating zebras.  It is in full rebellion against God and does not acknowledge God’s authority nor see the value in the things that he says.  1 Corinthians 1 says, “The way of the cross is folly to those who are perishing” – that is, to those who have not been born again, and still have dead hearts.  Remember, the dead heart embraces the world as the source of what is important.  A person needs the supernatural gift of God’s grace in order to understand the fact that things are not how they are meant to be, and that the problem is inside a person, in their heart.  Upon being born again, God performs spiritual heart surgery.  He removes your stone heart, and all the things that go along with the old heart: the messed-up priorities, the skewed desires, the inaccurate observations about life, the prejudices, and a whole host of others.  In its place, he installs a new heart, with accurate priorities (God in first place), wholesome desires (to follow him and become more like him), and the like.  This is why I said, in the first chapter, that the old thought patterns and methods of behavior have absolutely no place in the new heart.  You don’t think like that anymore.  Your desires aren’t that way anymore.  If your words and actions are really the overflow of your heart, then the overflow of a new, reborn heart should be pure, loving words and righteous actions.  Obviously it’s a lot easier to say this than it is to do it, but we’ll spend a lot of time beginning in chapter four taking a look at the things that keep holding us back, and then about how to continue the process of being born again.

Chapter 2: Love, Identity, and Purpose

The way God sees rebirth; or, “Why does God love me?”

God loves you.

How many times have you heard that phrase?  More importantly, have you ever wondered why he does that?  Why he loved you before you were born and why, even after the thousands or millions of times you have messed up, he stubbornly refuses to stop?

I’ll confess that I have a very hard time believing that sometimes.  I’m not saying that it’s untrue, just that it’s so counterintuitive that it defies comprehension.  On the surface of things, I feel like I haven’t given God a whole lot to be proud of me for.  Rather the opposite, I’ve given him dozens of things daily that ought to make him shake his head and turn his back on me.  Why is his love so strong and steadfast?

If you came expecting a complex and nuanced theological dissertation, you’re about to be disappointed, because the answer is simple.  God loves you because he made you.

Back the bus up to Genesis 1 again, and re-read what’s written there.  God made everything, and he saw that it was good.  Then he made man and woman, and he saw that they were good.  This is Adam and Eve we’re talking about, don’t forget.  God knew full well that they were going to fail him, rebel against him, and in the process eternally corrupt the entirety of his creation, not just humanity but the very earth and environment as well (see the tail end of Genesis 3).  He knew it all, but still, he loved Adam and Eve, and he considered them good.  Not good in the sense of morally upright, you understand, since they would quickly demonstrate that they were not that.  He meant good in the sense of pleasing, appealing, something that he took pride in.  He loved them.

That should be great comfort to each of us as well.  I’m including myself in this, more so than in any other chapter in the book, because this is something I have such difficulty with.

God’s Love: the Unstoppable Force

I have a few things to say before I come back to Adam and Eve.  David, in the Psalms, repeatedly refers to God’s love as “unfailing.”  This is a beautiful word, for a couple of reasons.  First, God’s love is not something that I have to earn; it’s a totally free gift.  It’s not given to me because I deserve it; in fact, there is nothing I could ever do to deserve his love.  What could I possibly do that would impress the God who made the universe?  His hand created galaxies, stars, planets, and everything on earth.  Compared to that, you and I have nothing.  I suppose that’s why it’s such a good thing that we don’t have to earn his love!

Second, just as there was nothing we could do to earn it, there’s nothing we could ever do to lose it.  It’s unfailing, after all.  It’s with us when we’re born, it’s with us when we first rebel against God, it’s with us when we’re running away from him as fast as we can, and it’s with us at the very depth of our sin and depravity.  It never, never goes away, and it never lessens in strength.  Your sin is not stronger than God’s love.  No matter what you do, no matter how badly you mess up, God’s love is still bigger and stronger.  His love is unfailing.

That’s the basic message I’m trying to get through to you.  If God’s love depended on you living the right way or following all the rules, then he would take it away the instant you did something wrong.  Would that even be love at all, if it was conditional on people jumping through hoops?  No, God’s love is not because of you or the things you do.  It’s because of God, and because God made you.  That’s something nobody can ever take away from you.  You will always be a creation of God, and you will always be a recipient of his incredible, powerful, earthshattering, unfailing love.

God also loves you because he left his fingerprints on you, metaphorically speaking.  Genesis 1 says, “In the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.”  Some debate exists as to what his “image of God” means, and if you consult a few Bible commentaries, you’ll probably get several different answers.  Let me just say the two things that nobody disagrees with.  First, the image of God means that humans are unique among creation.  We are the only ones with a soul, no matter what PETA might try to convince you.  We are the only things in all of creation that are capable of having a relationship with God.  Second, if we are created in God’s image, that means that our identity is linked to his identity.  We are not independent creatures; rather, we are reflections (however distorted) of the God who created us.  We were meant to be like him; we were meant to resemble him.  Let me clarify that last part very carefully.  I’m not saying that we were meant to be mini-deities.  I am saying that we are supposed to resemble him.  He is loving; we are to be loving.  He is merciful; we are to be merciful.  He is just; we are to be just.  People ought to be able to look at God’s children and see a picture of what God is like.  This is what I’m talking about when I say that our identity comes from God.

So, God loves you because he created you, and because you are his image bearer.  “But Jim,” you might say, “I’m not very loving, I’m definitely not merciful, and I’m only just in that I watch Law and Order twelve times a week.  If I’m that far from who I’m supposed to be, surely God must dislike me?”

You’re falling back into that old trap again.  God’s love does not depend on you!  You don’t have to jump through hoops or act right in order to earn it.  It’s already yours, because God’s love is unfailing!  It won’t ever lessen or go away, no matter what you do, no matter how badly you fail, no matter how far from God you stray.

He loves you, with an unfailing love, because you are his creation and you are his image bearer.  Those things are at the core of your identity.  That’s why the most important part of life, as far as he is concerned, is for you to be in a relationship with him, to be loving him and talking to him.  He craves a relationship with you, because he loves you, and you ought to crave a relationship with him too, because your identity comes from him and apart from him you will never be who you were meant to be.

The Beauty of God’s Jealousy

Oprah Winfrey once said that, although she grew up a Christian, she began to have doubts when she encountered a Bible verse about God being a jealous God.  She said that she could never worship a God who was jealous.  (Deuteronomy 5, in the New Living Translation specifically, is where you’ll find God saying, “I am a jealous God, and I will not share your affections with any other God.”)  Maybe you’ve heard someone say something like what Oprah said.  I want to show you that God’s jealousy is one of the most amazing and beautiful things about him.

When I was younger, somewhere between nine and twelve, I had a bike.  It was red, not quite a mountain bike but stouter than a street bike, and I rode all over the place on it.  If anyone else wanted to ride it, I got antsy.  I didn’t want anyone else touching my bike.  They might move the seat, or twist the grips, or accidentally break it, whatever.  It was my bike.  I wanted it all for myself.  We teach children that having this attitude toward possessions is a bad thing, because it’s nice to share.

I didn’t make my bike; God, however, did create me.  Psalm 139 says he knit me together in my mother’s womb; he made me from scratch like the world’s most awesome biscuits.  Now, he’s looking down at me, metaphorically since he does not actually have eyes, and imagine what he sees.

He sees me driving 25 miles to church (it’s worth the drive), past billboards telling me that I will be fulfilled or that women will love me if I drink Red Bull or Coors Light; past at least one XXX Adult Video shop, which promises to make my wildest dreams come true; past Best Buy, which tells me I will be the most popular man on the block if I have the largest TV.  Everywhere I go, I am assaulted by people, stores, and products that want to shape my identity.  They want to tell me who I am, they want me to think that they’re necessary for my life.  God sees this…and he is jealous.

He knows that those other people don’t really love me; they just want my money.  God, on the other hand, loves me greatly with an unfailing love.  God knows that the approval of people is weak and fleeting, but his own approval is strong and eternal.  Most of all, he knows that those other people can never truly fulfill me.  God, though, offers me an incredible fulfillment – and he is the only, only thing on earth or in heaven that is capable of fulfilling me in that way!  He is the only one who is capable of telling me who I really am!  Since he loves me so much, he does not want me to settle for less than the best.  He doesn’t want me to have weak, temporary approval, or conditional love, or to chase something that won’t really fulfill me.  He wants to give me full life, abundant life, and love of a quantity and quality so mindblowing that I still cannot wrap my mind around it.  If God were not jealous, if he did not want you fully for himself, he would be saying that he’s content to have you settle for less than being truly satisfied.  He could shrug his shoulders and say, “Well, that child’s not really happy with life, but eh, close enough.”  But he doesn’t do that, does he?  He’s a jealous God, and he wants you totally for himself!  His love, his identity, his fulfillment are the only things that will make you complete.

Adam and Eve: The Rest of the Story

Adam and Eve’s story takes an interesting twist in Genesis 3, when they make their decision to rebel against God.  This whole chapter is talking identity, and how we get our identity from God.  That’s why it’s very interesting to see the tactic that Satan takes when he attempts to deceive Adam and Eve.  “God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will become like God, knowing good and evil” (emphasis added).  He attacked their identity!  He said, “Who cares how God made you.  You can become something else!”  The really heartbreaking part of this exchange is the phrase, “like God.”  I just talked about how God’s goal for all of us is to make us like him, to conform us to the image of his son.  God’s plan really is for us to be like him!  Satan, however, revealing his nature as “the great deceiver,” promised Adam and Eve that he could make them like God, and then led them in the exact opposite direction.  But I want you to catch that very important observation.  The one lie that led to the fall of humanity was an attack on Adam and Eve’s identity.  Your identity, and mine, comes from God.  We are God’s children, designed to be in a relationship with God and to become more like God.

Now, since we’re talking about God’s love, it may seem an odd choice to continue talking about what happens after the fall, because on the surface, God doesn’t seem very loving with what he does next.  After that first rebellion, after Adam and Eve first abandoned their God-given identities in favor of something else, God booted them out of this perfect Garden of Eden, with little more than what they were carrying…oh, and he put curses on them too.  Well, yikes.  If you struggle with the idea that God loves you all the time, this probably didn’t help you very much.

However, I want you to look deeper.  Stay in Genesis 3, right before God kicks them out of the garden, and you’ll see that God actually made clothes out of animal skin for Adam and Eve.  They were naked, and they were ashamed of being naked – even though they shouldn’t have been ashamed, because naked is the way God made them.  But God came down to their level anyway, had compassion on their shame, and killed an animal (it doesn’t say which kind) so that they could cover themselves.  If you feel like God’s love for you stops when you mess up, consider that even as he was in the process of meting out consequences for their rebellion, God still took time to pour his love out on his children.

Further, God didn’t desert Adam and Eve, but continued to be their God and continued to love them.  A peek at the end of Genesis 4 shows that, after one of Adam’s sons killed the other, Adam had faith that God will give him another son.  God stuck with Adam and Eve.  Don’t get me wrong, here.  The consequences of their rebellion were absolutely seismic.  Their rebellion gave all of humanity broken hearts and an inclination toward our own rebellion.  In Romans 5, Paul says, “Through the sin of the one, death reigned in the many.”  Adam and Eve’s sin, and the resulting corruption of the fall of the entire human species, is the reason that God had to come to earth in the form of a man and be crucified in order to pay for our transgressions.  You may have done some awful stuff in your life, but you’ve never caused the demise of all of humanity.  Yet despite the incredible magnitude of what Adam and Eve had done, despite the fact that it would later cost Jesus his life, God still loved them faithfully, and never, ever deserted them.  That’s unfailing love in action.  You can rest in the promise that the same kind of unfailing love is aimed at you.

Have I mentioned God’s love is unfailing?

I’m not a big movie person.  My attention span is usually way too short to pay attention to anything for more than an hour or so.  However, I do really like the movie Heat, made in 1995 and starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.  There’s an unbelievable amount of language in it, so I only watch it on TV, but I watch it every single time I can find it on.  I happened to be watching it yesterday, and caught a conversation that I had never heard before.

Breedan: Why you sticking with me, Lillian?  Why?

Lillian: Cause I’m proud of you.  Proud you my man.

Breedan: (long pause) Proud of me?  What you proud of me for?

Lillian: (smiles) Come on home.  (she puts her arm around his waist and they rise)

That conversation takes place between God and me daily.  It makes no sense whatsoever to me that I keep failing God and he keeps coming back with the same steadfast, unfailing, unstoppable kind of love.  I feel like it needs to be one or the other: either I need to give God something to be proud of me for, or he needs to stop loving me.  But that’s not how his love works.  It’s not dependent on me, on the things I do.  I get it because I am God’s child, because I bear his image, simply because I exist.

The miraculous thing about being born again is that it’s available to absolutely everyone.  No matter who you are, no matter what you’ve done, God’s offer of salvation through Christ is available to every last man, woman, and child.  Your past actions cannot disqualify you; God’s love does not depend on you, it is a free gift to you because you are his child and you bear his image.  Because you are his child and bear his image, he wants you to be wholly his.  But there’s only one way for that to happen.  You have to turn your back on the identity you created for yourself and embrace the identity that God has in store for you.  Don’t worry about whether you can do it; God promises you that he will take care of that.  Don’t worry about whether you have too much baggage to get rid of; God is big enough.  Don’t worry about anything, actually.  You know what you have to do.  If there has never been a time in your life when you have repented and given control of your life over to God, take care of that right now.  If you have, and if you’re willing to go deeper down the rabbit hole, read on.

Chapter 3: The Myth of the Good Person

Why you need to be born again

One of the most destructive myths present in the world today is the myth that, if you live your life as a good person, you will go to heaven.  Not only is it untrue, it’s a very unappealing philosophy.  Actually, the first untruth is the idea that Christians go “to heaven.”  They don’t.  Check Revelation 21 and 22 and you will see that our eternal resting place is actually on a new, recreated earth.  At the end of everything, God is going to destroy this creation, and make everything totally new and perfect the way it was meant to be, with no sin and no Satan to corrupt things.  We are going to spend eternity in community with God and other believers, in a huge city on a new earth, not on some cloud lazily strumming a harp.  Just read the Bible and you’ll see what I mean.  When I speak of eternity here, I’m going to use the neutral phrase “eternal reward,” rather than “new earth,” just to keep things simple.

I say that the “good person” myth is untrue because of the drastic difference between the stone heart and the new heart.  The stone heart is simply not capable of doing good on its own.  It is fundamentally selfish.  Sociologists and animal researchers both say that self-preservation is the strongest instinct in humans or in any animal.  That’s the dead stone heart in action: “I have to look after me!”  That’s just the way things are.  A dead heart is not capable of living any differently – and is certainly not capable of doing more good than bad.  At times during this section, I will be speaking as if I still had a dead heart, since most of the people who believe in this “good person” hypothesis have not been born again.  The point of all this is to show why it’s so necessary to be born again – why you cannot simply do enough on your own to be deserving of an eternal reward, and why your salvation must begin with a supernatural intervention at the heart level.

We talked in the last chapter about the fact that you do not have to earn God’s love or approval.  They’re free gifts that he gives to you because he created you and because you bear his image.  This philosophy that I’m talking about, that you must be a “good person” in order to get an eternal reward, is all about trying to earn God’s favor.  By the end of this chapter, I hope that you will be incredibly glad that you don’t have to try and earn God’s favor, and I also hope you will realize how utterly impossible it is to do so!

Since I said that the “good person” myth is both untrue and unappealing, let me highlight two reasons why this is true.  There are actually a lot more; this chapter was originally the longest in the book, because the “good person” myth is so pervasive and so ridiculously off-base that I spent a lot of time poking holes in it.  In the interest of brevity, here are the two biggest problems with it.

1.  You will commit an absurdly high number of sins during your lifetime.  I figured out once that if I sinned ten times a day – and we’re talking words, deeds, and thoughts – and I live an average human lifespan of 77 years, I will sin 308,000 times in my lifetime.  And that’s if, if, I can limit myself to only ten a day!  I drove an hour and a half from one side of Dallas to the other tonight, and I’m pretty sure I sinned more than ten times on that drive alone!  What exactly would I have to do in order to still be considered a “good person” after committing that many sins?  How many good deeds would I have to do in order to offset the mean things I thought about my fellow drivers, the times I made them run off the road when they tried to merge at the last second (it might be sinful, but boy, is it ever satisfying!), the times I willfully and selfishly ignored the speed limit, tailgated a driver to get him to actually do the speed limit instead of 10 below it, and all the other things I did?  Worse still, how could I ever possibly do that many good deeds if I was still in possession of a stone heart, which was still broken and compelling me to sin even more?  How could I ever accumulate a positive balance of good when every day I find more and more excuses to sin?

You would think that somewhere along the line, perhaps around sin number 100,000 or so, you lose the right to think of yourself as a good person.

It ignores God’s holiness.  In other words, it assumes that God will let you get away with anything, as long as you’re “basically a good person” or do enough deeds to cover up your major goofs.

Actually, that’s probably the worst flaw with this idea.  It reduces God from a person, with whom you’re supposed to have a relationship, to barely more than an accountant, tallying up your good deeds versus your bad, and digging out his actuarial tables to tell you whether you were “good enough” to make it (but, in a strange twist of fate, he never actually defines “good person” or give you any way to tell whether you are one or not!).  Does this God even have a purpose apart from being a great galactic judge?  Does he help you at all, or does he just wait to bust you when you goof up?  And do you really want to spend eternity with a God like that?

God’s Holiness

Exodus 34 says that God will by no means leave sin unpunished.  One glance back at the Adam and Eve story from the last chapter ought to reinforce this fact.  After all, he kind of has no choice in the matter; if he didn’t punish sin, he wouldn’t be just and he wouldn’t be holy, and there is no reason to worship a God who’s not just or holy.  Yes, you heard me right.  Let’s examine the various times in the Bible when people have seen God, and let’s start with Isaiah’s vision in Isaiah 6.  Do you remember what the angels around the throne were saying?  “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty!  The whole earth is full of his glory!”  Do you hear that?  Holy, glorious, almighty.  Let’s also take a look at the first chapter of Revelation, where John – who was no stranger to Jesus, having been one of Jesus’ twelve apostles, and more than that, the “disciple whom Jesus loved” – saw the risen Christ in his glorified body, and “fell on my face as if dead.”  Did he do that because Jesus was just so loving?  Not a chance; he was blown away by the glory and majesty of the resurrected Christ.  Any cursory reading of the Bible will show that his holiness is the thing about him that really inspires awe.

What does God’s holiness mean in experiential terms?  Let me ask you to imagine something with me.  Let’s say you’re asked to enter a small room with three of the finalists in the World’s Strongest Man competition.  You have to strip down to your underwear, let them look at your body, and they will tell you just what kind of physical shape they think you’re in.  How humbling, even humiliating, would it be to have three of the most ripped guys on the planet looking critically at that mess you call a body?  No matter how big your biceps are, they’ll be too small.  No matter how much you tuck in your stomach, it’ll still look flabby next to theirs.  They’re just in such ridiculously good shape that you don’t stand a prayer of comparing to them.

That’s a very poor way to illustrate God’s holiness.  See, if you stood in a room with God, a perfectly and infinitely holy God, and you tried to compare your good deeds to his perfect holiness, you would end up feeling so inadequate that you would literally fall flat on your face.  The World’s Strongest Men, ripped as they might be, aren’t even infinite in physical perfection; they’re just so far above you that the difference is all you can think about.  God, on the other hand, is infinite in holiness, so far above you that the difference is all you could notice.  You could not exist in God’s presence without being blown away, intimidated, awed, and despairing at the difference between his holiness and your miserable failure of a life.  Do you really have the hubris to think that you could saunter up to an infinitely holy God and tell him that you’ve earned an eternal reward because you were such a good person?  His laughter would shatter your eardrums.

The only chance you could possibly stand is if you can stand on level ground with him in terms of holiness.  Now how on earth could you possibly compare with God’s holiness?  Could you do enough good deeds to achieve perfect holiness?  Of course not; no matter how much good you did, you would still have sin polluting your holiness, and it only takes one drop of sin to pollute an ocean of holy.  Something has to happen to your sin, or else you can never be considered holy.

Holiness, Jesus, and You

This is where Jesus Christ enters the picture.  When you repent from your sin and make God the ruler in your life, when you enter the kingdom of heaven, Christ becomes your savior.  He lived a life without a single sin, without ever rebelling against God one time, yet he allowed himself to die a sacrificial death anyway, so that he could take the punishment for your sin and mine on himself.  Romans 3 says that the wages of sin is death.  I just quoted Exodus 31: God cannot leave sin unpunished.  He can’t simply forget about your sins or vacuum them into a void; he must punish them, or else justice is not done.  So there are only two options.  The first one is that you die as a member of the kingdom of the world, and the punishment is placed on you, resulting in God finding you guilty for your sin and you spending an eternity exiled from his presence, since sin cannot exist in proximity to his holiness.  The second option is that you repent from your sin and make Christ your savior.  When you do this, God removes the guilt for all of your sin from you, and makes Jesus’ sacrificial death count for you.  The punishment moves from you to Christ on the cross.

Catch this again.  When you make Christ your savior, all of your sins are taken away from you – completely, totally, not a part of your identity anymore, not associated with you in any way.  They are done, paid for, removed from you.  This is a crucial but under-taught Biblical doctrine called expiation.

Now, if God removes all your sins from you, then you are not sinful anymore.  What do you call a person who is not sinful?  Holy!  When God removes your sin from you and places it on Christ, he also gives you credit for the perfect life that Jesus lived.  This is another doctrine called “imputation of righteousness.”  Evidence is found in Romans 5, which says, “by the obedience of the one (Jesus), the many were made righteous.”  Further proof is found in 2 Corinthians 5, which says, “God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of Christ.”  That second passage teaches both imputation and expiation.  Christ becomes your sin – it’s taken off of you and put onto him.  In exchange, you become, become, Christ’s righteousness.  You are no longer a sinner at all.  You are holy!

God’s Holiness: Great, now it’s terrifying, too

By the way, let me get something else out of the way.  I’m not just against the belief that God lets good people into heaven.  I’m against the belief that good people even exist.  I asked this question earlier, but I think it’s worth repeating.  If you commit 308,000 sins during your lifetime, at what point do you forfeit the right to think of yourself as a good person?

A good person cannot come from a corrupt heart.  If everyone in the world has a sinful and corrupt heart, that means there is not a single good person in the world.  You and I were born into a world full of broken hearts, and we broke our own hearts by rebelling against God and accepting what this world taught us about our identity, about how to interact with each other, what our priorities ought to be.  Every last one of us is looking in a fun-house mirror, believing wholeheartedly that it represents an accurate picture of reality, up until Jesus comes crashing in and tells you that he has the true picture of what life really looks like, if you’re willing to let him shatter your mirror and replace it with one that actually does what it’s supposed to do.

Now let’s come back to the topic of God’s holiness.  I love talking about it, because it’s just so incredible.  The most impressive thing about it is the way the human mind is totally incapable of even handling it.  The Revelation 1 account is my favorite, because as I said a minute ago, it’s written by John, who knew Jesus probably better than anyone else on earth.  Yet even he could do nothing except fall facedown, “as if dead.”  That’s some serious power!  I also like the story of Jesus’ birth as told in Luke 2, specifically this part: “An angel of the Lord appeared to the shepherds, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.”  What an impact.  If you’re in the mood to be amused and awed, flip through the Bible to all the times when God or his angels appeared to people who wigged out and wet their pants.  Also, think about the implications of this.  If angels, who are not even the fullness of God but merely his messengers, have that kind of effect on people, how much more would standing before a holy God dismay and terrify a person?  Perhaps this explains why God says, in Exodus 33, “No one can see my face and live.”

If you’ve ever been through a tornado, a hurricane, an earthquake, or anything comparable, you know a little of what it would be like to face God’s holiness, that feeling of encountering something so much more powerful than you that all you can do is get in the fetal position and wait for the terror to pass.  A person who thinks that he can go through life without addressing his own sin, then stand in front of an infinitely holy God and try to argue or reason his way into heaven, has absolutely no idea what holiness, sin, and “good” even mean.

This is also what gives rise to the exclusive truth claims of Christianity.  God is infinitely holy, and he has said that he will punish all sin.  So, the only way to obtain an eternal reward is to be completely without sin.  Since everyone sins, no one can obtain an eternal reward unless the sin that he accumulates is somehow removed from him.  If you remember from a few pages ago, we said that this is exactly what happens to you when you are born again; God removes your sin from you and places it on Christ, causing his death to act as the punishment for your sin.  That’s why no other religion can reconcile you to God.  They simply don’t provide any way of taking care of your sin.  Jesus Christ is an integral part of being born again, and if “No one can enter the kingdom unless he is born again,” there can be no entering the kingdom, no eternal reward, without Jesus Christ.

God’s holiness is what separates us from him.  So what if God is loving; I can be loving sometimes.  So what if he’s just; I can be just sometimes.  But I can’t ever claim that I am holy sometimes, can I?  That is exclusively God’s domain.  If our rebellion really does separate us from him, then what part of him does it separate us from?

Not from his love.  You will remember in the last chapter that I talked about God’s love being “unfailing.”  This means that his love is not something you do, or ever could, earn, and that nothing you do could ever make it go away.  It’s permanent, it’s strong, it’s unstoppable…it’s unfailing.

However, his holiness is also unfailing, as is his justice.  Do you remember back in chapter one, where I said that there were certain things God can’t do?  I’ll discuss those now, since they have to do with God’s holiness.

What God Cannot Do

I want you to consider the idea that you cannot love something without hating its opposite.  If you love truth, you have to hate dishonesty.  If you love peace, you have to hate war.  If you love love, then you have to hate hatred.  There isn’t room for both in your worldview.  You cannot, for example, love truth but tolerate lying.  If that’s the case, your “love” is not love at all, but merely a preference for one over the other, and you can exercise that preference or not depending on what is expedient at the time.  Are you with me so far?  If you love something, truly love it, then you must hate its opposite.  You must hate those things that get in the way of, inhibit, or prevent that which you love.

But wait a second.  Most of us have grown up acquainted with the idea, “God is love.”  He can’t hate things, can he?  Apparently he can, according to Proverbs 6:16, which says, “There are six things the Lord hates.”  There’s not a lot of wiggle room in that statement, no way to explain away or soften the language.  It pretty clearly says “hate.”  So what exactly does the Lord hate?

At one point during Jesus’ ministry, the Pharisees, hoping to catch him with a trick question, asked, “What is the greatest commandment in the Law?”  (This is in Matthew 22.)  Jesus replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.  And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Do you remember back in chapter one when I listed the three main points of this book?  One of them was, “A key part of being born again is living in community with God and with other people.”  This is where I got that from.  And, if God loves when we love him or love each other, he must hate anything that gets in the way of us doing those things.  Let me just focus on the “each other” part for now.  What kinds of things get in the way of that aspect of love?  Coincidentally, that’s exactly what the passage in Proverbs 6 addresses!  “There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him.”  You may notice that the Bible uses this method periodically, of saying “There are x number of things, even x+1 things.”  When it does that, the last thing that is listed, the “+1,” is intended to be a summary of the previous ones.  I’ll explain what that means when I get there, but I didn’t want you to check out before we really got started.

So, six things that God hates.  “Haughty eyes” is the first.  Haughtiness is arrogance, looking down on someone else, so the sin he is talking about here is pride.  God hates pride.  Looking down on someone else is pretty unloving.  It’s you elevating yourself, patting yourself on the back, at someone else’s expense.  Can you see how pride is the opposite of “loving your neighbor,” like Jesus commanded?  Do you understand that God hates pride because it is the opposite of loving your neighbor?  It’s actually one of several opposites, as we’re about to see.

“A lying tongue” is the second.  God hates lying for two reasons.  The first reason is internal; if you lie to or about someone, that shows that in your heart you don’t value them enough to honor them with the truth.  Isn’t that unloving?  The second reason is that lying breaks community.  Were you ever the victim of a rumor at school or in the workplace?  Do you remember how it felt when some people believed that the lie was true and began to treat you differently because of it?  Do you remember what happened when you found out who started the lie, and the strain that put on your relationship with the person?  Lies destroy people’s ability to live in peace with each other.  Since God values when people love each other, he hates lying, because it gets in the way of that love.

“Hands that shed innocent blood” is the third thing God hates.  I think this one speaks for itself, don’t you?  What must happen inside a person’s heart in order to convince them that they should kill someone?  We’re probably talking hatred, bitterness, a failure to forgive, or any number of things.  The killing itself, which God obviously hates, is only the culmination of many more things that have been festering inside the person for a longer time.  You’ll note that all of those things are unloving, and they culminate in an action that is unloving in the extreme.  Jesus was actually the one who said something along these lines, toward the end of his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, when he said, slightly paraphrased, “The Law told you not to murder to someone, but I’m telling you that if you even hate a person, it’s as if you’ve already murdered them in your heart.”  Why?  Because having that hate in your heart gets in the way of you loving that person, and God loves love and hates hate.

The next three are, “a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil,” and “a false witness who breathes out lies.”  Isn’t it interesting that, given the opportunity to list six things he hates, God chose lying twice?

You’ll recall that in a list of “six, even seven” things, the seventh thing acts as a summary of the previous six.  The seventh here is, “one who sows discord among brothers.”  In other words, God hates anything that is the opposite of love, anything that acts as a barrier to a person feeling love or expressing love toward someone else.

Now, as I said earlier, if you truly hate something, you can’t tolerate it, otherwise your love is merely a preference.  Is there any one of us who can truthfully claim that we have never been arrogant or prideful, never lied, and never hated someone?  If God hates those things so much, then he cannot tolerate them.  He still loves a person in spite of those things, but because he cannot tolerate this arrogant, lying, hateful nature that is inside their heart, the relationship between the two of them is fractured.  If this person were to live a “good life” and come up for eternal judgment, God is utterly unable to say, “Well, you were really arrogant and hateful and you lied a lot, but I guess I can tolerate that.  Come on in.”  He cannot tolerate it!  As long as there is sin or imperfection in a person’s heart, God is not capable of enduring their presence.  There is a permanent, insurmountable gap as long as our hearts are full of things that God cannot stand.  That’s why this doctrine of expiation, of God removing all of your sin completely from you and punishing Christ for it instead, is so crucial.

This is also why God removes our old heart of stone and replaces it with a new heart of flesh.  It’s so that every single part of you, even your formerly twisted heart, will be completely pure and acceptable to him.  He takes out the corrupt, distorted fun-house mirror of a heart and replaces it with one that can love purely, understand right and wrong accurately, relate to him, and most importantly, crave doing good.  I see that this is important to understand for two reasons.  First, now that you no longer carry the guilt for your sin, and now that you no longer have a corrupt heart that is manufacturing sin 24/7, you and God can communicate.  Christ has bridged the formerly insurmountable gap between the two of you; God’s holiness is no longer a source of terror and panic for you, but something that you can praise.  Second, once you are saved, you can trust your heart.  You will struggle and you will stumble, but the heart that God has given you is good.  There is nothing about you anymore that keeps God at arm’s length.  He loves you, he likes you, he is proud of you, he cares for you, and since all your sin is taken care of and your heart is pure, he considers you holy and calls you one of his own children.  I feel like I should put about fifteen exclamation marks here to show the importance of what just happened!

Just Two Options

All of this is a little harder to understand here on earth, where many people would consider themselves “good,” in the same way most people would call themselves “good drivers,” and we know how untrue that is.  People tend to be shameless self-promoters, and possess an amazing ability to emphasize the good in themselves while minimizing or negating the bad.  In fact, the inability to correctly define or perceive good is one of the great failings of the dead heart, and something that I’ll discuss in a lot more detail next chapter.  I think though, given the chance to stand in the presence of the God who embodies goodness, love, holiness, and perfection, each one of us will be overcome by a sense of how woefully short we have fallen.  If we are saved, our hearts will explode with gratefulness to Christ for the reconciliation that he has accomplished, knowing that God’s wrath has been removed from us.  If we are not saved, desperate terror will be the only possible reaction, because we know that we are about to drink from the firehose of God’s wrath and there is not a thing we can do about it.  All of this, and much more, conspires to destroy the myth of the good person.

It gets easier when you realize that there are no good people or bad people as far as God is concerned.  There are merely sinful people and holy people.  That is the only distinction he observes.  He is a loving God, which is why he never deserts people and never gives up on people in spite of their sin, but this does not mean that he must let them get away with whatever behavior they want as long as they end up with a positive “good” balance.  On the contrary, his holiness and justice demand that all sin must be punished, either by the sinner’s eternal exile from God’s presence or by the sacrificial death of Christ.  There is no middle ground; there is no backdoor into heaven.  Either you are sinless and holy, or you are sinful.

There’s just something wrong with the belief that a broken person with a fun-house mirror for a heart can work his way into heaven.  It reminds me of a Mythbusters episode where the two scientists, Adam and Jamie, were testing the myth that a blind person can drive a car if given good enough directions by a passenger in the car.  During the first test, the blind guy did pretty well.  Jamie sat in the back seat and gave him very clear directions, and the driver avoided all the obstacles and even parked the car in the driveway at the end.  However, for the second test, someone had the bright idea of making Jamie give directions while drunk.  This test was a lot more comical; Jamie, who was doing his best despite a blood-alcohol content that would have made a horse pass out, was unable to give directions accurately enough or quickly enough.  The blind guy did his best to compensate, but the car still wobbled all over the road like…well, like a drunk guy was advising a blind guy.  That was basically us, pre-salvation.  We were blind; we didn’t know what we had to do, and we didn’t know how to do it.  The only people who were giving us directions were just as impaired as we were, and the directions they gave us were terrible.  “Look out for number one, don’t take crap off of nobody, you’re the master of your own destiny.” We were all doing the best we could, but we didn’t have eyes to see, so we ended up cruising off in the wrong direction, thinking all along that we were doing pretty well and that we should get some kind of reward for our excellent driving.  Without Christ, a person doesn’t know how to live, and the only advice they get is from people who are just as blind and just as impaired.  Such a person might try the best that he can, but he simply doesn’t have the ability to succeed as long as he has a broken heart that is constantly leading him in the wrong direction.

This sort of serves as the backstory to explain where I am going with the rest of the book.  Now you understand why you could never impress God on your own strength: you committed an incredible number of sins, and you were saddled with a corrupt heart that kept generating more sins by the hour.  That’s why you needed some solution from outside yourself.  That’s why God has to give you a new heart and has to do something to take care of the guilt from your sins.  It answers why you need to be born again, and it answers how it happens.

There’s real beauty in all this.  If you ever needed proof that God’s love for you is unconditional and unfailing, just think about all the things you’ve done that you’re most ashamed of.  Think back before salvation, when your heart was truly vile.  Some of those things might be so bad that your friends deserted you, or maybe so bad that you could (or did) go to jail if caught for them.  Yet even in the midst of all that, in exactly the same way he stuck with Adam and Eve, God’s love for you was still vibrant and strong, and he was still pursuing you with his grace.  How much more does he love you, how much more is he proud of you now that you are no longer running full-speed in pursuit of sin and depravity, but rather toward him?  How much bigger is the smile on his face when he thinks about how far he has brought you in the last year, or ten years, or fifty years?

There was only one thing you could ever do to earn the favor of God, and that was to stop trying.  You told him you couldn’t handle it anymore, that you wanted to be rid of your sin, and he took it from you.  You told him you needed a savior, and he became your savior.  You told him you wanted him as the Lord of your life, and that’s exactly what he became – not by your efforts, not by anything great or wonderful about you, but solely because of his great love for you.

That’s what makes the Christian message so much more appealing than the belief that good people get to heaven.  Never mind all the logical inconsistencies, the fallacies, and the comical, unsympathetic way that the “good people” philosophy paints God.  It’s simply not an attractive philosophy!  Isn’t it far more wonderful that you were being actively, passionately pursued by the creator of everything that exists?  Isn’t it electrifying to know that, even though he can see all of creation, he chose to see you and draw you to himself?  Isn’t it amazingly liberating to know that your sin is already paid for, your failures are already forgiven, and God himself has guaranteed your eternal destiny?  You don’t have to do a thing, other than tell God the truth, that you can’t do it on your own and need him to save you.  The old hymn says it best: “Oh, how marvelous, how wonderful, is my Savior’s love for me!”

However, the tragedy of sin is not limited to the eternal component.  Next we’ll take a look at all the ways that sin makes earthly life into something far less beautiful than what God had originally designed.

Chapter 4: Sin, the Scourge of the Dead Heart

What Rebirth Saves You From

I think Christians have a hard time making up their minds about the word “sin.”  I know some preachers who love it more than any other word, and other preachers who are so scared of offending people that they don’t ever talk about it.  I certainly don’t want to.  The only reason I do is that we’re talking about being born again; we’re talking about a wholesale change of behavior and thought.  We can only understand that change if we talk about it in terms of the behaviors and thoughts we’re leaving behind.  Why is sin so harmful, anyway, and what are some of the sins that we often commit without realizing that we’re doing them?

Sin is perhaps one of the words I should have included in my definitions earlier in the book, but the basic definition is: anything that keeps you from your God-given identity.  If God’s ideal for you is to love him and love other people wholeheartedly and unconditionally, then anything that prevents you from doing that must be sin, right?

The Ten Commandments and You

Do you think that God enjoys giving rules?  Does he spend his days up in heaven excruciatingly bored, that he has to come up with lists of regulations to give us, knowing full well that we won’t even be able to keep the simplest of them?  Adam and Eve only had one, for crying out loud – “Don’t eat this fruit” – and they still blew it.  So what’s the point of the Ten Commandments?

I want to show you that the Ten Commandments are not the point.  Every place that displays them, every angry Christian who fights for their place in a public courthouse or park, seems to think that the rules are what’s important, that those ten commands are the thing that everyone should know about Christianity.  I think that all of those people should knock it off.  What did Jesus say was the most important commandment?

That’s right.  He said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.”  Isn’t that what we should be fighting to display in the public square?  Why do we want people to think that all we care about is lying, stealing, and making graven images?

In reality, the Ten Commandments are only important to God because they reflect those two most important commandments.  Oddly enough, less than half of the commandments, four of them, deal with how a person interacts with God.  The other six deal with how people are to interact with each other.  This shows that God is very, very interested in relationships, and that there is an incredible undercurrent of relationships in all of Christianity.  I’m going to talk about the way that we were made for relationships, just as soon as I get done with the Ten Commandments.

There are four commandments that deal with God, but I want to zero in on the very first one.  “You shall have no other gods before me.”  Don’t give anything else the place in your life – first place – that belongs to me, he’s saying.  Remember the jealousy thing that I talked about in chapter two?  If something else has first place in your life, then you’re not loving God with your whole heart, and you’re violating the most important commandment.  The other three commandments are similar: don’t make any idols, don’t misuse God’s name, and dedicate one day a week to resting and worshiping.  You see the theme.  Love for God needs to permeate your thoughts (don’t put any other god in first place), your words (don’t misuse his name), and your actions (observe a day of worship and don’t make idols).  If loving God is one of the two most important commandments, anything that gets in the way of you loving God has to be sin.  You’re not going to understand the importance of the Ten Commandments until you understand that their purpose is to point you back to the two most important commandments.

This brings us to the six commandments that deal with how we interact with other people.  There are familiar themes here: don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, don’t murder, honor your parents, don’t covet.  All of these, as well, point straight back to the command to love your neighbor wholeheartedly and unconditionally.  If you lie to someone, it’s because you don’t respect them enough to tell them the truth.  You can try and rationalize it however you want to, but lying to someone is showing disrespect.  Stealing from someone is the same thing; you don’t respect a person enough to let them keep what they own.  You selfishly put yourself and your own desires ahead of a love for your neighbor.  Just like I said in the last paragraph: if loving your neighbor is one of the two most important commandments, then anything that gets in the way of you loving your neighbor must be sin.  Isn’t it funny how, even when people thought God was just assembling a list of rules, he was still teaching his people about love?  In fact, Jesus said the exact same thing.  Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.  And the second command is like it: love your neighbor as yourself.  All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two.”  (Emphasis added.)  It’s right there in Matthew 22:40.  Jesus himself said that all of the law, the thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots in the Old Testament, were for the sole purpose of explaining to people that love, pure unconditional love for God and for every other human, was the most important thing in the universe.

Part of me wonders why God didn’t just come right out and say, all the way back in Exodus, the thing that Jesus ended up saying in Matthew 22.  I mean, he did say, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” in Deuteronomy 6.  He did say “Love your neighbor as yourself” in Leviticus 19.  Why bother with all the long lists of things NOT to do, if the whole point was what people SHOULD do?

Paul gives an answer in Romans 3, when he says, “Through the law we became conscious of sin.”  In other words, when God gave his long lists of rules and regulations, he was just writing a longer version of what I wrote in the previous chapter, demonstrating that there’s no such thing as a “good person” because everyone breaks the rules with great frequency.  In fact, just three verses after the verse I just quoted, Paul says, “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus.”  The fact remains, though, that even in the Old Testament, God’s law was directing people toward the greater law that he would later deliver through Jesus, which was unconditional love for God and everyone else on earth.  Have you ever thought that the Old Testament God seems so concerned with rules while the New Testament God cares about love?  In reality, it’s the same God all along, and you can see now that even the rules were one way of teaching people about love.

Made For Community

It’s so simple that I can’t believe it took me this long to figure it out.  We were

made for community.  When Jesus talks about the two most important commandments, all he’s doing is telling us to live in perfect community with God and with other people.  When God makes his list of things that he hates, he lists things that break community.  In the Ten Commandments, he prohibits things that destroy the community between you and him or between you and other people.  Can it really be that basic?

The short answer is yes.  I have two reasons for saying so.

1.  God is community.  It’s understandable that we have spent four thousand years, from the time the books of Moses were written until now, trying to figure out the Trinity.  God is one God, but he is three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – each of whom is unique, separate and distinct from the others, but in such close community together that they form one God.  That’s some serious community.  I have two younger brothers, and when I was growing up, we couldn’t spend five minutes in the room together without finding something to feud about.  God, on the other hand, has a perfect relationship within himself.  The Father and the Son enjoy perfect love and perfect community, so much so that when the Father had to dispatch the Son to earth in order to die for a sinful humanity, the Son went willingly!  Father to Son, Father to Spirit, Son to Spirit, Spirit to Father – perfect relationships all around.  God is community.  He lives in trinity, tri-unity; it’s the very makeup of his being.

2.  God commands us to that same kind of community. My proof for this comes from John 17.  It’s Jesus’ last words as he is praying in the garden, immediately before his arrest, trial, and crucifixion.  In it, he’s praying for the disciples as they’re about to endure his absence, and he prays this: “That they may be one, as I and the Father are one.”  Whoa!  I’ve just finished ranting about how God enjoys perfect community within himself, and here Jesus is praying that his disciples here on earth will be just as close to each other as the Father and the Son are in heaven.  Would you say that your Christian friendships are that way?  Me neither.

The command continues in 1 Corinthians 12, which talks a lot about the unity that God wants his church to experience.  Paul refers to us as the “body of Christ,” which is a very interesting thought.  Much in the same way that God has multiple “parts” – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – but is only one God, so the global church has millions of “parts” (individual believers) but is one body.  He says, “There should be no division in the body…if one part suffers, every part suffers with it.”  That’s a beautiful picture of the closeness that God wants his people to experience together.  How great would it be to have a church family that would gather around you to lift you up whenever you were upset, provide money when you were short on bills, cook meals when you were injured, call to check on you when you were out of town, and pray for you on a daily basis?  How great an honor would it be to do those things for another believer in the church?  Being a part of a team like that would be an awesome, invigorating feeling, and that’s exactly how God wants things to go.  He wants us, as a global church and as local churches, to be completely and totally unified, with relationships as close as the one the Father has with the Son.  Can I be any clearer in explaining that we were made for community?

Community Lost

The really painful thing is that Paul says all this in the middle of a passage talking about spiritual gifts, things like healing and speaking in other languages, that Christians today fight about.  He talks about unity, then he talks about spiritual gifts for a few short verses, then he goes on to say that if we don’t have love, nothing else that we do matters anything.  Yet somehow, a huge number of believers have taken it upon themselves to ignore the bits about unity and love and instead have huge arguments with each other over the rather piddly issue of what’s in between, the spiritual gifts.  I personally don’t speak in other languages, and Paul doesn’t say that every believer will.  Beyond that, what does it matter?

I say this because it illustrates the whole issue I’m talking about in this chapter, which is sin and how it ruins the community that God created us to enjoy.  Just to review one further time, God loves community.  He created us for community, and he wants us to enjoy deep, personal, intimate relationships with other Christians.  So why on earth isn’t it happening?

I think it’s because Christians on the whole have grossly misrepresented sin for hundreds of years, and as a result, we think of sin as something that other people do.  In doing this, we minimize or negate the effects of sin in our own lives.  We talk about “big” sins like homosexuality, pornography, adultery, and other pet sins that we adopt because we can rant about “those people,” the dead-hearted people, while patting ourselves on the back.

Which of those sins was on the list of things that God hates?  Can you answer me that?  Flip back to last chapter and tell me where God says that he hates homosexuality.  I’m not saying that he doesn’t; Leviticus 18 says he considers it “an abomination,” which is awfully strong language.  I’m just saying that, when it came time for God to assemble a list of the things he hates the most, homosexuality didn’t make the list, nor did drinking or dancing or gambling or whatever you typically think when you’re asked to list behaviors that “bad people” with stone hearts do.

No, the things that God hates are the things that you and I probably do on a pretty regular basis.  The first of the six was pride, haughtiness, looking down on other people.  Have you ever been guilty of having an “us versus them” mentality?  Haven’t you ever thought, “We’re right and they’re wrong”?  Do you belittle or criticize the people who disagree with your political opinions, and when you hear about someone who struggles with a “big” sin, do you breathe a little sigh of relief that you’re not one of those people?  Do you hear about people on Welfare and automatically assume that they should stop using drugs and/or drinking, and just get a job like a normal person?

One of two things is happening in your mind right now.  Some of you are shaking your head and saying, “I’m not prideful.  Not me.  I’m not one of those prideful people.”  Well, congratulations; the moment you said that phrase you became one, so welcome to the club.  Others of you are realizing that you’re incredibly prideful, without ever realizing it or meaning to be.  I place myself among that group.  Do you think I have gotten this far in my book without realizing what a terrible, error-prone wretch of a person I am?  Do you think I am writing this part of the book without being pierced by how woefully short of God’s standard I have fallen?  No, I’m prideful.  I confused religion and politics for the longest time, mocked homosexuals because I didn’t understand compassion, and picked fights with Christians from other denominations over minor quibbles.  I hope you’ve never done things like that, but I guarantee you’re guilty of looking down at people in the past, and I’m fairly sure that quite a few of us still do it now.  I don’t say this to wag my finger; I only do it to demonstrate how widespread this problem of sin is, and to get each one of us into the habit of thinking that sin, this kind of community-breaking sin, is something that we all do. if you’re not prideful, you probably lie (or tell half-truths), hold bitterness or unforgiveness in your heart, scheme against people, gossip, or simply fail to trust people with deep secrets.

I’ve talked about how being born again is both an action and a process, and I will explain this even more later on.  The thing is, undergoing the one-time process, accepting Christ as your savior, does not free your heart from the grip of sin.  It frees you from the guilt for all your sin, past present and future – praise God for that – but you still have all the old habits, thought patterns, behaviors, and instincts wired into the way you act.  Now we all have to undergo the lifelong process, which the Bible refers to as “sanctification,” where God continues to burn off those imperfections in us and replace them with his perfection.  The thing is, he can’t do that until we admit that we still have problems.

We can talk until we’re blue in the face about all the terrible things that the pagans outside the church do, but the simple fact remains that God has placed us in community and commanded us to have relationships as close between ourselves as the one that he has with his son.  We expect lost people to sin; they’re lost, and they have dead hearts, so they have no other choice!  But we’re saved; we supposedly have a new heart, which makes us desire good.  We should know better!  Why do we keep falling so incredibly short of this standard for community?

I want to talk very candidly about a few sins that destroy community.  Just so you know I’m not out to point fingers out you, I’m going to restrict this list to ones that I personally have struggled with in the past or currently do.  It’s a confession, not an accusation – even though you are probably guilty of some of them as well.  I hope you can read this section with an open mind regarding whether or not you do these things.  If God really did create us for community, then becoming aware of the things we do (consciously or not) that break community is the first step in moving toward our God-given identity, right?  Besides, Proverbs does say that wounds from a friend are sweeter than kisses from an enemy.

How We Break Community

Selfishness is a nice, broad way of summing up everything that’s currently wrong with humanity, actually.  I think a great many ills are done by people who simply want things their own way.  The funny thing is, humans kind of come into the earth wired to want things their own way.  Kids steal cookies from the cookie jar not because they aspire to a career of petty theft but because they just plain want a cookie, and that’s as far through it as they think.  Adults are plenty selfish as well.  They form friendships with people they think will be able to do favors for them, to give just one example.  They get into relationships because they’re lonely or because they want sex, not because they truly care about another human being.  They use guilt-trips, anger, manipulation, the silent treatment, or physical violence to get their way or to win arguments.  The idea of “wanting my way” is selfishness to the very core, and I think it happens a lot more than any of us want to admit.

I doubt many people would want to say the phrase, “I am the most important person in my life,” but a lot of them live like it.  If someone else is having a problem, needs some time or money, or just wants a close friendship, many people would do a mental cost-benefit analysis before determining whether to help the person.  Is it worth it to me to give twenty bucks to a friend who can’t pay the electric bill this month?  Do I have one weekend a month to watch the neighbor’s kids so he can take his wife out on a date once in a while?  Look at the way a person allocates his time and money and you’ll see whether he thinks anything is more important than himself.  What do your time and your finances say about you?  Jesus said in Matthew 6, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  In other words, if you don’t think you’re selfish, you’d better be giving generously to your church and to other people who need it.  Otherwise, you’re hoarding your treasure, and if the way you spend your time and treasure is all about you, then you’re selfish.

Let’s go back to something I mentioned a minute ago.  “I want my way” is an unfortunate hallmark of churches a lot of the time.  If you’ve been born again for long, you may have been through or heard of a church splitting, usually over something monumentally stupid.  I actually know of a church that split over the color of the carpet in the new auditorium they were about to build.  Ask some of the older people in your church, or your pastor, and see what kind of stories you can get.  Church people, probably me included, have a terrible habit of mistaking preferences for principles.  Do you catch that distinction?  Just because you want something one way does not mean that everyone who agrees with you is wrong.  If you want traditional worship and someone else wants contemporary, who is in the wrong?  If you want orange carpet and some other guy wants blue, who is wrong?  Those are issues of preference.  Don’t confuse them with principles, the things that are truly important.  Anytime my preference gets in the way of my relationship with someone else, I’m guilty of breaking community, which is sin.

Apathy is one of the most common problems among American believers.  We’ve got it pretty good here; we feel mostly insulated from the worst of the global problems.  Because of that, it seems we have a fairly low threshold for the idea that there are people with real problems who need our help desperately.

I’m talking big problems like hunger, lack of fresh water, poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, alcoholism.  If we really are God’s people here on earth, and God really has said that he wants those people taken care of (see Psalm 146 and Matthew 25), why don’t we care enough to actually do it?

I think the answer is that it’s difficult for me to be brokenhearted every time I see something that’s wrong with the world.  There’s so much wrong, so much pain and frustration and hopelessness out there, that caring about it all requires a seemingly endless supply of emotional energy from me.  I just don’t have the time to solve every problem, the money to finance every solution, or even the mental capacity to know what all is wrong and how to fix it.  So, rather than do what I can, I retreat to the good old standby of apathy.  “I have enough problems in my own life,” I think, “what do I care about starving kids in Africa?”

I would say two things in response to this.  First, God cares about every single person on earth.  He loves them because he made them, remember, even the ones who don’t know him or chose not to follow him.  It grieves him deeply to see his children suffering and experiencing a life less glorious than the one he has made for him.  How much more must it grieve him to see me, with the time and energy to make a difference in even one person’s life, and fritter away the chance?  The second thing is that “I don’t have the time/money to care” is just an excuse.  I touched on it while talking about selfishness.  If helping other people was really a priority, I would build my schedule around it, not give it my leftovers.

And never mind the stereotypical starving kids in Africa.  What about the people in my own church who are having financial problems, relationship issues, or are going through a hard time?  Do I even know who those people are?  Have I made any kind of effort at all to reach out and get to know people on a deeply intimate level, so that they talk to me about the problems they’re facing?  If God wants us to experience real, true community, why isn’t that my first priority?

Apathy is the answer.  We might all try to make excuses, but the fact of the matter is that if we cared enough, we would do something.  The global church has enough money and enough time to provide a foster family for every child who needs one, to feed and clothe every single person who lacks food and clothing, to take care of every widow, to build homes for every homeless person.  What would happen to people’s opinion of the Christian body if hundreds of millions of Christians were doing those things, making a real difference in the world, on a regular basis?

A critical spirit will kill any chance of community.  If you look hard enough, you can find something to dislike about any person, church, or church program.  Have you ever met a person who just can’t stop complaining about their job?  You want to go up to them and say, “Why don’t you just quit already?”  A critical spirit doesn’t come up as much in churches that are doing well, but when things start to go sour, fingers start getting pointed.  I was in one church at the beginning of my seminary, and this church had an awfully hard time keeping members.  For every person that joined, another person would leave.  You’d better believe I had some strong opinions about who was screwing up and what kept pushing those people out the door.  And, I regret to say, I shared those opinions vocally with several people, who were probably influenced by my anger.  Rather than being a force for peace and unity in that church, I was a force for division and criticism.

Oftentimes this one even comes from the best motivations.  Church is important to me, which is why I want it to be the best it can possibly be.  If there’s something that can be improved, some way that we can see more people saved and do a better job of ministering to our church and community, I want to be all over it.  For the people who critique their friends, bosses, or whoever else, it’s often done out of a desire to have a stronger friendship, a smoother work environment, or whatever.  Pinpointing possible avenues of improvement is not a bad thing, under two conditions: first, it must be done with humility; and second, it must be accompanied by constructive solutions for how to improve things.  Criticizing without offering solutions is petty and it destroys community.  Criticizing out of pride, “I know how to do things better than they do,” is an equally sinful mindset.

The need to be “right.”   This is one of my pet peeves, actually.  I’m not sure where along the line we got the idea that it’s necessary to “win” every argument.  It’s almost as if we think that winning an argument validates us and proves our worth.  I have a hard time finding any other explanation for our collective obsession, stone hearts and new hearts alike, for waging and attempting to win epic numbers of arguments.  The ratio of arguments worth fighting to arguments that are stupid and piddly is absurd.  I know this because I argue very well.  It takes me no time at all to find the weak points in someone’s point of view and counter them with facts or a better opinion.  I can win arguments at the drop of a hat.  The thing of it is, what goes through my head when I decide that I have to argue with someone?  What does it say about my heart when I pass judgment on another person’s opinion and decide that I have to combat it?

There are a few things that are absolute truth and worth arguing over.  If someone says that sin is not a big deal or that it’s possible to be saved without Jesus, that’s worth arguing, because those things are absolutely foundational to being reconciled with God and embracing the identity he created you for.  But think about the last ten arguments you had with people close to you, if you even remember what they were about.  I’m guessing most of them were silly things that you really should never have been fighting over.

This one can be very closely related to the critical spirit.  If you’re constantly looking for reasons to disagree with people, you will certainly find them.  You should probably look inside yourself to see if winning all those arguments is a source of pride for you.

Self-reliance.  In the section about apathy, I asked whether I knew any people from my church who were going through problems, and concluded that I don’t because I don’t really care.  However, I’m not the only one at fault in those situations.  Why do people who have problems try to hide those problems or handle them on their own, rather than bring them to a church body who would love to help with them?

Oddly enough, I’m guilty of this one as well.  I’m terribly self-reliant most of the time.  I don’t like to admit that I need help with anything.  When I was 23, I moved to Texas for seminary, and didn’t have a job when I arrived.  My dad told me that he had set aside a certain amount of money to help me until I got started; I just had to call him and ask for help.  Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to do that?  I made it on frozen pizza and hot dogs wrapped in white bread for a couple of months, because the thought of calling my dad and telling him I needed money just burned me.  (I suspect this may be a bigger issue for men than for women, because of the way men pride themselves on providing for themselves and their families.)

The Styx song “Blue Collar Man” drives the point home pretty well, too.  The whole song is about how Tommy Shaw doesn’t want free handouts; he would rather work and earn his money himself.  “I’m not a charity case,” he concludes at the end of the first verse.  Now, there’s a certain amount of nobility in that, and some stupidity as well.  But we’re not just talking about work versus unemployment.  We’re talking about all the kinds of problems that exist, from money to relationships to loved ones dying to problems at work to major disappointment.  We’re even talking minor problems, like the one I mentioned earlier, a husband wanting to take his wife on a date but not having anyone to take care of the kids.  How frequently do you face problems that would go much smoother with someone’s help, yet for some incomprehensible reason, you don’t share that information with the people who could help you?

I think the core issue here is embarrassment, maybe two different kinds of embarrassment.  The first basically assumes that needing help means you’ve messed up somewhere.  Last weekend, I went to Six Flags Over Texas with the youth group from a church I used to go to.  After we’d been in the park a couple of hours, I checked my pocket and realized that I didn’t have my car keys on me.  It was rather humiliating to let the other people in my group know that I had lost them and that I had to go take care of the problem.  It just seemed so amateur that I would lose my car keys; that’s not something that responsible, mature people do, as far as I was concerned.  Of course, that’s not accurate at all.  Plenty of people lose their car keys, and it has nothing to do with how mature the person is.  But I felt like it did.  I ended up getting them back – I had left them in my car, for the first time in the nearly ten years that I’ve had a driver’s license – but that feeling of embarrassment stuck with me.

The second thing is the unspoken belief that, if you were really a worthwhile person, you could handle all your problems yourself.  It’s been ingrained in us, perhaps more here in the United States than anywhere else, that self-sufficiency is a good thing, and that any reasonably intelligent person has no reason to ask for help from anyone else.  North Korea’s state religion is actually dedicated to this belief; the religion is called “juche,” and the central tenet is self-reliance.  Our culture, intentionally or not, backs this up.  If you’re intelligent and competent, you get promotions at work.  If you’re good enough and smart enough, you can do anything all by yourself.  It’s almost a universal human mindset.  The problem is that it’s wildly untrue.  Think about the assumption that a person should be able to handle all their problems themselves.  Did you birth yourself?  If you had cancer, would you refuse to see a doctor?  If you were being sued, would you refuse to get a lawyer?  The fact is that we are, whether we realize it or not, totally dependent on other people almost all the time, which makes it all the stranger that when we have the opportunity to ask for help, we delude ourselves into thinking we don’t need it.

If God has made us for community, then making your problems known to your church friends, giving them the opportunity to shower you with love and help, is part of your identity.  It’s actually a double blessing.  Not only is it beneficial to you, by breaking your self-reliance and admitting that you’re dependent (both on God and on your community), it’s beneficial to your community as well, by giving them the opportunity to bless you with their time, money, and love!  That’s what living in community is all about.  Paul said it himself in 1 Corinthians 12: “When one member of the body suffers, all suffer with it.”

God’s idea of the church is not a whole bunch of self-reliant people who gather together to worship God and then part ways.  There’s no beauty in that.  There is beauty in people admitting that they can’t do live alone, and retreating into God and his church for the help, support, prayer, and encouragement that they were created to need.  I can’t stress this enough.  Needing help does not mean you are weak.  You were created that way, created to need other people.  When Adam was created, he had an intimate, personal relationship with God, yet God still said, “It’s not good for man to be alone.”  Adam wasn’t alone!  He walked beside God!  Yet God still said that Adam was created for community with other people, and that it was “not good” for him to fly solo.  I think, because of the cultural setting into which this book is written, self-reliance may be one of the larger problems we face as a church.

So where am I going with all of this?  Pay attention, because this is big.

Do we do the things that God hates?

The point of that list was to get us thinking consciously about things that we do unconsciously.  I have never in my life sat down and said, “I think I will be apathetic today,” but that doesn’t stop me from doing it, right?  We can’t be changed until we admit that we are, even if not on purpose, doing things that require changing.

We’ve already established that there are certain things God hates, and that haughtiness, which is pride or arrogance, is first on the list.  Can we look at the four things I’ve just listed and see how all four of them are different manifestations of arrogance?  Selfishness is basically arrogance personified; it’s the belief that I am more important than any other person.  Apathy is arrogance; I’m too important to care about other people’s problems.  A critical spirit is pride; I believe that I have earned the right to bad-mouth other people.  Self-reliance is also pride; I believe I am sufficient to meet my own needs.  I didn’t just pick those four things arbitrarily.  I chose them because they’re four different ways that each and every one of us is guilty of living pride, the first thing that God hates, on a near-daily basis.

If you’ll recall last chapter, the reason that God hates pride is that it breaks community.  Pride comes from a “me” centered attitude, while community hinges on “us.”  And, if you’ll think back to earlier than this chapter, we were made for community.  It is our identity, to fulfill our highest purpose as members of a relationship, with God and with our neighbors as well.  Where does this pride come from?  It’s one of the many things that we learned back when we had the stone heart, one of the things that made up the identity that we built for ourselves before we repented for our selfishness and learned that God had a better way.

The point of everything you’ve read so far is to explain the basics of the situation.  God made us with an identity in mind, and we chose to go a different direction.  That rebellion is sin and that’s why we need salvation.  At the moment of our salvation, God replaced our rebellious heart with one that desires him, but we still carry along all the rebellious thoughts, behaviors, habits, and prejudices that we had before.  The only way we can get rid of those is to let God overwrite them with his perfect identity, which is unconditional love for him and for everyone else.  But we can’t begin that process until we acknowledge the reality of sin as something that every human struggles with and something that you and I still do on a daily basis.  Say it out loud: I sin.  I break community without meaning to and without realizing it.  But it’s doubly important to realize that your heart, the very core of you, doesn’t want to do that.  You don’t want to, do you?  You don’t want to be a selfish, apathetic, prideful, critical, or self-reliant person, right?  That proves that you have a new heart in you, a heart which desires to do good.  You know it about yourself, and I know it about myself.

Better still, we have hope, because God himself has promised that he is the one who began this work in us, and that he will be faithful to complete it.  He will not stop until we think and act more like Jesus.  Unfortunately, for me, becoming more like Jesus involves the unpleasant task of examining myself and finding ways that I am not like him.  That’s why these last two chapters were necessary.  They weren’t fun, but I can’t move forward unless I find out what’s holding me back…right?

What’s holding you back?  What leftovers from your old self are still polluting the way you think and interact with people?  Whatever it is, that’s the stuff that God has to get rid of if you’re ever planning on learning how to love him and love other people better.

I’ve basically spent the entire book this far building my case for rebirth.  Now we can stop talking about the messy stuff and start talking about the fun stuff: moving forward, embracing the identity that God has for us, and living out the daily process of being born again.

Chapter 5: Love the Lord Your God

Living the Greatest Commandment

How do you love God?

I posed this question to a couple of friends while debating how to start this chapter, and I was buried under a wave of predictable Sunday school answers.  “Read your Bible,” “pray,” “share Jesus with people.”  I think all of those answers are wrong.

They’re wrong because they tell me how to express my love for God, but in order to express love, I have to already have it.  If I asked you, “How do I fall in love with a woman,” you wouldn’t tell me to buy her roses, take her to movies, or write her poetry.  Those are things I do after I am already in love with a woman.  How do I actually get the love in the first place?

I think the answers that I got say a lot about the way people view God.  I ask about love, and I’m given a list of behaviors.  To take the relationship metaphor a little bit further, is it possible for me to do all those things for a woman and yet still have her complain that I’m emotionally absent from the relationship?  Of course it is.  So isn’t it just as possible to do the same thing to God, to pat myself on the back because I don’t drink alcohol and don’t dance and don’t cheat on my wife, without ever actually loving God?

The greatest commandment in the entire Bible, according to Jesus, is to love God wholeheartedly (and wholemindedly and wholesouledly and wholestrengthedly).  This is our identity; this is what God created each one of us to do before we went running off to do things our own way.  If our identity is to be someone who loves God with the whole of our being, then I think it’s probably time for us to figure out exactly what that means.  Where do we get love for God from, and how do we get more of it?  How do we start, wherever we are, and move toward loving God wholeheartedly?

The Source of Love For God

Where does God’s love for you come from?  Does it come from things you do, or does it come from God?  Chapter two explained this in detail; God’s love is unfailing, meaning that you get it whether you deserve it or not, and you can’t get rid of it no matter what you do.  His love is dependent on him, not on you or your behaviors.  You might think, then, that if God’s love for you comes from God, your love for him must come from you.  What if that’s not accurate?  What if your love from God actually comes from God?

There’s an old hymn that says, “Oh, how I love Jesus, because he first loved me.”  Did God love you first?  I’m fairly sure he did, since he loved you before you were even born, before you were ever capable of loving him at all.  Now, I realize this hymn is not inspired Scripture, but could it be right?  Could it be that the love you have for God is not generated by your heart at all, but merely a response to him and how much he loves you?

The Bible is pretty clear about the fact that God wants us to love him.  Not just that he commands it, but that he craves it.  For starters, he engineered the universe in a way that gives us a clue of how amazing he is.  He didn’t create with an attitude of functionality, only giving us the plants and animals and earth that we needed in order to survive.  Rather, he created an entire universe, crammed full of galaxies and stars and planets and comets and crazy things whose sole purpose is to showcase God.  In Isaiah 6, Isaiah tells of a vision he had of God up on his throne.  The angels around him are singing, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!  The whole earth is filled with his glory!”  Did you catch that?  The whole earth – and not just the earth, either, but the whole universe.  God created everything full of his glory to serve as a beacon to us, like a spiritual lighthouse, guiding us toward himself.

Romans 1, Paul explains the same idea.  This is a long quote, but it’s so perfect for what we’re talking about.  He says, “What may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.  For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly understood, being seen from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (emphasis added).   Look at those ideas!  Paul is working here to establish the idea that God has created the world in such a way that anyone who sees it knows that it had to come from somewhere.  God has made it plain to us, he has given the human heart (even the broken stone hearts) an innate curiosity about this earth and where it came from.  He made it plain to us that something powerful created the world.  How else do you explain the fact that nine out of ten humans worldwide believe in some kind of religion?  The need to explain the origin of everything is pervasive, because God has built our hearts in a way that craves him.  When we look at what has been made, we understand that something incredible made it; God has made it plain to us.  Another translation says, “He showed it to us.”  Why would he do that?  Why would he go out of his way to make a mind-blowing creation, and then again to make plain to us that he was behind it?

Is there any explanation, other than that he wanted us to notice, to become curious, and to seek him for answers?  In that light, isn’t all of creation, with its marvelous and beautiful wonders, an invitation to know and love God?

I also want to track back to Deuteronomy 5 and the passage where God talks about being jealous.  He says, “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God who will not tolerate your affection toward any other gods.”  In other words, he is saying that he wants your affection, and so badly that he wants all of it.  Some people see that as God being harsh and stern, but it’s exactly the opposite.  It’s God pleading for you to love him, to crave him, to put him ahead of everything else in your life.  It’s an invitation to a relationship with him.

Let me give one more example.  In Ezekiel 16, God gives Ezekiel a story to tell the Israelites.  I think God says it better than I ever could, so let me just quote the story.  Look at how powerful this language is, at the raw emotion that God uses.

“'Later I passed by, and when I looked at you and saw that you were old enough for love, I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness. I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you,’ declares the Sovereign LORD, ‘and you became mine.  I clothed you with an embroidered dress and put leather sandals on you. I dressed you in fine linen and covered you with costly garments.  I adorned you with jewelry: I put bracelets on your arms and a necklace around your neck.  You became very beautiful and rose to be a queen.  And your fame spread among the nations on account of your beauty, because the splendor I had given you made your beauty perfect,’ declares the Sovereign LORD.  ‘But you trusted in your beauty and used your fame to become a prostitute. You lavished your favors on anyone who passed by and your beauty became his.’

What a powerful image of God this is!  God is talking about being heartbroken because his people, whom he loved, were cheating on him!  He’s not apathetic about whether or not we love him.  He doesn’t shrug his shoulders when people turn their backs on them, and he doesn’t send them to hell with a bemused smile on his face.  He’s devastated, because he wants every heart in the world completely for himself.  Just a few chapters later, in Ezekiel 19, he says, “Do I take any pleasure in punishing the wicked?  No!  I would rather they turn from their ways and live!”  That’s how deep his love is.  Even if a person commits terrible sins, God still wants his heart.  God would rather love a person than punish him.  Now, earlier in the same chapter he promises that he will absolutely punish all sins, vowing, “The soul that sins will die,” so even in the midst of his love, we can’t escape his holiness.  But even when a person is in full-on rebellion toward God, even when they’re rejecting his identity and building their own identity that’s slowly destroying them, even when they’re causing him pain by ignoring the love he’s trying to pour out on them, he still says that he craves a relationship with them and would rather love them than punish them.  Whoa!

Think about that for a moment.  God loves you so much that he wants your entire affection.  That’s why loving God with your whole heart is the most important commandment.  It’s what you were created to do; it’s your identity.  God even began the process by giving you a universe that you could look at and marvel over.  After that, he showered his love on you, even when you were committing adultery against him on a daily basis by placing your affections in the world.  He pursued you until he got your attention, until you finally realized the depth of his great love.  That’s why I say that God is the source of your love for God.  It’s not something you created within yourself.  It’s your heart’s natural response, unstoppable response, when it realizes the depth of the love that God has poured out on it.

That response, of coming to an understanding of who God is and what he is like, is called worship.  When you realize that God is so unbelievably loving that it literally defies words, that’s worship.  Now I want to spend a while, probably a long while, discussing worship and its close cousin praise, because those are the two ways that you grow in love for God.

The Difference Between Praise and Worship

What are praise and worship?  I went into a Christian bookstore near my house for the purpose of asking a couple strangers this question.  I’m not really confrontational, so after I went in, I had to hang out in the music section for a few minutes, looking at the poor old lady who was about to get ambushed with a deep spiritual question and convincing myself that yes, I did really want to do this.  When I get nervous, I start laughing (correction, I laugh all the time, but doubly so when nervous), so then I had to spend a few more minutes calming down.  By then, a manager had replaced the previous cashier, and I didn’t feel as bad wandering up to him.

“What’s the difference between praise and worship?

“Um.  What, you mean the difference between the ‘Modern Worship’ and ‘Praise’ sections on our shelf?”

“I guess.  I’m really just curious about the actual difference between praise and worship.”

I suppose I still didn’t make myself clear, because I was treated to a (pretty good, to be honest) explanation about the difference between his store’s “Praise” genre, which was for people who like Amy Grant, and “Modern Worship” genre, which was for people who like some rock in with their Jesus music.  At the end, when I rephrased the question one more time, he shrugged.  “They pretty much mean the same thing.”

As I was leaving the store, almost as an afterthought, I asked the cashier this question.  She instantly looked baffled, then said, “I know the answer, but I can’t remember it right now.”  Well, okay then.

Honestly, like that manager had said, the words get used as synonyms a lot of the time, but I don’t think they mean the same thing.  The central difference is that worship is based on who God is, while praise is based on what God does.

I guess now we have to define worship.  My definition is, “properly acknowledging who God is,” but I actually don’t like that definition.  “Acknowledging” makes it sound like I’m just talking about something that happens in your head, but that’s not the case.  It happens both in your head and in your heart.  Here’s what I mean.  We talked extensively in previous chapters about God’s incredible love, his amazing holiness, and his perfect justice.  Did anything happen in your heart when you read about those things?  When you realized, whether fifty years ago or two pages ago, that God’s love for you is unstoppable and huge beyond words, did it fill you with awe and respect?  That feeling in your heart was worship.  When you properly acknowledged the depth and breadth of God’s love, the result was worship.

Let me use God’s holiness as an example.  Holiness is really what separates us from God.  I used this line earlier, but it’s worth repeating.  God is loving, and a stone heart can be a little bit loving.  God is just, and a stone heart can be a little bit just sometimes.  But God is also holy, and no stone heart can ever claim to be a little bit holy.  He is, by his very nature, something that I could never be no matter how hard I tried!  That’s how impressive he is, and that’s why he deserves our worship.

Yet the really great thing about God, and the thing that makes him deserve worship even more, is that he doesn't just sit up on his holy stool and let that be the end of it.  There's a theological conundrum called "immanence and transcendence." What it means is that God is very near to us, all around us in fact, and we can easily call on him just by saying his name.  That's called immanence.  However, he's also very far from us, because we can't touch him, and short of salvation through Christ, there's no way we can even have a relationship with him.  That's called transcendence.  God's holiness is the chief force behind his transcendence; our sin is what separates us from a high and holy God.  However, his love and mercy are the driving forces behind his immanence.  He came down to us, took the form of a lowly human, who got tired and hungry and frustrated, and then allowed himself to be put to an unjust death simply to allow us a way of entering a relationship with him - that's how incomparably huge his love and mercy are.  This is all in addition to the worship he deserves because of his holiness!

Isaiah 57 contains one of my very favorite phrases for God: "The high and exalted one."  God is the king of the entire universe. He is the only holy one, the only one who is perfect in love.  In fact, he's even worthy of worship because of his position as king.  We believe that people who are in high earthly positions deserve our respect.  There's not much, in all honesty, that separates you or me from any given president of the United States.  Yet if we were to meet the president, we would be expected to treat him honorably and with respect, simply because he is in a high position.  How much more honor and respect belong to the God of the universe, the king of everything that exists?  Beyond his holiness, beyond his love and mercy, he deserves worship because he is high and exalted.

Praise, on the other hand, is based in how God's attributes ("who God is") impact me in my life. For example, I worship God because he is loving. I praise him because he is so loving that he pursued me even when I was running away from him, and didn’t stop even though he should hate hated me. I worship God because he is holy; I praise him because he has forgiven all of my sins and made me holy as well. I worship him because of his mercy; I praise him because his mercy is constantly with me, no matter how badly I mess up, and that I am instantly forgiven the moment I ask for it. See how the two are related, but slightly different? Sometimes they're not even distinguishable from each other. You'll notice that in my description of God's love, I had to rely on his actions in order to demonstrate my point. Paul says the same thing in Romans 5:8: "God showed his love for us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Worship and praise often go hand in hand, but they're not quite exactly the same.

Here's Biblical proof for what I'm talking about.  Psalm 29:2 says, "Ascribe the Lord the glory that is due his name; worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness."  Note the two key themes.  David talks about "the glory that is due his name," the idea that God deserves worship simply because of who he is.  And what is it about God that deserves the worship?  "The splendor of his holiness."  Psalm 99:5 puts it even more simply: "Exalt the Lord and worship at his footstool; he is holy."  Worship is grounded in who God is.

Praise is also addressed in many of the Psalms.  Take 139:14, which says, "I praise you, oh God, because I am fearfully and wonderfully made."  Note that: I praise you "because."  Praise is grounded in what God does.  Psalm 9:11 elaborates: "Sing praises to the Lord, enthroned in Zion; proclaim among the nations what he has done."  Again, the theme of praise is directly connected to "what he has done."

I said at the beginning of this section that praise and worship were the two ways that you grow in love for God.  Now that we know what praise and worship are, we can look at how they’re connected to love.

A Life of Worship

I’ve heard of a technique that some Christian counselors will use with a couple who is having trouble.  They’ll turn to the husband and say, “What was it about your wife that originally made you fall in love with her?  What did you like about her?”  The husband then has to spend several minutes explaining all the things about his wife that he liked back when they met, some or all of which were hopefully still true.  When he is finished, the wife has to answer the same question, and at the end of it, the couple has removed themselves from the problems and concerns of the moment, and regained some perspective on why the relationship exists.  The real issue for the couple is that they’re reacting to the moment, just playing whack-a-mole with the problems that come up, and not investing the right time or energy into the relationship.

That sentence also describes the way a lot of Christians relate to God.  A person’s prayer life is a wonderful insight into their relationship with God.  What do you usually pray for?  Many people, frequently me included, have prayers that read like a honey-do list for God.  Please take care of this, please heal this person, please protect me, yada yada.  I’m not saying that we shouldn’t ask God for things, please don’t misunderstand me.  I just feel like we nag him a lot.  We’re constantly after him for handouts, but we don’t talk to him unless we need something.  For that matter, we often don’t even take the time to thank him after he gives us something we just asked for!

I want to suggest to you that your relationship with God could be stronger if worship played a bigger role in your life.  (Duh, right?)  Worship gives you something to talk to God about, gives your mind and heart an opportunity to react to him, instead of treating him like a cosmic vending machine.  So how do you go about making worship a bigger part of your life?  How do you get to the point where you have a life of constant worship?

Let me answer that question with another question.  What did God give us as the initial invitation to worship him?  It was creation, right?  The earth and the universe and all the crazy-awesome things in them.  If those things are an invitation to worship God, then shouldn’t we take him up on the invitation?

We’re all surrounded by creation every moment of every day, but we rarely think of creation as an opportunity to worship God.  Can I ask you to try something?  Put the book down right now (actually, wait until the end of this paragraph) and go outdoors.  Look up at the sky, at the trees or rocks or grass around you, and look for things that are amazing.  Ready?  Go.

What did you see?  Did you see the sun, the huge atomic reactor that puts out all the light and heat that keep us alive?  Did you see the stars, suns so far away that we can’t even describe the distance to them in meaningful terms?  Perhaps you saw trees, which start as a tiny seed and, all on their own, grow into these massive, towering things which give us shade and oxygen and keep our soil from eroding.  I just took my own advice and went outside to get the mail, at eleven at night.  I felt the wind blowing in from the west, my face caressed by air molecules that started their day in New Mexico or California.  I saw a truly gigantic ant pile, complete with scurrying ants, creatures with miniscule brains which are still somehow capable of all working together to build intricate homes and bring back food.  Isn’t creation amazing?

In fact, God tells us that creation was designed to amaze.  In that Romans 1 passage, Paul says it’s how God shows off his “eternal power and divine nature.”  We can see from creation that God is worthy of worship.  How unbelievably creative is God?  Not only did he create all these things, but he imagined them, created them in his mind as he brought them to life on earth.  Do you wonder whether God is creative?  Look at all the species of butterflies out there, the peacocks, the mountain ranges, the colors of sunsets.  All of those were God’s ideas.  He deserves worship for his creativity.  Then, after he imagined all these things, he possessed the power to bring them into existence.  He populated the earth with stunning natural features, with animals both beautiful and terrifying, with trees that grow to be forty stories tall and three stories thick.  If that doesn’t inspire awe and respect in your heart, will anything?

If you want to have a life of worship, you can start by noticing creation.  Most people don’t.  Even though it’s so amazing, we’re surrounded by it so often that we stop even seeing it.  When was the last time you stopped what you were doing to look at the colors in a sunset?  When was the last time you counted a few of the stars in the sky, just to remind yourself how many there are?  When was the last time you really looked at creation with God in mind?

If you want to know what this kind of worship looks like, and how it plays out in your life, it might just take the form of a simple prayer.  “God, you put all this here.  Even beyond the earth, there’s stuff out there so far away that I can’t even see it, that you made simply to show how awesome you are.  And you are awesome.”  You’re properly acknowledging who God is.  You’re worshiping.

I would even suggest that you begin going out of your way to explore God’s creation.  If he put the whole earth and the whole universe here in order to show off how amazing he is, then when you put your eyes on those things, you’re actually bringing him honor.  If you’re the athletic type, begin budgeting a certain amount of time, perhaps starting with one hour a month, for you to get outside away from it all and just find new things in creation that you’ve never seen, but which God created to show off his power and divinity.  Let your heart worship when you see them.  If you’re not athletic or can’t get out into nature, use the Internet.  Go to NASA’s website and find photos taken by the Hubble telescope of those far-distant things in space, nebulae and stars and dust clouds in all kinds of shapes and colors.  That stuff amazes me.  Try to find images of sunsets that dazzle you, oceans whose beauty takes your breath away, mountains so tall they reach into space, or whatever you want to look at.  Just go out of your way to find it.  When you see creation, let your heart worship.  Look at those things and think in your heart, “If what I’m seeing is awesome, how much more awesome must God be, since he made them all?”  Doing this every day, every time you experience creation, will go an awfully long way toward making worship an integral part of your everyday life.

Creation is, in some ways, the easiest way to worship God, because it’s something you can see and touch, run your fingers through, take snapshots of, and commit to memory.  The other things I talked about, the other reasons that God deserves worship, are a little harder to touch.  So how do you go about worshiping God for those other things, which you can’t see?

I’d like to start with a story.  In Exodus 3, Moses encounters God in the form of a burning bush.  Moses asks, paraphrased, “When I tell people what I saw here, who should I tell them was speaking to me?”  God’s reply is: “I am who I am.”  At first glance this seems like a very glib, unhelpful answer, like when your parents would say, “because I said so.”  In reality, God’s answer doesn’t translate literally into English.  What he said was, “I am the uncreated one,” or “I am the self-existent one.”  His claim was that he is the only thing in all of creation that was not a creature.  Before the world existed – “In the beginning” – there was God, the trinity.  Father, Son, Holy Spirit.  Three distinct persons forming one coherent God, perfect in tri-unity.

How exactly does this answer my question?  What I guess I’m trying to say is that at some point, in order to worship God for who he is, you have to learn who he is, and there’s no way to do that apart from getting into the Bible.  Often in the Bible, God will make claims about himself.  Already in this book, I’ve pointed out where he said he was holy (Isaiah 6), jealous (Deuteronomy 5), high and exalted (Isaiah 61), powerful (Romans 1), and loving (Ezekiel 16, 18, 19).  Once you find him making this claim, you can ask yourself: so what?  Why does this attribute of God make him deserve my worship?

Most of the time the answer is pretty self-explanatory.  What makes God’s holiness impressive?  As I said earlier, it’s the fact that he is perfectly holy, with no hint of impurity anywhere in him.  He is, effortlessly and permanently, something that I could never be no matter how hard I tried.  That blows me away.  Every command that he gives is morally correct, and everything that he does is morally right.  Have you ever thought of God in that way before?  When was the last time you spent some time thinking about God’s holiness?  Sure, it’s a little harder to have a meaningful experience with this kind of thing than it is with creation, but that doesn’t matter.  You can start including in your prayers: “God, you’re so holy.  Everyone on earth has tried and failed to be holy, but you have always been and will always be holy.  That’s amazing to me.”  The more you think about his holiness, the more amazed you will be.  Also, the more you read the Bible, whether those passages that I just cited or other parts of the Bible, you will find even more things about him that are worthy of worship, even more ways that his love and mercy and justice and holiness impacted people’s lives, and those things will cause you to worship him even more.  The more you worship, the more you will find yourself amazed by God.

“Worship” is often used as a synonym for “music,” as well; take a look at how many churches have “worship leaders” and “worship pastors.”  It’s obviously much, much bigger than that, but you can also use music if you’re so inclined.  You can listen very closely to the lyrics of Christian songs and try to pick out what they’re worshiping God for.  You can even sing those songs to God as your own form of worship.  If you’re really creative, you could write your own worship songs or poetry.  You could create art that depicts his creation or tries to convey his holiness and justice.  No matter which of these you do, you’re worshiping God, by giving him honor and respect and acknowledging in your heart that he is who he says he is.

I want to say again: I’m not talking about something that’s merely intellectual.  Some people would have you believe that worshiping God is all acquiring knowledge about him.  The things I just wrote about creation and music should show you that I believe experience is a crucial part of worship as well.  However, some of these things are simply more intellectual than others.  It’s hard to experience holiness in the same way that you experience your shoes in the dust and the wind on your face.  But I don’t believe you can have just head knowledge, because the most important commandment is to love God, and that’s an experience, that’s something you do.  I also don’t think you can survive on just experiences, because you have to learn about who God is before you can worship him for who he is.

And the point, of course, is not merely to read up on God like an encyclopedia entry and then recite this knowledge to yourself as if the recitation itself is what’s important.  It’s actually about what happens as you’re reciting those things.  When you properly acknowledge who God is, you’re also properly acknowledging who you are.  When you worship God’s holiness, you’re quietly admitting that you are not holy.  When you worship God’s power and majesty, it’s an admission that you are not powerful and you are not majestic.  The fact that God is all those things, and yet is still crazy in love with you despite your imperfections, ought to inspire even more worship.  When you tell God these things, when you humble yourself by worshiping him, God is also working in your heart, filling you with even more love for him.  When you learn about him and recite that knowledge back to him, it’s part of your relationship with God.  What you’re telling God during that time is that he’s powerful and holy, but what he’s telling you is that you’re valuable and he loves you.  I can’t really explain it; you just have to experience it.  When you worship God, your heart feels better.  He makes it feel better, because worshiping is how you come into contact with God, and it’s also how he comes into contact with you.  If you want to love him more, spend time thinking about the things about him that make you love him, and you will find yourself falling more in love with him.  The more you worship, the more God fills you up with love.

So, as plainly as I can say it, what I’m telling you is that you need to spend more time worshiping God.  You will need to think about him, notice his creation, ponder his divine attributes.  Go out of your way to do these things.  If you need to, create some reminder, a note in your car or an alarm on your phone or whatever, that will remind you to worship.  Do whatever you have to do in order to bring both your mind and your heart to a place where they understand and appreciate God.  Spend your thoughts and your emotions on him.  Go through the Bible and find different ways that people worship him, and try those.  I don’t know; you know yourself better than I do.  You figure out what helps you worship, and then go do it.

Let me track back to a point I made at the beginning of this chapter.  How do you love God?  God loves you, loves you, intensely.  He compares himself to a groom, to a husband.  So, think of your relationship with God like a romance.  If you’re getting to know a boyfriend or girlfriend, how do you build that relationship?  You spend time with them, you get to know them.  Worship is a way of getting to know God.  I’m telling you, if loving God wholeheartedly is the single most important commandment, then worship is the way we fall in love with God.  You’re looking for things about God that make you love him.  When you notice how huge and incredible he is, when you realize how much he loves you and has always loved you, when you start to wrap your mind around his holiness and justice, your heart will respond to God, and it will respond with love.

I ask you to try this.  Take the things I told you in this chapter and put them into practice for a week or two.  See what happens at the end of that time.  Let me also point out that I am not making any of this up.  Nothing in this chapter is my idea; none of it is a new method or model that I am implementing.  Every bit of it comes from, and is backed up by, Scripture.  God has said that the most important commandment is to love him wholeheartedly, and living a life of worship is the single biggest step you can take down that road.  Psalm 34:8 says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.”  I’m inviting you to taste and see.

A Life of Praise

Worship may be the biggest step toward loving God, but praise isn’t far behind.  Worship, remember, is properly acknowledging who God is, giving him the respect and honor he deserves for his love and holiness and the other things that make up his being.  Praise, on the other hand, is giving him respect and honor for the things he has done in your life.

If worship has a tendency to be a little bit intellectual, then praise is totally experiential.  It is all, from start to finish, about experiencing God and the things that he does.  It’s exciting stuff because it’s God proving who he is, time and time again, in the lives of everyone who believes in him.

The Bible is actually a very ambitious document, because it makes a lot of promises about God and the things that God does.  For example, he says (as I’ve spent this whole book saying) that, when a person repents from their sins, he will give them a new heart which desires to do good.  And here we all are, desiring to do good, and reading (or, in my case, writing) a book about how to do good even better.  God says what will happen, and in each one of our lives, he has proved it.  He also promises a lot of other things, like the fact that he will make everything that happens to us work together for our good, the fact that he will give us peace and comfort when we need it, and the fact that he will never leave us nor forsake us.  On a regular basis, he exercises his power to make those things actually happen in our lives.  Think of it like him coming down from heaven to touch your life.  How big a blessing is it that you have the chance to see those things, to remember them, and then to praise God for them?

I want to say two things about praise.  First, God throws blessings into our lives in quantities far too huge for us to even comprehend.  It’s his way of showing his love for us.  Praise is beautiful because it’s our way of giving God the credit for the things he does; it’s another way of giving him honor and respect.  Second, praise is a way of reminding yourself that you’re dependent on God.  When you call to mind the things he does for you, you’re admitting that life would be impossible, or at least a lot more difficult and a lot less happy, if God wasn’t intervening for you.

I guess now is as good a time as any to remind you that I’m not writing this as if I’ve figured it all out.  I do not have what I would call a life of praise or worship – but I want one.  After I wrote all that stuff about worship, I started trying to put it into practice, and to be honest, it’s been kind of hit or miss, much like it probably will be for you when you try.  But remember, as I keep saying, this is our identity we’re talking about.  God is rebirthing us, transforming us, into people who are worshipful and praiseful, and he has promised that he will be faithful to complete the work.  With that said, here are the rest of my thoughts on praise.

From my experience, a failure to praise comes mainly from complacency.  I don’t thank God for waking up alive each morning, because I’ve come to expect that I will, and I begin taking it for granted.  I don’t thank him for my family or my friends or good bodily health because over time I’ve become so used to them that I forget I should be amazed by them.  (Exactly like what I said about creation, right?)  A big part of a life of praise, then, involves continually reminding myself to see things differently.

I came into this world with absolutely nothing.  I didn’t even have breath until some doctor whopped me on the backside.  Somehow, as I got older, I picked up the idea that I’m entitled to certain things: tasty food, a warm place to sleep, good friends, love from the people around me, some modicum of social justice, and so on.  Once I decide that I’m entitled to those things, I take them for granted.  I may have them for virtually all my life, but the moment I’m without one of them for a moment, I get uppity and start whining at God.  The problem, as I said, is that I’m complacent, or more accurately I’m ungrateful.  This is what my stone heart taught me about how to live, and for whatever reason (mainly that I’ve just never thought about it before) I’m still living in the habit that I formed back when I had a dead heart.

This is a shame, because God is throwing awesome things into my life for the sole purpose of showing me that he loves me.  If I’m ungrateful or if I miss his blessings because I feel like I’m entitled to them, all I’m doing is depriving myself of chances to feel God’s love and see the proof that he’s still up there caring for me.  Remember how Paul said that God made the earth full of his glory and then showed it to us so that we would worship him?  Praise, as I keep saying, works in exactly the same way.  God intervenes in your life so that we will see those things and praise him.  So let’s start seeing them!

I want to separate God’s blessings into two types, namely praises that we’re expecting and praises that we’re not expecting.  It’s easier to praise God for the first kind, because we’re expecting them (obviously), so that’s a good place to start.  Most of us pray for things, right?  Now what happens after we finish praying and God answers the prayer?  I would bet that for most people, myself included, we don’t hang around long enough to notice the outcome of most prayers.  We pray for stuff, but by the time the answer comes, we’re on to other things.  I think that in that sense, the first part of praise is simply slowing down and actually waiting for the answers to the things we ask for.

Have you ever been around a four-year-old who’s just coming into the “question everything” stage?  “Daddy, why is the sky blue?”  “Well, you see, it’s because the-”  “Why is the grass green?” “Uh, you see, the plants have a-”  “Why is the…”  I wonder if we don’t sound the same way to God.  “Dear God, please heal my friend who’s sick.”  “Okay, here you go, good as-”  “Dear God, please keep my parents safe on their vacation.”  “Alright, and by the way, I tried to tell you that I took care of your fr-”  “Dear God, please help Aunt Mabel find her dog; I never really liked the thing but she’s awful tore up about it.”  “Well, okay, but did you see-”  “Dear God…”

Doesn’t that sound a little bit ridiculous?  I think you can see that being aware of the things God is doing isn’t just something beneficial for us; it’s the least we could do for a God who cares about us enough to listen to us, hear our prayers, and intervene in our lives to sort things out.  Please understand me here.  I’m not saying that God dislikes when we ask him for things.  It’s actually the exact opposite; we bring show him our respect by acknowledging that we can’t handle things and that we need his help.  However, it’s only polite of us to do our part and praise him in return.

I want to challenge you (and me, for that matter) to start keeping track of how God answers your prayers.  You can use a list, or write the stories down, or take photos and make a bulletin board, or whatever you want to do.  I’m going to talk in a little bit about all the different forms that praise can take, but this is where to start.  Start by looking for answers for the things that you’re praying for.  When God gives you the answer, praise him.  The ultimate goal, of course, is to have a life of praise, so once we start praying for things and praising God for the answers, we can move on to asking God for more and more things, so that we constantly have answered prayers to praise him for.  It becomes a big self-sustaining circle, but it starts by being observant and seeing when God answers the prayers we’ve been sending up.

The second, and far more complicated, aspect of this is praising God for the blessings we didn’t ask for.  If we struggle so mightily with noticing when God does things that we specifically asked him to do, you might think it’s nearly impossible to notice the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of subtle and unexpected blessings that he tosses into our lives on a daily basis.  Not so.  There are a couple of Bible verses that will help us on our way.

Now that we’re beginning to notice things we can praise God for, how do we go about actually praising him?  Biblical praise takes a lot of different forms.  Sometimes it’s quiet and reverent, a prayer that thanks God for what he has done – but not always.  The Bible records several songs of praise for things that God has just done, most notably in Exodus 15 where Moses and the Israelites sing a spontaneous praise tune for God’s protection as they crossed the Red Sea, and in Luke 1, where Mary sings after hearing the news that she is about to give birth to the Messiah.  Back in the Old Testament, in 2 Samuel 6, David is so overjoyed at the Ark of the Covenant returning safely to Jerusalem that he strips off all his clothes and dances naked in the street.  I’m not recommending you do that, but there is a Biblical precedent just in case you should want to.  One of the most unique examples I’ve found is what Jesus did with the Last Supper.  He established something that was equal parts interpretive drama, ritual, and object lesson in leading us to show praise for what he did through his death and resurrection.

Lest you feel that creativity is a bad thing when it comes to praise, let me point out that God himself is extremely creative.  Joshua 4 tells the story of God parting the Jordan River to allow his people to cross into the land he had promised them.  Before they leave, though, God tells Joshua to send some people back onto the dry riverbed to collect twelve stones, for the purpose of building an altar.  What would happen to people each time they saw these stones, which used to be at the bottom of the Jordan River?  They would remember what God did and give praise, right?  He didn’t tell them to simply write down what happened; he gave them a visual reminder.  If you want to think of it in art terms, he told them to build a sculpture.  When it comes to you praising God, it’s pretty much between you and God.  If you want to use poetry, music, drama, dance, lists, stories, or something I’m not creative enough to think of, go for it.  There are Biblical precedents for all of those things plus more.  Plus, let’s just be honest about it, you’re going to be even more likely to praise if you can do it in a way that you love, true?

This brings us to one of the tough questions surrounding praise.  What am I supposed to do if everything in my life is going wrong and I can’t seem to find anything to praise God for?  I don’t want my faith to be like a roller coaster, up and down with the ups and downs in my life.  Somehow I need to make my faith not dependent on my circumstances…but how?

I want to point you to the first four verses in Psalm 22.  David says, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?”  Now, I don’t know, and David doesn’t say, exactly what he was going through. I think it’s better that way, actually.  It makes it so that anyone can identify with him.  Have you ever felt like God was far from you, like he wasn’t even listening to you?  David continues, “Oh my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer; by night, and I am not silent.”  You’ve got to love that about David; he was never afraid to speak his mind to God.  But these are the very next two verses: “Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the praise of Israel.  In you our fathers put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them.”  In an instant, David goes from unspeakable agony to praise for God!  What prompted the change?

Read it again and you’ll see that David went looking for things to praise God for.  His present circumstances were painful and uncertain, so he took his eyes off them, and put his eyes instead on God and on the mighty things God has done for him.  This is an absolutely critical component in having a life of praise.  Unfortunately, most of us will go through phases where we feel like David felt here.  Even Jesus did; you may recognize that Jesus quoted the first verse of this psalm as he was dying on the cross.  (Read the rest of the psalm and you’ll see it’s actually a messianic prophecy that talks about Jesus being pierced and having lots cast for his clothes.  It’s neat.)  Think about this, though.  David experienced pain and turmoil well beyond what any of us will ever bear.  If he could make a life of praise by finding things to celebrate even in the midst of his very darkest hour, surely you and I can do the same.

The Old Testament is exploding with the command: “Remember.”  It might not be an exaggeration to say that, second only to foreshadowing the coming Messiah, remembering is the theme of the entire Old Testament.  Remember God; remember who he is (worship); remember what he has done for you (praise).  The point of all this remembering is that it takes the focus of your faith off of you, your problems and struggles and failures, and places it instead on God, the high and exalted, unchanging, faithful, loving king of the universe.  This is where the focus belongs.  It’s easy to make the focus about me, because I can see me and I can see my problems, but I can’t always see God.  That’s the whole reason that, when I can’t see God, I have to do exactly what David did and call to mind times that I could see his hand moving, when I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that he was real and on my side because I could see him intervening in my life.

I have a story about this one as well.  A few summers ago, my stepmom, Deb, was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  During this time, she was also music minister at the church we were attending.  One Sunday she ended up having to do the special music.  I don’t remember the exact circumstances, whether the person who was supposed to do the special music canceled on her or whether she was actually on the schedule, but whatever the case, she sat down behind the piano and sang a beautiful song called “But By Your Grace.”  All I could think was, “She’s sitting there, with a tumor inside her head right now, and she’s singing about God’s grace.”  That’s what a life of praise will do to a person.

God’s command is for us to lean on him, no matter what, for our identity, for encouragement, for affirmation, for love, for everything we need.  Remembering past praises in the midst of present turmoil is a crucial part of having a life of praise.  It’s also a way of reminding yourself that God has brought you this far.  He has given you everything you have and cradled you in his hand because of his incredible, unfailing love for you.  He’s not about to drop you now.

What about my sin?

It seems like a legitimate question.  How can I live a life of praise and worship if I still have these gigantic flaws within myself?  How can I think of myself as a worshiper if I have sins that I commit every day, knowing that I shouldn’t, but unable to stop myself?

Like all great lies, though, that one seems true because it has a hint of truth in it.  It’s true that God considers sin to be serious business.  He really, really hates it, and his ultimate goal is to purge you of it.  But I want to challenge you to remember the things I explained in chapter two.

What happened, and happens, to your sin?  What happened to it when you got saved?  God took it all from you and punished Jesus instead, so that you can be holy.  Romans 8 also says, “There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”  God doesn’t hold your sin against you at all.  He definitely does not hold a grudge against you for it, or plan to punish you because of it.  There’s no condemnation for you, period.  All your sin is gone and already forgiven.  You might feel terrible because of it – and you probably will, if you have a new heart, because that new heart doesn’t want to sin anymore.  It wants to do good.  The fact that you feel bad about your sin proves that God has changed you and that he is working in you, which is cause for praise.  I have a couple of sins in mind right now that I do, and I’ve written countless songs in which I was, metaphorically, throwing myself on my face in front of God and apologizing for being such a wretch.  The problem is that I’m not a wretch anymore.  I’m forgiven and holy.  I keep repeating this because it keeps being true, and because we need repetition to break the ages-old lie that our sin still stands between us and God.  There is no condemnation for you.  You stand before God holy and righteous.  Your praise and worship is a pure aroma to him, a sweet sound in his ears.  He delights in you, in hearing from you.  He loves you and cherishes you.  Sin doesn’t pollute his opinion of you.  Isn’t that cause for even more praise?  When you feel broken by your sin, try praising him instead for his unfailing love and for the way he continues to offer you his hand even in spite of your failings.  Then praise him even more for his forgiveness, for the salvation he’s given you, for the promise of eternal joy, for everything you can think of.

This is exactly what I was talking about in the last section.  Take your eyes off of you.  Your sin and your failure are not what define your relationship to God.  His love is not dependent on you.  It’s dependent on him, so put your eyes on him and remember him.  Remember the things about him worth praising and worshiping.  In his time, he will perfect you.  You cannot and must not ride yourself too hard about your own sin, sin which God has already forgiven.  Do not make yourself the center of your faith.  Every time you feel the urge to get down on yourself or blame yourself, pause for a second, and start praising or worshiping instead.

This part of the chapter is for me.  I have serious problems.  I’ve struggled with depression for a number of years, and I hate myself – not mild dislike, more like serious loathing – on pretty much a daily basis.  I know all my imperfections, and every time they surface and I hurt someone, do something inconsiderate, speak without thinking, or whatever, it sticks in my memory and I think about it.  I can tell you things I did years ago that hurt my friends.  I’m actually very discouraged right now as I type this, because I had a disagreement with Andrea tonight and she went to bed upset with me.  Now she’s asleep, and I’m still awake, entertaining thoughts of what a miserable failure I am and how the world just might be better off if I wasn’t a part of it.

When those thoughts occur to me, I have a choice.  I can focus on me, or I can focus on God.  Focusing on me is easy; it’s an old habit, and, as terrible as it sounds, it’s comfortable.  I’m used to thinking those things about myself.  However, if I make this choice, my thoughts stay negative.  Nothing can break the cycle until my mood just happens to change.  My other choice is to focus on God, to take my eyes off myself and all the things I don’t like about myself and worship him instead.  Right now I’m writing about his love and faithfulness, and all the wonderful things about him that deserve my respect and admiration.  I can take my attention away from myself, and fix it instead on God.  And I think that’s what I’m going to choose.  Thank you, God, for valuing me more than I value myself.

Another thing which continues to boggle my mind is an often-quoted passage in 2 Corinthians.  Paul is grappling with the Lord over what he calls “a thorn in my flesh.”  We’re not sure what this is.  Some people think it was a sin he struggled with; others suggest it was a person who kept persecuting or hindering him.  We really don’t know, and it doesn’t much matter.  He says, “Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me.  But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, because my power is made perfect in weakness.’”  Maybe you’ve read that verse before or heard it sung in a song, but I want you to really ponder it for a second.  What does God mean when he says that his power is made perfect in weakness?  Doesn’t that seem backward?  I would think that his power would be shown most strongly in making me so perfect that I didn’t sin anymore.  How great a witness would that be to the world?  Who could doubt the power of God if all these Christians were walking around and never making mistakes?  For some reason, though, God doesn’t see it my way.

What he tells me is that his power is made perfect when he uses weakness, imperfect people, in spite of their imperfections.  I think he’s right.  Think of it this way.  There’s a blind guy, Erik Wiehemayer, who climbs mountains.  He’s an amazing climber; he’s even climbed Mount Everest.  Now, if you hear that someone climbs mountains, you probably say, “Big deal.”  If you hear that a blind guy climbs mountains, suddenly you’re paying attention, because that shouldn’t be possible.  God is talking about kind of the same thing.  If he was able to love perfect people and use them in ministry, that wouldn’t be a big deal.  They’re perfect.  But he is able to love and to use imperfect people, in spite of their (sometimes massive) imperfections, because he’s so huge and so powerful that he’s able to overcome any sin and any failure.  He certainly has the ability to make all of us perfect in a heartbeat, if he wants to.  He’s God; he can do anything.  Yet for some reason, no matter how much we might plead for him to free us from the clutches of certain sins, he doesn’t always do it.  Why?  To show his power, and also, to keep us dependent on him, so we don’t become self-sufficient.  God allowed Paul to remain in weakness so that Paul would remain dependent on God’s power.  God, in turn, would receive honor and respect for the way he continued to use an imperfect man to change the world.  How’s that for awesome?

Sin is a serious deal, and the wrong kind of sin can really damage your relationship with other people.  But I want to point out that the worst consequence of sin is when it becomes such a distraction to you that it impairs your relationship with God.  If your sin or the guilt you feel over it impairs you from praising or worshiping God, then it’s causing you to break the most important commandment in the entire Bible.  God has already forgiven your sin.  Please, for your sake, don’t hold it against yourself longer than God does.

An Open Heart

We’ve just spent a chapter learning how to live a life of praise and worship, under the assumption that those things will help us love God and so fulfill the greatest commandment.  In parting, let me just make a few general observations about living a life of love for God that didn’t fit anywhere else in the chapter.

I think a life of love involves having the willingness to let God affect you.  We’ve talked about seeing creation and being amazed.  We’ve talked about seeing the things God is doing in your life and being awed and humbled.  The natural human tendency is to explain and categorize things, to understand them, which is a way of gaining mastery over them.  I found out last month that my brother Peter might have lupus, and you’d better believe I went and found out everything I could about the disease, because that took away some of the fear.  We, as people, fear the unknown, and knowledge is power because it makes the unknown into something manageable.  Look at Moses at the burning bush.  He asked God, “Who am I talking to?”  He was trying to figure God out.

I don’t mean to imply that figuring God out is a bad thing, but I will say this.  A lot of people have dead faith because they’ve tried to gain emotional mastery over God, in a sense.  It wasn’t intentional, but they’ve made faith into a set of do’s and don’ts, and prayer into a slot machine lever, because those things are easy to understand and don’t require any uncertainty.  They’ve made their faith all action and no emotion, which is a relic of the old heart and its desire to be master over everything it touches.  Love for God involves letting him touch your emotions – awe you, humble you, dazzle you, encourage you, and touch you at the very center of your heart.

I’m not saying that your walk with God is all about emotion, but emotion is still a critical part. God is awesome, so if I’m not awed, something is wrong.  Am I right?  I know a lot of people, and I’ve done it too, who try to make excuses for why there’s no emotion in their walk with God.  I would say that a person who’s living a life of praise and worship is going to have an emotional walk, because they’re constantly putting their hearts in contact with the things about God that amaze and astonish us.

You probably know that emotions can be draining, and that it’s very hard to put out emotional energy constantly without being fatigued.  Don’t worry about that.  It’s not your job to second-guess God.  Just do what he says to do and let him do what he does.

No one can get around the fact that the greatest commandment, love, is an emotion.  Oh sure, sometimes love is a choice, but if it’s always a choice and never a feeling, then it’s not love at all.  Go back to the marriage metaphor (which God made up, not me).  What does your marriage to God look like?  Is there any love there at all?  If you want love and emotion, you have to bring your heart close to God through praise, worship, and a willingness to let him move you.  But note one thing.  James 4:8 says, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.”  Look at who moves first.  He won’t force himself on you.  He is a lover, not a rapist.  Draw near to him, and he will draw near to you.  You know how to praise, by now.  You know how to worship.  Go draw near to him.

Chapter 6: Love Your Neighbor As Yourself

Or, making Mr. Rogers look like an amateur

I might as well be honest and say that I don’t know the first thing about loving people.  I’ve got a pretty good handle on the praise and worship stuff, because that’s easy.  There are a lot of things about God that deserve my worship, and he does a lot of great stuff that makes me want to praise him.  The problem is, he’s plunked me down on earth surrounded by people who are lazy, arrogant, angry, untrustworthy, stupid, ignorant, and obnoxious, and he commands me to love those people the same way I love him.  Excuse me?

Here’s a story that explains why I have such a hard time loving people.  I really hate driving because it turns reasonably intelligent, well-educated people into complete morons.  Recently I was coming back from church on a Sunday night, down into western Fort Worth, and had to take a big, sweeping ramp from Interstate 820 onto Interstate 30.  For reasons known only to God and a designer who was probably drunk at the time, the entrance and exit of this ramp are only one lane, but the ramp itself widens to two lanes for about a quarter of a mile.  You can probably see where this is going.

I, minding my own business and doing the speed limit, stayed in the lane where I was supposed to be, just behind and in the opposite lane from the car in front of me.  Some impatient jerkbag decided to pass on the ramp, and he made a valiant attempt, but there just wasn’t enough space between me and the car in front of me for him to squeeze between us.  He was stuck driving beside me.  You might think that when the ramp began to narrow to one lane, he would put on the brakes like a reasonable human being and assume his rightful place in line.  On the contrary, he continued to drive directly alongside me, half on the road and half off, for several hundred feet until the thought finally penetrated his skull: “Hey!  I’m not on the road!”  Only then did he get back in line.  What possesses a person to do that?

Okay, my role in things was a little less innocent than I let on.  When I saw him come up behind me, I may or may not have scooted closer to the car in front of me, rendering Mr. Impatient unable to pass and basically causing the situation that ended up happening.  I realize it wasn’t a terribly loving thing to do (here comes the rationalization!), but passing on a ramp is unbelievably stupid and no one should do it.  I would bet Mr. Impatient thought twice before the next time he tried it.  To me, what I did was just.  I didn’t have to treat him lovingly because I was teaching him a valuable lesson in civic responsibility, and possibly saving someone’s life later on down the line.

Oh, that rationalization sounds wonderful.  It’s one of my better ones, to be sure.  But there’s a problem.  I invented a reason why it was okay for me not to treat Mr. Impatient lovingly.  I put conditions on my love.  I decided that, if he didn’t drive the way I wanted him to drive, I wasn’t going to behave in a loving way toward him.  And don’t even say that you can love a person with your heart but not with your actions.  Jesus said in Luke 6 that out of the overflow of the heart, a person speaks and acts.  If your actions aren’t loving, it’s because your heart is not loving.  That’s bad news for pretty much all of us, yeah?

I say this because it illustrates how difficult it’s going to be for you and me to have lives characterized by pure, unconditional love for our fellow humans.  Is it any wonder that this is the area where most Christians fall short of Christ’s example?  Any idiot can love a God who forgave them of everything they’ve ever done wrong, or admire a God so powerful that he created sunsets and mountains.  Very few people can love someone who mistreats them, takes advantage of them, or simply doesn’t care about them.

Also, let me make one thing clear.  If you aren’t loving God with your heart and with your actions every day, there is no way you will ever, ever, ever be able to love other people on a regular basis.  I’m not saying this to be difficult or discourage you; I’m saying it because it’s true.  After all, the most important commandment is to love God wholeheartedly.  If you can’t get that one squared away, nothing else matters.  If you can’t love God, whom it’s easy to love, then realistically you will never have a life of pure unconditional love for other people.  You might be more loving than various people that you compare yourself to, but you’ll still be falling drastically short of Jesus’ gold standard.  Because, let’s face it, the command to love everyone all the time is impossible for any human to fulfill under his own power.

Jesus Ruins It For All of Us

Let me give you a good example of just how high Jesus has set the bar.  Mark 5 tells the story of a Jewish religious leader named Jairus, whose daughter was sick.  You may recall that the religious leaders were not overly fond of Jesus; they kept coming up to him and asking complicated questions about the Old Testament, hoping to trick him into giving a “wrong” answer.  They thought he was a heretic because he claimed to be the Son of God, which ultimately led to them being some of the major players in the plot to have Jesus arrested and crucified.  You could say there was some tension there.

Despite this, Jairus is desperate, and comes to Jesus for the sole purpose of begging Jesus to heal is daughter.  Now, if I were Jesus, I’d be thinking, “Score!  I can get something out of this.  Maybe I’ll do him the favor if I make him promise to stop persecuting me.  Maybe I’ll make him reform the Jewish system so he and his fellow religious leaders can stop being such hypocrites.  Wow, this is great!  I’ve got some leverage here!”  (I’m indebted to a children’s book, The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare, for first raising this idea.)  Sounds reasonable, right?

The problem, as we’re going to rapidly discover, is that reasonable to us does not necessarily mean reasonable to Jesus.  The thought process I just described basically amounts to “conditional love.”  Jesus could have done any one of those things, but he would have been using his love as a weapon to get what he wanted, which is not love at all.  No, unconditional love means asking for nothing in return, often getting nothing in return, but loving anyway because it’s simply the right thing to do.  That’s what Jesus meant when he said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

For example, imagine what would happen if a powerful Christian leader of today had miraculous powers, and a Muslim with a sick daughter came for healing.  What do you think would happen in that situation?   Maybe the Christian would refuse to heal the daughter until the Muslim fellow converted, or praised Jesus, or whatever.  Maybe he would just refuse the healing altogether.  Maybe he would take the opportunity to lecture the Muslim on why Christianity is the only way to be saved.  I don’t know, but I bet it would be one or more of those things, don’t you?  Yet Jesus, in almost the exact same situation, did nothing of the sort.

Actually, what he did do was even more baffling; he dilly-dallied on his way to Jairus’ house, so much that the daughter died while Jesus was still en route.  A few of Jairus’ friends came out, letting him know to stop bothering Jesus, but Jesus went into the house anyway.  Sure enough, the daughter was dead, but that didn’t stop him: he raised her from the dead!  One of the more dramatic miracles he ever did was done on behalf of someone who belonged to a group that repeatedly tried to have Jesus arrested – and Jesus asked for absolutely nothing in return.  He didn’t even sit down with Jairus and have a spiritual talk with him.  He just loved unconditionally, and then moved on.

This story planted one thought in my head: there is no force in the universe stronger than pure unconditional love.

Why a life of love?

If you’re anything like me, though, looking at all the people in the world who continually give me reason to get annoyed with them rather than love them, you may wonder why love is even a big deal at all (apart from being the most powerful force in the universe).  Why does it matter so much to God?  Why isn’t it enough to simply love him; why does there have to be this relational component as well?

That’s a pretty valid question if you think about it.  The way I usually explain Christianity to people, and the way I’ve explained it in this book, is that I’ve sinned and my sin separates me from God until I have a savior who can do something about it.  By that explanation, once I get my sin taken care of, it’s game over and I win, right?  Why should love for other people matter at all, if the problem is entirely between me and God?

The answer, of course, is that the problem is not just between me and God; it’s that the entire world is separated from God until it finds a savior, and my own salvation is merely one part in a greater story, the story of millions of people all over the earth being reconciled to God through Christ.  I don’t win the game by being born again; the real game is getting everyone on earth to be born again.  So I think the reason we fail at love a lot of the time is that we’re thinking too narrowly, and not understanding how important love really is in the big picture of what God is doing.

First, a life of love is the only way you can please God.  Isaiah 58 provides a fascinating insight into the way God sees our worship.  God says, “Is this the kind of fast I have chosen, only one day for a man to humble himself?  Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed, and for lying on sackcloth and ashes? ...Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice, to set the oppressed free, and to break every yoke?”  What a powerful statement.  See, the Israelites were “fasting,” they were going through the motions of worshiping God, but God told them that their worship was meaningless because it had no oomph.  It wasn’t making any difference in the way they lived.  “If you really want to worship me,” God says, “do some real good in the lives of people who need it.”  Otherwise we’re just paying lip service to God, and he doesn’t appreciate that.

The problem is that a lot of people think like I thought.  “If I go to church on Sunday (okay, most Sundays) and read the Bible every day (well, once or twice a week) and pray every day (uh, more like when I feel up to it), then God will be pleased with my piety.”  Obviously, none of us is as pious as we could be or as we ought to be.  If our goal is pleasing God, then all of us fall woefully short.  Now don’t get me wrong here; I’m not saying God doesn’t love us.  You know by now that he loves us with an unfailing love that is not dependent on anything we do, but there’s a difference between loving someone and being proud of them.  What do we really do to give God reason to stand up and clap for us?  Do we really think that minding our own faith is good enough for the God who is out to save the whole world?

When I think about pleasing someone, making them proud of me, I think back to college.  My dad knew that I had a lot of potential, and he held me to a high standard, but I got mediocre grades because I was lazy and didn’t care.  I came home from my first semester of college, a pretty expensive college, with three A’s and three C’s, something like that.  It was a solid B average, and I was satisfied.  Dad looked at the paper, then looked at me, and said, “Is this the best you can do?”  I told him honestly no, it wasn’t, and went on to make the Dean’s List the next seven semesters.

How are you doing at making God proud of you?  How are you at caring for the people in your church who are going through hard times?  How are you at befriending non-Christians so that they can feel the love God is trying to pour out on them?  I imagine God coming to each of us and asking, “Is this the best you can do?”  I think we would all have no choice but to admit that we could be doing a lot better.

Also, a life of love makes sense because it’s your identity.  God gave you a new heart, and along with that, he gave you the desire to please him.  Philippians 2 says, “For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him.”  That’s what you, at the center of your being, want the most.  Since a life of love is what pleases God, as I just finished explaining, as long as you don’t have a life of love, you’re going to be unhappy.  You will know that there’s something about you (although you may not have known what) that isn’t the way it ought to be.  That’s because you’re living in a way that your new heart can’t handle.  The new heart sees the value in love and wants to thrive on it.  It wants to treat people like they’re valuable, and it wants to reflect the love that God shows you back to the people who need it.  If there’s a conflict between your heart’s desire and your lifestyle, of course you’re going to feel it.  It will probably manifest itself in the form of tension (“Why can’t I live the way I want to live?”) or guilt (“I’m such an awful Christian”) or something like that.  But if you’ve ever felt those feelings and wondered where they came from, it’s probably that you weren’t living up to your true identity of someone who loves unconditionally all the time.

Finally, a life of love makes sense because love is everything.  In the often-quoted 1 Corinthians 13, Paul says, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels… If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains… If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I am nothing.”  Ouch.

Let me remind you that “love your neighbor as yourself,” unconditionally and at all times, is the second most important commandment in the entire Bible.  If you don’t understand this, then nothing else matters.  You might as well stop coming to church, stop reading your Bible, and stop caring about God, because according to Paul, all of that stuff is absolutely worthless if you can’t understand the one thing that is truly valuable.  In fact, if you don’t have love, your entire life is worthless.  You are nothing.

This may seem a little harsh; perhaps Paul is exaggerating, something he was known to do on occasion.  But think about it this way.  God’s ultimate purpose is much bigger than me.  He’s engineering the salvation of the whole world.  2 Peter 4 says that he wants everyone to repent and come to knowledge of the truth.  If that’s the scoreboard in the game I talked about earlier, then we’re losing pretty badly.  The score is currently something like “Satan 5 billion, God 1 billion.”  Our side only has two plays in the playbook.  One is God’s Holy Spirit convicting the hearts of people who hear the gospel message.  The other is God’s people showing the same kind of selfless, fanatical love that Christ showed to us.  Anything else we could possibly do is a waste of time.

So how did Jesus do it?

After a couple weeks of figuring out how to say what I wanted to say here, I finally thought it would be best if we took a look at Jesus and what his life of love looked like.  I think it makes sense to do it this way.  After all, Jesus is the one who set the bar so high in the first place.  He’s the only human example of the kind of nonstop lifelong love that we’re talking about.  More than that, the passage in Romans 8 says that the whole rebirthing process is God working to make us more like Jesus.  If we’re going to become like Jesus, then we’d better know what kind of changes God is going to make in us.

I want to say one thing about Jesus before we start.  The Bible teaches that he was 100% man and 100% God.  “How is that possible?” you may wonder.  “Doesn’t that make 200% of a person?”  It should, but God can make one plus one equal one if he wants to; he is God, after all.

This means some very important things; it means that Jesus is the only one whose death could atone for our sins, and it also means he has a direct line to the Father to intercede on our behalf.  However, for the purpose of being born again, it means something else, which is that Jesus went through his entire life with a pure heart.  He wasn’t born with a heart of stone like you and I were, which also means that he didn’t have a lifetime of old habits and selfishness to overcome, like you and I do.  I would argue that this gives him a massively unfair advantage when it comes to loving people, but it also shows why he was uniquely positioned to demonstrate a life of love to the rest of us.  (Actually, we’ll get to experience the same thing when God gives us our eternal reward; 1 Corinthians 15 says that we will be “raised incorruptible.”  Next chapter will have a lengthy discussion of this idea, but I wanted to plant the seed now.)

Jesus’ attitude was compassion

Repeatedly, the writers of the gospels describe Jesus having compassion on people.  Compassion means that other people’s problems hurt Jesus.  He felt their pain as if it was his own.  This is probably why Jesus tells us to love our neighbors the same as we love ourselves.  If you have a problem, you take care of it immediately.  If you’re hungry, you eat.  If you’re upset, you seek comfort.  Compassion, and the whole point of the command to have a life of love, is to treat everyone else’s problems with the same intensity and urgency that you apply to your own problems.

You can see back to back examples of this in Matthew 14 and 15.  In chapter 14, he sees a large crowd of people and felt “compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like a sheep without a shepherd.”  Jesus had never known what it was like to be a sheep without a shepherd; he was one with God, as he says in John 17, but that didn’t stop him from sympathizing with these people for their predicament.  He had compassion on them anyway, felt for them in their affliction, and did what he could to help them out.

Again in Matthew 15, Jesus is out teaching a crowd, and they’ve been out away from civilization for three days.  Jesus says to his disciples, “I have compassion for these people; they have been with me three days and have nothing to eat.”  You may know the rest of the story; the disciples argue that they don’t have enough food for four thousand people, so Jesus takes it upon himself to create the food all by himself.  It’s one of his more dramatic miracles, making food out of thin air.

What’s interesting to me is that to Jesus, every problem was an opportunity to help.  In chapter 14, he healed a bunch of sick people; that’s kind of a big deal.  But in chapter 15, the only problem is that people were hungry.  Given that Jesus’ mission on earth was to reconcile people to God, you might think that having them be hungry for a couple of days is really nothing worth worrying about.  They’ll all survive.  But Jesus didn’t see it that way.  What compassion did to him was make him sensitive to every problem, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, and to take matters into his own hands to do whatever he could to help.

Admittedly, he has a bit of an unfair advantage in this area as well, because you and I will run into some problems if we try to heal sick people or create food with just our bare hands and a prayer.  But the point is not what you can and can’t do; it’s the attitude of compassion.  In fact, Paul says in Philippians 2, “Your attitude should be the same as Christ Jesus.”  Compassion is one of the major things that made up Jesus’ attitude, and it’s exactly what he demands of us when he tells us to love others as ourselves.

Maybe you know some Christians who fall afoul of this command.  They act like salvation is all that matters, and that once you’re saved, you should stop having problems.  I’ve had people tell me to my face that pain and disappointment during a rough time in my life meant that my faith wasn’t strong enough.  I think it’s fairly safe to describe that as a lack of compassion.  Even if it was true (it’s not), how does saying so help the person?  Alternately, some people will see a lost person who’s having problems and not attempt to deal with the problems at all until they get the person saved.  While it may be true that eternity is more important than what happens here on earth, that’s not to say that earthly problems are inconsequential.  If you look at Jesus’ ministry, he spent the vast majority of his time dealing with people’s earthly problems – sickness, hunger, even running out of wine at a wedding.  Reconciling the world to God was the most important thing he did, but he spent a whole lot more time dealing with problems that didn’t have eternal consequences.

Do you remember back in chapter four when I raised the question of whether we do the things that God hates?  Jesus’ example of compassion flies in the face of two of them.  One is selfishness, which is really just a blanket term I’ve been using all along to explain the fact that we’re often blind to other people’s problems and that we tend to think of ourselves first.  The whole point of compassion is to open our eyes to other people’s problems and to treat those problems as seriously as we would if we were the ones dealing with them.

Before God, as I’ve said, we were first place in our own lives.  We did whatever we wanted to do.  The problem we face is that, when God gave us new hearts, he radically redefined our priorities in life.  We are no longer first place; God is (Exodus 20).  We are not even in second place; everyone else on earth is (Philippians 2).  That’s the way our new heart wants to operate, but the old selfishness is so ingrained that we struggle to overcome it.  Seeing other people and their problems is just not something we’re used to doing, but it’s exactly what Jesus did, meaning it’s exactly what we should do.

Also, Jesus’ compassion is a poke in the eye of another major way we fall short, which is apathy.  Be honest, now.  Have you ever seen one of those commercials for the Christian Children’s Fund, the ones that show melodramatic pictures of kids in third-world countries who look on the verge of tears, while the pudgy Santa Claus looking guy explains that we hold the key to getting them proper food and clothing?  And have you ever rolled your eyes at how ridiculously over-the-top those commercials are and how shamelessly they play to a person’s emotions?  That’s apathy in action.  For other examples, look at how the Christian community has responded to issues such as AIDS, poverty, abortion, divorce, and the environment.  It’s been pretty apathetic, hasn’t it?  We have done virtually nothing in contributing constructive solutions to any of those problems or to the people who are struggling with them.  What we have done has been angry finger-pointing and loud moralism, for the most part.  Obviously I’m generalizing a bit, and there have been Christians who have been on the cutting edge of all those issues.  But shouldn’t we have a monopoly on helping the hurting?  If loving others really is the second most important commandment, second only to loving God himself, then doesn’t our apathy indicate that we’ve missed something very important?  Should we really be trailing behind people who still have stone hearts, when it comes to showing compassion?

I think there’s sort of an unspoken fear that caring about people and their problems will be very emotionally draining for us.  No doubt it will.  I told myself that I was not going to use Extreme Makeover: Home Edition to prove any point in this book, and I’m eating my words.  The point of the show is that Ty Pennington and his crew of builders pick a family in need, people who are poor or have had a relative die or are very generous and deserve some kind of reward, and this family’s house gets renovated or completely rebuilt, free of charge.  If you ever watch that show, you know that at the end of it, at least a few of the crew are usually moved to tears, because it’s so wonderful to see a family who is down-and-out suddenly get one of the greatest gifts they will ever receive.  Ty and his crew been doing this week in and week out for ten years or so, and it’s still emotional for them to see the joy and excitement they bring to people who desperately need it.  Time has not dulled Ty’s ability to care about other people, nor has the frequency with which he sees people in dire straits.  The fellow is a compassion machine.  You may think, “I barely have the emotional energy to care about my own problems.  Am I really supposed to take dozens of people and care about their problems the same as my own?”  Well…yes.  It’s what God tells you to do, and he will make you as strong as you need to be.  Do you really think he would give you that command, and then not give you the ability to fulfill it?  Or do you think Ty Pennington and company should be changing more lives than you do?

1 John 4 says that the world would be able to instantly tell Christians apart because of their love for each other.  Is that the kind of love that you’re showing?  Or do you, like me and like pretty much everyone on earth, still have some growing to do in that area?  How are you doing at being compassionate?  Honestly evaluate yourself.  Find out how selfishness and apathy cause you to block out other people’s problems.  Now think about what life would be like if you, if every Christian you knew, went out of their way to help anyone who needed it.  Wouldn’t the world think of Christians a lot differently if we actually had the same attitude that Jesus had?

Jesus understood his priorities

Love was definitely a priority to Jesus.  He went out of his way to help people who had problems.  Being fully human, he had the same hang-ups we have: he got hungry, tired, frustrated, and all kinds of other things.  He had a human body and was subject to its limitations, just like we are.  But he didn’t let those things stop him.  Even when he was totally exhausted, he kept on paying attention to people.  John 4 records him wandering into some town in Samaria, “tired from the journey” according to John.  When a woman comes up, he asks her for a drink, but instead of taking the water she offers and leaning back for a nap, Jesus engages her in a conversation.  “Go fetch your husband,” he tells her; it wasn’t proper for him to speak with a woman by himself, but you’ll note that it didn’t stop him from doing so.  She replies that she has no husband, and Jesus says, “You’re right; you’ve had five, and the man you’re with now isn’t your husband.”  After they talk for more, she’s so impressed with what he says that she runs and tells the whole town, which flocks to Jesus en masse.  He rolled into town tired, yet still had a deeply emotional conversation with a hurting woman, resulting in hundreds or thousands of people mobbing him, looking to hear more of what he had to say.  That’s what I mean when I say that he had his priorities right.

Jesus knew that his mission was to reconcile the world to God.  He started with acts of love, to open people’s eyes to the fact that God really cares about them, and then he concluded with the ultimate act of love, allowing himself to be put to death so that God could punish him for our sins instead of punishing us.  That was the entire reason he was sent to earth.  In fact, you and I have exactly the same mission.  2 Corinthians 5 says that we’ve been tasked with the “ministry of reconciliation,” the same ministry that Jesus had.  As I mentioned earlier in the chapter, God’s goal is to bring everyone on earth to faith in him.  He wants everybody to believe and accept Christ, so once he gives us a new heart, we become his tools to bring more people to him.  The key difference between us and Jesus, obviously, is that we won’t be crucified to satisfy God’s wrath the way Jesus was.  However, look at how Jesus pursued reconciliation: acts of love, and then the ultimate act of love.  If God doesn’t ask us to do the second of those, doesn’t it mean he places even more emphasis on the first, on those acts of love which we can do?

There’s a catchphrase in the business world, known as Parkinson’s Law, which states, “A task expands to fill the time allowed.”  What this means for my life is that, if I place myself first on the priority list, I’m never going to have time to love people.  I come home from school or work, I’m tired, and I want to relax.  So I change clothes, turn on the TV, check my email, bum around on Facebook or Myspace, and before I know it, it’s bedtime.  My tasks expanded to fill the time I allowed for them.  What if loving people was one of my tasks, and in fact the most important of them?  What if it was the one thing I made time for, even before the things I wanted to do?

I mean, it’s not like the things I’m watching on TV or browsing on the internet are more important than loving people.  They’re not.  It’s just that I don’t make time for love, I don’t Sharpie it into my schedule and guard that time jealously, so I never get around to doing it.  My priorities are backward from Jesus’.  Rather than putting other people first, I put myself and my own relaxation first.  I mean, I’ve lived in this apartment for nine months and I don’t even know my neighbors’ names.  Obviously they’re not really a priority for me.  I might have been able to help them with some of the difficulties they’ve had in the last nine months, but I’ve been too busy being selfish to walk twenty feet and knock on their door to introduce myself.  Ouch.  I wish I was the only person who failed so miserably at this; I wish I was a shining example of how not to do things.  But I think that I’m probably the norm rather than the exception.

Do you see how the themes of apathy and selfishness come up again?  Is there any explanation, other than those two, for why I have not made any attempt to show the most basic concern for my neighbors?  I haven’t exactly sat on my hands during this time, by the way; I’ve mentored teens at my church, given money to people who needed it, counseled friends who were going through depression; every once in a while I’ll get off my duff and sacrifice a little time and energy.  I could sit back and congratulate myself for all the things I did.  But I certainly can’t claim to be loving the people in my apartment building the same as I love myself.  I’ve fallen far short of Jesus’ command to me.  My life is still basically structured around me.  It may be harsh to say it this way, but I simply don’t care about other people, at least not enough to assign them a priority higher than my own amusement and relaxation.

Jesus worked toward unity

God is really up to something impressive with the world.  When he says he wants the entire world to be reconciled to him, what he’s really saying is that he wants us all to be unified.  One world worshiping one God – that’s what God had in mind when he created the world, and that’s what our eternal future will look like as well.  How impossibly huge is this task?  Look at all the things people find to disagree about.  A quick Google search for the word “debate” turns up a hundred and fifty million pages.  “Argument” turns up another hundred and forty million.  We can’t really be surprised by this.  If people are born basically selfish, as I’ve argued, and you put six billion people on earth who are motivated by “me first,” then conflict is inevitable.  Everybody can’t be first.  But, thankfully, Christians have this unity thing figured out, and are completely free from conflict with other people.

Okay, stop laughing.  You know as well as I do that Christians are far from conflict-free.  We fight with non-Christians who have lifestyles we don’t like, and we fight with other Christians who have different ideas about the Bible and the way we should do church.  As the great philosopher Forrest Gump might have said, Christians and conflict go together like peas and carrots.

That’s what makes Jesus’ focus on unity so amazing.  In Matthew 18, Jesus gives a formula for resolving conflict.  It’s one of the few formulas that Jesus, or the Bible for that matters, ever gives.  (Read Donald Miller’s book Searching For God Knows What if you want to read more about the lack of formulas in the Bible, and because it’s a phenomenal piece of writing.  That book has been one of the greatest helps to me on my own spiritual walk.)  In fact, this formula is so common that virtually every church uses it as their model for conflict resolution, at least in theory.  If you’re in the mood for a giggle, pick a few churches at random from the phone book and call them to find out about how they handle conflict, and see how many of them point you to Matthew 18.

So what exactly is in that chapter?  Well, starting in verse 15, Jesus says that if you have a conflict with a person, you should confront them about it and give them the chance to repent.  “If he listens to you,” Jesus says, “you have won your brother over.”  Please catch that he doesn’t say to go to your brother, with name-calling, accusations, anger, or bitterness.  The point is to “win your brother over,” which does not mean proving him wrong or winning an argument, because winning an argument means that someone wins and someone loses.  The point is to reconcile, because when you reconcile, both people win.  If your brother still doesn’t listen to you, then Jesus says to go back with two or three other people, and try again to achieve reconciliation.  If he still doesn’t listen to you, then you’re supposed to make the issue known to the entire church, and try again to reconcile.  The point is unity.  It’s not establishing who’s right and who’s wrong.  Doing that is just as sinful as whatever the brother did to create the conflict in the first place.

In fact, back in chapter four, I highlighted “a critical spirit” and “the need to be ‘right’” as two of the ways that we do things God hates.  Both of those things contribute to conflict rather than unity.  An eagerness to argue will destroy a life of love.  2 Timothy 2 says, “The Lord’s servant must not quarrel; instead, he must be kind to everyone.”  I don’t think it can be said more plainly.

I don’t like being wrong.  Even being right is not good enough for me if other people think I’m wrong.  What’s behind that urge?  Why is the need to be “right” so strong and pervasive?  I think it comes back to the selfishness thing I mentioned earlier: I want people to think as highly of me as I think of me.  Maybe I’m right about that and maybe I’m wrong; I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter.  But I know a lot of people struggle with this.  Try it in conversation sometime.  Drop a hint that you think someone is wrong about something they think they’re right about.  See how quickly and strongly they defend themselves.  Better still, tell one of your friends to try it on you sometime.  See how you take the bait.

If you want to pursue unity, you have to kill that desire to be right.  Murder it in cold blood.  Your mission is to reconcile people to God, and nothing else matters.  Remember what I said about tasks expanding to fill the time allowed?  If you have time to argue with people about silly and inconsequential things, it means you’re not devoting enough time to reconciliation – either earthly conflict reconciliation, or bringing people back to God.  If you devote the proper amount of time to that, there will be no time left in your schedule for disagreements with people.

Since Philippians 2 says that our attitude should be the same as Jesus’, what kind of attitude will create unity?  The biggest thing we can possibly do is to keep sight of what’s important.  Jesus never lost sight of his mission.  He knew that love was more important than anything else he could have spent time doing.  He could have boycotted businesses that hired homosexuals, or led protest marches against the religious leaders he disagreed with, or spent all his time slandering the people who refused to believe in him.  But he didn’t do any of those things.  He just kept on seeking out people who had problems, and doing whatever he could to help their problems.  That created unity; people flocked to his love.  It also meant he had no time to sow disunity, even if he wanted to.  Conflict is merely evidence that a person has been sidetracked from what is really important.  Christians should have no time to fight, not with anyone and especially not amongst ourselves.

Ephesians 6 says, “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against…the powers of this dark world and the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”  If you’re fighting with a person, you’re already doing it wrong.  Your goal is not to win arguments, be right, or somehow logic people into agreeing with you.  Your goal is to reconcile people to God, and you pursue that by showing love to whoever you can, whenever you can, however you can.  Only that will create true unity.

Jesus showed love equally to everyone

God help us all; we mess this one up so badly.

Literally, just a moment ago, I was reading an article in the New York Times about gay arriage, and it quoted a pastor in New England who was arranging for his congregation to go protest gay marriage. I wanted to ask him, “Really? You’re called to love everybody on earth unconditionally, and the best way you can think of to do this is to protest the people who disagree with you?”

The problem is that, many times, we get obsessed by the things we disapprove of, or the things that God disapproves of, and we let those things interfere with the way we treat people. I call this “holding a person’s sin in front of their face.”  Everyone has a face, and when you think of them, that’s what you should see.  The problem comes when you think of a person and you think of something else, some sin, instead of the fact that they’re a human being who desperately needs God’s love.  Obviously this is really dangerous, because it interferes with our ability to see those people as God sees them.  I’m going to run with gay marriage a bit, not because I feel like it’s all that important, but just because that pastor has me thinking about it. The same thing applies to any sin on earth. Just remove “gay marriage” and replace it with whatever sin you disapprove of people for doing.

What’s behind our disapproval of gay marriage anyway? On the surface it seems noble. God is against homosexuality, so we are too. I want to suggest that our motivations are actually selfish. What we really want is for everybody to think and act the way that we’re comfortable with them thinking and acting. Oh sure, God is in the picture, but he’s really an afterthought. Do you honestly think gay marriage is a major issue to God? Do you think he gives half a care whether lost people are going to hell with rings on their hands or not?

What we have successfully done is take something that’s a terribly minor issue and blow it way out of proportion, distorting people’s image of Christianity so that they perceive it to be about angry disapproval and moralism, and alienating millions of people from ever hearing the true gospel of Christ, because we’ve filthied his name by association with our misguided crusade. Am I supposed to think this is the way Jesus would want his church interacting with the people who most need him as savior? Do we really have time to love homosexuals, doctors who perform abortions, our political opponents, drunks, spouse abusers, child molesters, or anybody else if all we can do is rant about how God disapproves of them?

You may object that you’ve never been on a protest march, spoken an angry word from a pulpit, or loudly voiced disapproval for those people whose behavior offends God. I say it doesn’t matter. Jesus observed in Matthew 5 that if you hate someone in your heart, it’s the same as if you’ve already murdered them. If that spirit of disapproval is in your heart, there’s already something competing with love, which is supposed to occupy your entire heart. And, if you’ll remember back to chapter 4, God hates anything that gets in the way of his people loving him or loving each other unconditionally, because those are the things that compose your identity as someone who has been, and is being, born again.

In fact, I keep coming back to that word “unconditionally.” Our disapproval of certain behaviors is nothing more than conditional love. We’re telling those people that we won’t love or accept them unless they act the way we want them to act. They have to earn our love. I want to point out that this is the most un-Christlike attitude in the entire universe. God did not command that you get everything squared away before he poured his love out on you. He didn’t tell you to make yourself perfect before he would offer you salvation. All we do when we disapprove of people is hold them to a higher standard than what God is holding them to – and what God held us to.

Look again at 2 Corinthians 5.  We’re tasked with the “ministry of reconciliation.”  Note that we’re not tasked with a “ministry of disapproval,” nor even a “ministry of morality.” We’re told to do whatever is necessary to bring people to faith in their creator God. Do we accomplish that by giving those people the impression that God regards them as misfits and outcasts?  Paul says in that same chapter, “I earnestly plead with you: be reconciled to God!” What credibility do I have with anyone when I plead for them to come to God? Are anger and disapproval going to make people listen to me when I start talking to them about God?  I think you will find, just like Jesus found, that pure unconditional love is the most powerful force in the universe.

How does this come back to the issue I keep talking about, which is selfishness? It’s intimately connected. I’m calling for a massive rethinking of the way we as Christians see the people who are living in sin. Right now, you and I treat people based on the way we see their lifestyle, their sin. That’s selfish. Treating people based on our opinion of them is conditional love, and is the opposite of the way God treated us before we were saved. Instead, God calls us to see even the people we disagree with as people who need reconciliation to him. It doesn’t matter what I think about their lifestyle. The only thing I’m supposed to understand is that they need God, and they’re going to meet him through my love, not through my disapproval.

I want to raise a couple of major points. The first is that Jesus calls us to respond to every single person on earth with unconditional love at all times. If you believe your faith calls you to respond with disapproval or moralism, then your faith is broken. You’re called to love, and that’s it. Believe it or not, you’re not even called to tell people that what they’re doing is wrong at all. Your task is not to convict people; you can’t do that if you try. That job belongs to the Holy Spirit. Let God do what he does, and you just worry about you. You’ve got a hard enough time removing all the sins from your own life without turning your attention on other people.

Second, what happens in my heart if I spend all my time focusing my attention outwardly on people who I think God is angry at? How does it help me be born again if I’m constantly fostering anger, bitterness, and hostility in my own heart? Do those things help me become more like Jesus? No, they actually lead me in the exact opposite direction. My Godly identity, as I have been saying all along, is to be someone who loves everyone unconditionally at all times. Anything that gets in the way of that is the worst kind of sin. That’s what makes this particular issue heartbreaking for me. I see well-meaning Christians feeding the fires of selfish anger while convincing themselves that it’s all for God. They’re willingly choosing to live in the old heart rather than be reborn into unconditional love, and they think this is perfectly acceptable.

I’ve heard angry preachers who seem to base their entire ministry around “holy disapproval.” Many times, they point to Jesus’ actions in Matthew 21, where he went romping into the temple and drove out all the people who were selling things in the temple. “See,” I’ve heard more than once, “Jesus got angry. We have to call it like we see it.” That’s great and all, but anger wasn’t Jesus’ ministry. How did he treat Jairus? How did he treat the prostitutes, tax collectors, and lepers that he encountered? He didn’t just love them; he went miles out of his way to love them. He sought out the worst sinners in all of society for the sole purpose of paying attention to them and letting them know that they matter. His anger wasn’t directed at them. His anger was only for the people who were using God’s house, the temple, for the wrong purposes, furthering their own selfish ends while paying lip service to God. If Jesus came back today, it seems to me he would be much angrier at disapproving Christians than he would at the people we’re disapproving of. After all, we’re the ones who are supposed to know better.

As an afterthought, look how Jesus approached the issue of sin. Take John 8 as an example. A bunch of Pharisees catch a woman in adultery – literally in the act of it – and drag her before Jesus to see what he would say. You probably know the story; he agrees that she should die for what she did, but says, “Whoever among you is without any sin, let him cast the first stone.” After they have all slinked away, he tells the woman, “Go now and leave your life of sin.” He showed her mercy, and then he told her to leave her life of sin. I think we get it backward a lot of the time. We scream for people to leave their life of sin, as a prerequisite for receiving our mercy. Maybe we should think about doing it Jesus’ way.

We just got done talking about compassion, right?  When you see someone whose lifestyle you disagree with, try and hold off on the finger-pointing for five seconds.  Have compassion instead.  Think about the fact that they don’t know God’s love the way you do, that they don’t have the hope and comfort that comes from God’s promise of an eternal reward.  They’re adrift, “like sheep without a shepherd” to quote Jesus, lost and confused and hurting.  And you, fellow Christian, might be the only person in their life who can show them that they matter to you and to God.

Do you want to know a little secret? People like being loved. They like being treated like they matter. People want to be around someone who treats them like that. If a person knows that you love them, they’ll be a lot more likely to listen when you start talking about God stuff.

I’m not making any of this up, by the way; it all comes from how Jesus treated people who were living in sin. Luke 19 tells of Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus, who according to the song I learned when I was four, “was a wee little man, who climbed up in a sycamore tree” because he really, really wanted to see what this whole Jesus business was all about. (Side note: when was the last time that anyone in your church was so loving that strangers started climbing trees just for a better look at you?) When Zacchaeus finally got Jesus’ attention, did Jesus sit down and go over the Romans Road with him? No, they went to Zacchaeus’ house for dinner. Two interesting things happened. Whatever was said at dinner must have been pretty good, because it prompted Zacchaeus to change his entire lifestyle. But you’ll note that Jesus’ love came first, and Zacchaeus’ life change came second. Also, the religious leaders got mad at Jesus because he dared to spend time with a sinner. Jesus didn’t play the finger-wagging moralism game that the religious leaders thrived on, and they didn’t appreciate it. But look how effective Jesus was, compared to how effective the finger-wagging was.

Think of the way you treat people who you disagree with.  Now say, “What if God had treated me that way before I was saved?”  Maybe you don’t stand up in the street and scream about how they’re going to hell; maybe you just ignore them.  There’s no difference.  Pay attention to people you’ve been ignoring.  Go out of your way to befriend the people who most need it.  Spend some time with them, say kind words to them.  Don’t worry about the consequences.  Just do what Jesus commands you to do.

Jesus was vulnerable

One thing that’s probably been running through your head as you read this is the fact that the act of loving people can be tough, not because you don’t want to, but because people are frequently very reluctant to talk about things they need help with.  I talked about this idea in chapter 4, where I referred to it as “self-reliance.”  It’s like we see needing help as a sign that we’ve failed at life.  I know this is true of me personally.  There are plenty of situations where I could have used someone’s help, and could have provided them with an opportunity to show me love and become more like Christ, but for some reason, I have a very hard time admitting that I need someone else to lend me a hand.

I think the reason (big surprise coming up here) is selfishness, wanting to feel like I can handle things myself and wanting other people to think of me as a person who has it pretty much all together.  The thing is, I’m not, and everyone already knows it.  But that temptation to keep up the façade is so strong that I give in to it almost every time.  Just now I checked my bank account and, between checking and savings, I have about eight dollars.  You would think that now would be an optimal time to ask for help from somebody, but I’m busy making excuses for why I can’t.  I have two credit cards with plenty of balance left; I’ll just use them until the next check comes.  So what if by that point I’ll have a thousand dollars worth of credit card debt that I’ll spend the rest of the summer paying off.  I can handle it myself, by golly.  I can survive on microwave dinners and white bread for the next couple of weeks.

I can almost hear God sighing at the fact that I still don’t understand.

Jesus was very vulnerable with his disciples, which is strange to me.  He was fully God, after all.  People for thousands of years were going to look at him and make conclusions about what God was like.  Yet Jesus allowed his disciples to see him exhausted, hungry, frustrated, annoyed, sleepy, weeping, and joyful.  At least one of them, John, stuck around long enough to see him whipped, beaten, and nailed to a cross, where he hung for hours, gasping for breath in unimaginable physical and emotional pain.  And this is the picture of God that Jesus left us.  Not exactly what you think God would look like, huh?

In fact, it’s so counterintuitive that when Jesus showed up, a lot of people had a hard time believing that he was really the Messiah at all.  They were looking for someone who would be strong, the consummate man’s man who would rise up with military strength and free Israel from Roman oppression.  If you heard that God was coming to earth, I bet that’s what you would be looking for as well.  That’s because the old heart selfishly equates individual strength with success.  If you lack strength, the old heart says, you must be doing something wrong.  The idea that we need other people is pretty foreign.

However, I talked earlier in the book about the fact that we were made for community.  God exists in tri-unity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Each of them has different roles, and if I may be so bold, each needs the other.  The Father needed the Son to come to earth and be crucified.  The Son needs the Spirit to work in people’s hearts so that they understand the need for a savior.  They’re all inter-reliant.

Besides, you’ve already admitted that you’re an utter failure at life.  Your salvation came when you observed that, despite your best efforts, you made a total mess out of everything you touched, that you screwed things up and are utterly incapable of saving yourself.  You’re already used to the idea of needing help.  Why should that need be a one-time event?

Let me also remind you that the entire chapter up to this point has focused on the fact that we’re commanded to love other people, to find ways we can make them feel valued and do things to help them.  What will happen if every person we talk to stubbornly refuses to admit that they need any help?  We won’t be able to love them very well.  Yet we can do the same thing to other people if we’re too self-reliant; we can deprive them of a chance to exercise their new heart, to put our needs above their own, and to show us God’s love.

Maybe it’s just a me thing, but the idea of someone putting my needs above their own is really what trips me up here.  I don’t think anyone should do that.  I’m capable of taking care of myself, thank you very much, and if I’m not then I’m capable of enduring a little unhappiness until things turn around.  I’ve already told you that I have major self-esteem problems and that I despise myself on pretty much a daily basis.  Someone putting my needs above their own seems like the biggest waste of time and energy I can think of.  If I had to be honest about it, I would say that I just don’t think I’m worth it.  I want to be wrong about that, but if I don’t value myself, it’s hardly reasonable to expect other people to do it.  Sadly, I don’t think this gives me carte blanche to love other people as little as I love myself.

It also tells me that there’s something wrong with my attitude.  If Jesus had no problem being vulnerable, and my attitude is supposed to be the same as his, then I have some fixing to do.  I have to put away my selfish desire to do things on my own.  I think what this really means is that I have to start seeing the challenges that God places in my life as opportunities for other people to love me, rather than as challenges that I have to overcome.  I’m so used to approaching these things from the point of view of the old heart, which says that I have to stand alone or else I fall.  It’s not easy to take God’s word for it when he says, “No no, you have it backwards.  You lean on me and the people I’ve put in your life, or else you fall.”  This is definitely one area where I have to be daily born again.

I hope, if you have a hard time being vulnerable as well, you’ll ask yourself, “Why do I feel like this is such a threat to me?  Why do I react so poorly to being in a situation of need?”  Ask yourself and ask God those questions, and see what he says.

Apart from the fact that we’re supposed to, there’s another really neat benefit to being vulnerable with people.  If you communicate your needs to the people around you, and then God does something neat to deliver you, now there’s a whole crowd of people who can praise God along with you.  The community aspect of praise is often neglected, but there are so many times in the Bible when praise was a group activity.  Moses’ and Miriam’s song after God parted the Red Sea is one of them, found in Exodus 15.  By involving your community in your needs, and therefore in your praise, you’re actually helping other people love God better by giving them even more things to celebrate.

God’s power is best revealed in situations that human effort could not possibly resolve.  The more impossible the problem, the more dramatic God’s solution is, and that makes people realize that no one other than God could have been responsible.  The question is, when you face an impossible problem, how do you respond to it?  With vulnerability and a willingness to involve the people who are close to you, or with a stubborn and selfish desire to handle everything on your own?  Your attitude should be the same as Jesus’, and he was vulnerable to the end.

Jesus was relentless

Have you ever tried to be nice to someone and they didn’t want anything to do with you?  Or you tried to be nice to a person, but someone else got mad at you for it?  Those are two of the most discouraging things that can happen to a person, especially one who is just getting serious about this whole life of love thing.  It’s almost enough to not make you want to do it anymore.

It had that effect on me, for sure.  I was an education major in college, and I did my student teaching at a truly wretched small town in Indiana.  More than half of the kids had only one parent in the house; usually it was the dad who was missing.  Over half of them were below the poverty line.  I asked one of my students what she wanted to do when she grew up, and she wanted to work at the Red Gold tomato canning plant in town.  That was the only thing most of these kids had to look forward to.  It was also a very backward town.  My supervising teacher told me that, not too long ago, several of her students had brought in their membership certificates for the Junior Knights of the KKK.  It was a town that badly needed some of the hope and love that Jesus has to offer.

I came into this situation as a new Christian, convinced that Jesus loved everybody and thought they were important.  So, I treated the kids that way.  I listened when they talked to me, knowing that probably nobody at home did the same for them.  I laughed at their jokes, encouraged them, and waved goodbye at the end of the day.  I would like to think that any Christian would have done the same thing in that situation.

But the principal came to me with bad news: some people were worried at how much the students liked me.  He said it looked bad that I spent so much time with the kids, and asked me to leave and not come back.  I was devastated; I didn’t even get to say goodbye.  I was just one more person who walked out on those kids for no reason that they would ever understand.  More than that, I was upset at the questions that were asked about my character; no one accused me of doing anything improper with the kids, of course, but the suggestion that I might be that kind of person really made my blood boil.  I cruised through the rest of my student teaching, at a different school, with my mind on autopilot and my heart disengaged.  This wasn’t supposed to happen.  People aren’t supposed to respond to Christian love in that way.

Jesus was no stranger to this feeling either.  One of the most heartbreaking examples is in Luke 13, where Jesus cries, “Oh Jerusalem, how I longed to gather your children together, like a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!”  Jesus was the Messiah, the deliverer who God promised to the Jews.  Thousands of passages of Old Testament prophecy deal with the coming of this Messiah, and when he finally arrived, the very people who were expecting him ignored and persecuted him.  Being fully God, Jesus knew that this would happen, but being fully man, it tore him apart.  He came to his own people with a message of hope and salvation, and they should have come running to him with open arms, ecstatic that after hundreds of years, the promise was finally fulfilled.  But they turned their backs and hardened their hearts.

Look at God the Father.  We’ve already talked a lot in this book about how God’s love is unfailing.  Even when you and God were separated by a wall of sin, he still loved you.  He offered you his salvation knowing full well that you would continue to break his heart by sinning dozens or hundreds of times a day.  He continues to forgive every day, knowing that tomorrow will be no different.  We ignore him, disrespect him, refuse to tell people about him, worship him halfheartedly, sing songs without meaning the words, pray selfishly in the hopes of getting blessings.  We’re pretty terrible children, to be really honest.  But does there ever come a time when God gives an ultimatum?  “Alright kids, get it together or I’m cutting off the love.”  Not even close.  He’s relentless.  Certainly no earthly discouragement we face could ever compare with what we do to God.  If he finds no reason to stop loving us, far be it from us to find reasons to stop loving other people.

In fact, any attempt to do so is nothing more than selfishness.  If there ever comes a point when I say, “I really want to help my friend, but it costs too much/will take too much time/isn’t worth it/they never pay me back,” or anything like that, all you’re doing is saying that you’re more important than they are.  Your time or money or whatever matters more to you than that person’s problem.

Surely God could have decided that it wasn’t worth it to subject Jesus to a human life, if his only reward was going to be billions of terrible children who can’t stop messing up.  But thankfully for all of us, God didn’t do a cost-benefit analysis.  If he had, we would all still be doomed to hell, because the blood of Jesus is worth infinitely more than our pathetic souls ever will be.  Try remembering that the next time you’re tempted, for any reason, not to do everything you can to love someone.

The fact is that there’s no good reason, ever, not to love someone.  We’re commanded to love unconditionally at all times; this is the second greatest commandment in the entire Bible.  We cannot ignore love.  It is who we are; it is what our new heart wants to do.  We must be relentless.

If we really wanted to, we could find plenty of reasons not to love people, all of which seem valid.  Maybe there’s great cost; maybe the person doesn’t want anything to do with us; maybe someone objects.  But if our greatest purposes in life are to love God and to love other people, then none of these reasons can measure up.  Nothing else will satisfy us like being conformed to the image of Christ.

When you attempt to love people, there will be barriers.  Find ways around them.  If you truly don’t have money to help out someone in need, surely there is something you can do that doesn’t involve spending money.  If you truly don’t have time to mow a neighbor’s lawn, maybe you can make a few phone calls and find someone else who would do it.  If you try to show love and the person gets upset, you can find some other way to show love.  Use the wisdom God gave you.  Find ways to be true to your new identity.

In my case, after trying to do what was right and having it backfire so badly, I was quite tempted to stop trying to love at all.  “If this is the reaction I get, then it’s not worth it.  I’ll find something else I can do.”  But God didn’t let me stop; he kept that desire alive in me, and ultimately got me involved in youth ministry, which I’ve done ever since and has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life.  You’ll find that it’s always fulfilling to live out of your new heart and be true to your identity.

In Jesus’ case, even as he was being crucified, he still took time to show love to the people around him.  One of the men being crucified with him said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” and Jesus says, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Even while dying, he delivered salvation, hope, and comfort.  A little later, Jesus saw his mother grieving, and told John to take care of her and treat her like his own mother.  He took the time to perceive other people’s needs and find ways to meet them.  Any time you think, “I don’t know how to show love,” remember that even hanging on a tree didn’t stop Jesus from finding ways to love people.

No price is too high and no discouragement too great.  There is never a good reason not to show love to someone.  Jesus knew those things, and that’s what made him so relentless.  We’re called to show the same kind of love, both because it’s true to our new heart and because God has tasked us with reconciling the world to him through it.

Sometimes, like in my example, you’ll run into situations where it’s simply not possible for you to continue loving a person.  Some people are so baffled by unconditional love that they’ll push you away because they don’t know how to handle it.  It’s worlds away from how they’ve always been treated.  If that ever happens, it means you’re doing something right.  The message of Jesus, pure and unconditional love to everybody, is revolutionary and backwards to someone with a stone heart.  They can’t make sense of it, and sometimes they will react badly because they assume you must have some hidden agenda they don’t know about.  Please don’t be discouraged when this happens.  Keep talking to God and asking him what he wants you to do.  Sometimes he will have you go back to the person and keep trying.  Sometimes he will show you a new person or group of people to focus on instead.  If you’ve got a life of worship and praise, and you’re talking to God on a regular basis, he’ll let you know.

If love is the most powerful force in the universe, then even a stone heart is no match for it.  I hope we can all be as relentless as Jesus was, and I hope that when love and a stone heart collide, love will always be the victor.

Concluding Thoughts

At the beginning of this chapter, I explained why it’s difficult for me to love people – they’re a source of frustration, annoyance, pain, and anger for me.  That’s how I see humanity: a giant blob of far-from-perfect souls, most of whom don’t give a rip about becoming any more perfect than they currently are.  But is that how God sees humanity?

It doesn’t seem that way.  God carefully and patiently knit each and every human together in their mother’s womb (Psalm 139).  He loved each of us long before we were ever born, and he continues to love us even when we spend our lives in full-on rebellion against him.  He never stops pursuing us, never stops inviting us into a relationship with him.  He’s fully entitled to treat us like a source of frustration and all the other things I just said, but he doesn’t see us that way.  He sees us as his people.  He created us all; we all come from him, and we all exist because he lovingly thought us up and then built us from scratch.  We’re all God’s people – and he wants us back.

If that is God’s attitude toward humanity, and my attitude is supposed to be the same as Jesus’ (who was fully God, so he had the same attitude), then I need a serious change of perspective.  The very way I think of humanity is a sin, and God demands that I repent and see things his way.  Who am I to argue?

And when you understand how God sees humanity, you begin to understand the necessity of loving every single person on the planet as well as you possibly can.  Whoever you encounter, no matter how ugly their past or how messy their lifestyle, they’re still one of God’s people, who he made and who he loves, and who he wants a relationship with.  He didn’t put us here to wag our fingers at those people and tell them how badly they’re messing up.  He put us here so that we can play an integral role in pointing those people back to the God who dreamed them up and still wants to hold them close.  It starts by understanding that they matter to God, because if they matter, then I have to treat them like they matter.  I owe it to myself and to them to pay time and attention to them, to encourage them, to build them up, to help them however I can, no matter what I personally might think of what they’re doing.  At the end of the day, my personal opinion matters absolutely zero.  The only opinion that matters is God’s, and he has said that he wants a personal relationship with every human on the planet.  A life of love is one of the major tools he uses to make that known to people who don’t know him.  Or, as a Christian named W.J. Toms once said, “Be careful how you live; you may be the only Bible some person ever reads.”

Even beyond this, a life of love is what you want for yourself.  The new heart God gave you when you were born again is purpose-built to show love to God and to other people.  Love is your new identity and one of the two most important commands you’re given.  If you’re not living a life of love, you will probably know that something is wrong, that you are not receiving everything the Christian life has to give.  Philippians 2 does say, “He has given you the desire and the power to do what pleases him.”  You desire to love him.  It’s the core of who you are now.  Your heart doesn’t put itself first anymore, so when you can live in a way that you’re not first, it’s deeply fulfilling to you.

I think you can see why it’s so important to be reborn in this area.  The old heart’s belief, that it came first and everyone else came later if they came at all, has to die.  So does the belief that it’s okay for us to treat people based on what we think of them, instead of based on the fact that God loves them.  We require rebirth if we’re to be the people of love that God created us to be.  We have to let God take those things away from us, to be replaced by selfless and unconditional love.

I want you to take a moment, just between you and God, to evaluate yourself on how you’re living up to Jesus’ example.  How do you do at showing compassion?  Do you have your priorities right?  Do you show love to people regardless of what you think of them?  Are you relentless with your love?

I hope the answers are more encouraging for you than they were for me, but at the same time, failing the pop quiz is not the end of the story.  Becoming aware that we need rebirth is the first step to being reborn.

Let me close this chapter with a story to illustrate a few of the things I talked about in this story.  I got a letter the other day from my mom, with a check for $300 in it.  My mom loves giving people stuff; she really doesn’t make very much money, but somehow, she still finds enough to give some away, or to buy things for people.  In the letter that accompanied it, she mentioned that my stepdad will be undergoing hip replacement surgery soon.  “Money will be really tight then,” she wrote, “so I’m glad I have it now!”

I fought back tears while reading that, because my mom understands something about love that I doubt I ever will.  If I knew that money was going to be tight in the near future, I would be saving everything I could.  That’s not wrong; in fact, there’s a lot of Biblical wisdom in the idea of saving for a rainy day.  But mom, in her selflessness, chose to give away what little she had.  In doing so, she’s setting herself up for a double blessing.  First, she gets the satisfaction of giving me money and seeing me enjoy it.  Second, she gets to see how God will take care of her and provide for her during the time when money is short.  Who knows what people he will use, and from what unexpected source he will give her money or groceries or other blessings.  But she’s about to find out, because she understood selfless love.  When I look at examples like that, I have a good picture of just how far I have to go.

As we seek to follow Jesus’ example, I can only imagine the impact that we’ll have on the world.

Chapter 7: The Final Rebirth

I decided, almost as soon as I started this book, that I was going to end by talking about eternity.  To me, eternity is vastly underrated as a teaching in the church.  I cling to the hope of Revelation 21 and 22, which talk about what eternity will be like, because that’s the whole reason for everything we do.  Salvation means nothing without talk of what we’re saved from (sin, which we’ve talked about extensively already) and what we’re saved into.  We’re saved into a lifetime of worship and praise and unconditional love here on earth, but we’re also saved into the hope of an amazing eternal reward.  Colossians 2 actually refers to the message of the gospel as “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”  Hope here does not mean wishful thinking, like “I hope I win the lottery,” but rather a confident expectation of a better future.  2 Corinthians 5 makes reference to the Holy Spirit being a deposit, a down-payment, until we receive our full inheritance later on.  The full inheritance, obviously, is our eternal reward, which is awesome almost beyond words.

This is what the whole Bible is building toward.  Romans 8 says that creation is groaning under the weight of what sin has done to it.  The earth and everything in it yearn for the day when God will have his final victory over the forces of sin, death, decay, pain, fear, uncertainty, disappointment, regret, bitterness, and failure.  A thorough dissection of the end of Revelation will give us a better understanding of what God has in mind when he’s talking about rebirth, and what exactly he is spending this lifetime preparing us for.

Oddly enough, though, my dissection of Revelation begins in 2 Peter.  When God decides that the time has come, he’s going to inaugurate eternity by completely destroying this current creation and making everything over again. 2 Peter 3 says, “That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat.”  Revelation 21 then picks up from this point by saying, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.”  Passed away is right; God blew them up and melted them with fire.  I think he does this just to put an exclamation mark on the history of the world.  It shows that God is all about rebirth, from beginning to end.  He took my dead heart, tore it out, and gave me one that was alive instead.  Then he takes the dead world, which was crippled by sin and bears the memory of humanity’s failure, and he says, “No more of this.”  He tears the universe apart and reconstructs it from scratch.  Being born again is not just, as Jesus said, the way to enter the Kingdom of God.  It’s God’s entire plan for all of creation – every man, woman, and child, and even the earth and the galaxies themselves.

One thing that fascinated me about this verse is that God recreates new heavens and a new earth.  The new earth is for humanity to live on, as you’ll see momentarily.  But why would he bother making new heavens?  What’s the point of having galaxies so far away that we won’t be able to see them from our eternal home?

Isaiah 6 provides the answer.  “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!  The whole earth is full of his glory!”  Not just the whole earth, even, but everything that has been made.  Psalm 8 adds, “I consider your heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and stars which you have set in place.”  Those things all exist to give us reason to worship God.  When we see what God has made, we understand that only a really mighty God could have made them, and so we worship.  So it will be in eternity as well.  God’s purpose with creation is not utilitarian; it exists to proclaim his glory, not merely to be used by us.

Now seems as good a time as any to address what the purpose for eternity is.  The Westminster Catechism, a book of spiritual questions and answers dating from the 1700s, suggests, “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”  That’s exactly accurate.  Maybe you’ve never actually pondered the reason for eternity, which is why so many people have the misconception that we’ll be lazily standing around singing praise songs to God for eternity.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Singing music is only one (very poor) way to glorify God.  There are innumerable other ways, which I’ll point out to you as this chapter progresses, but that’s what I want you to know.  The point of eternity is to show our respect to God through everything that we do.

We have a difficult time glorifying God now, because of all the selfishness and other junk that trip us up when we try to live the right kind of life.  Thankfully, it’s not always going to be that way.  When God recreates earth and the heavens, he’s going to give us all brand new bodies, referred to as glorified or resurrection bodies.  Then he’s going to unleash us on this new earth.

This promise, of a new body for the resurrection, is something that the apostle Paul considered absolutely crucial to the Christian faith.  He said, “If it’s only for this life that we have hope, then we are to be pitied more than anyone else alive!”  The hope of the next life was the thing that kept him going.  Paul’s life sucked.  He got beaten repeatedly, whipped, flogged, hunted down, chased out of cities, you name it.  Following Jesus cost him everything.  I think that explains why he was so eager for this new body, which had none of the flaws of his earthly body (most people think Paul was bow-legged and suffered from seizures) so that he could get on with experiencing life the way God had originally intended for it to be.

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul talks extensively about this resurrection body.  The main thing you should know is that it will be sinless.  Eternity is where God fulfills his promise to conform you to the image of Christ.  Do you remember last chapter, when I griped that Jesus was born with a new heart, which gave him an unfair advantage in loving people?  We get the same thing in our resurrection bodies.  In 1 Corinthians, Paul repeatedly refers to the resurrection body being “incorruptible.”  Sin is a corruption, a perversion, of what God originally had in mind when he created the world.  He made the world and saw that it was good; sin turned it into something vastly different.  God’s entire purpose in annihilating all of creation and then recreating it brand new is to have things the way they were in the beginning, to return to the state where nothing separates God from his people.  That starts in our hearts, which will be incorruptible.  It is literally impossible for anything to corrupt them.  We’re locked in to an eternity of perfect relationship with God right from the start.

Have you ever made a list of things you wanted to ask God when you get to heaven?  I want to know whether I’ve eaten an even or an odd number of M&Ms.  I don’t care about the actual number, really; I just want to know if it’s even or odd.  There are other things I want to understand, too, like how his sovereignty and my free will coexist, what his handwriting looked like (see Daniel 5 and John 8), how Jesus made the bread to feed thousands of people at a time, how his cooking tasted (see John 21), and many other things.  In eternity, I will be able to understand those things, because of the perfection of my new heart.  Shortly before he starts talking about the resurrection body, Paul spends the last half of 1 Corinthians 13 addressing this very idea.  “Now we see but a poor reflection in a mirror,” he says; the things we think we understand about God and eternity are smudgy and vague.  “But then we shall see face to face.  Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”  There will be no more mysteries about God, who he is, and why he does the things he does.  He will make those things known to us, so that we can have a relationship with him beyond anything we’ve ever imagined.

Now, if that part of the resurrection body has you excited, you might want to have a paper bag handy just in case you hyperventilate or throw up from awesomeness.  The body itself will be vastly different from what we’ve always known.  My examples in this section will chiefly come from Jesus’ resurrection, when he appeared with a (partially) glorified body.

I don’t know if you’re aware just how much our current bodies are dependent on things other than God.  We rely on food, or else we shut down.  We rely on water or else we dehydrate and die.  We need sleep or we get slap-happy and then go insane.   We need oxygen or we suffocate.  Really, our entire lives consist of ping-ponging between needs, trying to satisfy them.  You structure your entire day around when you need to go to bed and wake up, and you schedule your waking time around the meals you have to eat.  It’s a very confining existence.  You don’t just have the freedom to wander off and do whatever you want to do, because your body will object and eventually die if you don’t attend to it.  We are, in essence, prisoners to those needs.

Yet the resurrection body will be totally dependent on God.  Paul contrasts our new body, a “spiritual” body, with the one we have now, which is “natural.”  This means that the “natural” aspects of our body, including the sinful tendencies I talked about as well as the physical needs we have, will be no more.  Our bodies will no longer generate power by burning the calories in food; rather, they will be supplied with power by God himself.  Jesus, for instance, when God raised him from the dead, had no need of physical food.  His glorified body was powered entirely by God instead.  When I told this to my girlfriend Andrea, she was not at all amused at the thought of not eating for the rest of eternity.  She is Hispanic, as is her entire family, and they love their food (as do I).  I hope she’ll be comforted to see that the post-resurrection Jesus did eat.  In Luke 22, the disciples give him a piece of fish, which he eats to prove that he’s really alive and not just a ghost.  He was still quite capable of eating, but he wasn’t forced to eat for sustenance the way you and I have to.

There is also proof of this elsewhere in Scripture.  Matthew 4 records Jesus fasting in the desert for 40 days.  This is, quite obviously, impossible for a human body.  We become severely impaired after just three days without water, and we die after six days, but Jesus went more than nine times longer than this.  Clearly he must have been receiving energy and sustenance from something other than food – in other words, from God.  He was hungry; Matthew says so, because his human (non-glorified) body was still engineered in a way that it required food, despite receiving God-power to keep him going during his fast.  However, in a resurrection body, a spiritual body which is engineered not to need food, that same God-power that Jesus received during his fast will be more than sufficient to give us all the energy we require.

Just so you know what I mean when I say God-power, let me observe something.  God has a lot of power, a limitless supply in fact, and he is continually expending it.  He has enough power to create a universe from scratch, destroy that universe, and create another brand new one also from scratch.  His power formed every planet, star, comet, asteroid, and nebula out of absolutely nothing.  Far from being a one-time act, his power is currently active in the hearts of all six billion people on earth right now.  Romans 1 explains that he makes plain to people the fact that creation came from God; that would be God’s power actively giving people comprehension.  When you read the Bible, that’s God’s power enabling you to understand complicated spiritual things.  Colossians 1 even says that in him, all things hold together.  He is actively spending his power, even now, to hold every molecule on earth together, and if he were to stop, everything that exists would blow itself apart from centrifugal force and the failure of the bonds in the atoms.  He holds everything together, because he’s God, and he’s just that powerful.  In the future, in addition to holding together the new heaven and the new earth, he’s going to be feeding us a constant stream of power, which is what will enable us to be wholly dependent on him instead of food for energy, him instead of sleep for rejuvenation, him instead of air for life, and so on.  That is one of the ways we will glorify him in eternity: by being totally dependent on him.

So that’s where the whole food angle comes from.  Will we be able to eat it anyway?  I think so, because if God puts pear trees in the new earth, eating and enjoying his pears will be another way of glorifying him, won’t it?  Much in the same way that he gets glory when I marvel at the night sky or the lightning, so he gets glory when I enjoy the scent of flowers and the taste of food.  I don’t know if eating is one of the ways he will allow us to glorify him in the new earth, but I would not be surprised if it was.  This is doubly true because eating now is just another exercise in selfishness.  It’s something I have to do so that my body won’t self-destruct.  In eternity, it will be totally selfless, done not because we have to but because we want to sample the wonderful things God has given us to eat.

Just as we won’t be prisoners to food, neither will we be prisoners to fatigue.  One of the coolest stories in Scripture comes in 1 Kings 18, when God’s power comes on Elijah, who was a prophet and all-around hardcore guy, and Elijah outruns a horse for sixteen miles.  I don’t know if you’ve ever run sixteen miles – I haven’t – but it’s not easy.  I used to run distance until I discovered soccer, and found that running is a lot more fun when you can run ten yards and then kick something.  The furthest I’ve ever run consecutively was three miles, in a shade over 24 minutes, and that was after several weeks of training.  My dad has run a marathon, and it took him several months to work up to that distance.  Elijah required no training, no special shoes (possibly no shoes at all), no nothing, just God’s power giving him supernatural endurance.  The verse specifically says so: “The power of the Lord came upon Elijah.”  He didn’t just run sixteen miles; he outran some dude’s horse-drawn chariot.  When God’s power filled him, fatigue meant nothing.

So it will be for us on the new earth.  I bet Elijah was mighty sore at the end of that run, because he was still equipped with muscles that are engineered by God to feel pain after too much exercise (it’s a defense mechanism to prevent injury).  Yet with our new bodies, incorruptible and totally dependent on God, his power will be completely sufficient to keep us going as long as we want to go.  Can you imagine running full-speed for hours and never getting tired?  One of my vivid memories from childhood is being on a family road trip and driving through Kansas until we could see the Rocky Mountains on the horizon.  I imagine myself running across the plains through waist-high grass, blue sky overhead, toward whatever towering mountains God creates for the new earth, feeling God’s power coursing through me and praising him for the way I’m thoroughly dependent on him.  How beautiful it will be to travel all over this new earth, glorifying God with the sight of each new and majestic rock, tree, and plant he has made.  With no need for food and with God’s power giving us boundless energy, we can take in all the sights and continually praise God for his marvelous creation.

It’s also interesting that Elijah was granted not merely supernatural endurance but supernatural speed as well.  He was empowered to move faster than the human body can normally move.  I don’t know very many people who can outrun a horse over the space of a mile, never mind sixteen miles!  It probably stands to reason that our resurrection body will be freed from the limitations of velocity that currently hinder us.  We’re not all that fast; not even the fastest animals on earth, not by a long shot.  Could it be that in the new earth, God’s power will enable us to move far faster than we currently think possible?  That will certainly explain a few things about how we can explore all of the new creation, as well as how we plan to navigate the giant city I’m about to talk about.  Distance, on earth, divides. It keeps two people apart from each other.  Will God be content to let distance divide in eternity, or will he supernaturally give us means to navigate distance so quickly that it becomes no barrier?  It’s an interesting question, and I think I can make a pretty good Biblical argument for the latter.

All this talk about the resurrection body is fascinating, but apart from exploring the new creation, it gives us very little idea of what we’ll actually be doing on the new earth (apart from the very general suggestion that, whatever we do, we’ll be glorifying God).  Let’s talk about that now.  This whole book is founded on the idea that all of life is a long exercise in being born again, and that as the end result, God is going to conform us to the image of Christ, so that we will be as perfectly holy, righteous, sinless, and loving as he was.  We will have enough of God’s power inside us that there will be no trace of impurity.  This is guaranteed to happen; God has predestined it.  On earth, we will be partially conformed to the image of Christ, but in eternity, the work will be complete and we will finally resemble Christ.  This will allow us to live in eternity the same kind of lives that we would have had on earth, if sin was not a part of the picture.  As I have been saying all throughout the book, one of the most important things to God is community; he hates the things that break community, and he engineered us to live in close proximity and real intimacy with each other.  The new earth is where that dream finally becomes reality.

This new earth is going to be packed out with people.  There are currently, by most estimates, about a billion people on earth who are going to be there – and that’s just at this point in history.  If you look at the whole of recorded history, who knows how many billions of people we’re talking about.  If you had a vision of heaven as a tranquil place populated by a small number of angels on clouds, I would ask you to rethink your vision.  The new earth will be a teeming mass of humanity, people speaking every language ever spoken, from every people group, as different as we could possibly imagine, billions upon billions of people.  This is as good a time as any to address whether our resurrection bodies will in any way resemble our physical ones, and the answer is that somehow they will.  My primary evidence for this comes from the story of Jesus’ transfiguration, found in Mark 9 and in other gospels as well.  In the transfiguration, the disciples saw Jesus talking to Moses and Elijah, and had no problems recognizing these two people, who had been dead for hundreds of years.  I don’t know if it’s that our resurrection bodies will resemble our physical ones or if God will give us the understanding to recognize people despite the fact that they look nothing like they did on earth.  I think it’s actually a physical resemblance, though, because in Revelation, John specifically says that he sees people from every “tongue and tribe and nation.”  He could tell by looking that they were from all over the world.  So that’s that.  Side note: I also think it’s obvious that God will empower us to understand every language at this point.  On earth, language, like distance, divides.  Will God be content to let that division dwell in eternity?  I don’t see how he would.  He will celebrate our diversity by letting us retain our languages, but meld us into one by allowing us to understand every language.  Diversity with unity - amazing!

One of the other things God does in the new earth is plop a ready-made city, which John refers to as “the new Jerusalem,” down from the clouds onto earth.  This is pretty neat, because if we had to make this city ourselves, it would take the first thousands of years of eternity to do so, not to mention that we would have to pretty much ruin God’s new earth to get that much wood, stone, and brick.  God solves these problems by using his God-power to make a city himself – hey, he’s already made an entire new universe, so why not?  What’s one more city?  This city, according to John, is purely massive, about the same size as the continental United States.

I was quite dismayed to find that we would be spending eternity primarily in a city, because I’m very much more of an outdoorsy kind of guy.  I would be perfectly happy to spend the rest of my life, and eternity, without ever seeing a city.  To me, cities are congested, dirty, and run-down; nature is bright and full of life.  The problem is that earthly cities are only this way because of inequality, selfishness, greed, lack of education, and broken families.  I think we can safely assume that God will have fixed those problems in eternity.

A city is also an important element of the new creation because, as I said back in chapter three, you and I were made for community.  As cool as it would be to take our resurrection bodies and navigate the farthest galaxies, it’s not what God has in mind for us.  Community is important to him, and it’s important that we pursue it here on earth, but we can never have it completely on earth.  The fragments of the old heart left over make us continue to be selfish, jealous, greedy, and arrogant, even though we don’t want to be.  We continue to do things that break community and sow division.  When we go through eternity with a perfected heart, capable of loving purely and selflessly the way God always intended, we’ll be able to have perfect friendships with everybody.  Can you ever imagine ten billion people living in perfect harmony in any earthly city?  It’s impossible.  Yet that’s what the new earth will have, a new Jerusalem packed to the gills with believers from every tongue and tribe and nation, but all having Christ in common, and all sharing the experience of this new and incredible life together.  We’ll be able to be friends with everybody.  No longer will we have faulty memories that don’t remember names and faces; no longer will we treat some people well and others poorly.  We’ll love them all, unconditionally and at all times.  We’ll explore creation with them, praise God with them, live next door to them or above them or around the corner from them, walk around with them, tell stories, write new praise tunes, celebrate God, and all kinds of other things that I probably can’t even imagine here.  These will be perfect friendships, of a kind that we could never have on earth, but which are possible on the new earth because of God’s power and grace.  That’s how we glorify him through our relationships on the new earth.

Have you ever read the Bible passage about how there won’t be marriage in heaven?  Many couples are, understandably, rather chagrined at this.  However, what need for marriage will we have, if every single friendship is as perfect as it could possibly be?  What need would there to be make a vow to treat one person especially well, if we’re already treating everyone we meet perfectly?  There’s simply no need for marriage anymore.  I’m quite sure that we’ll remember our old lives (people will, at any rate, remember their language, recognize people, etcetera), so no doubt we will remember our spouses with special fondness, and they may be our companions as we go through eternity.  But every relationship we have will be as perfect as possible.  This thought may bother you now, but when you enter eternity, I’m sure that the reality of having billions of new friends, with whom you have better and more fulfilling friendships than you ever imagined, will soothe your anxiety considerably.

We’re talking about friendships where every word builds up and encourages people.  Every conversation makes both people feel valued by God and by each other.  You will be comfortable there, because the gentleness in everyone’s heart will calm you and set you at ease.  You won’t have to worry about people cheating you, lying to you, taking advantage of you, stealing from you, or treating you in any way other than with the same love that Christ has already lavished on you.  Can you imagine how freeing that will be?  Do you even understand how distrusting we have to be of virtually everyone we meet here on this earth, how closely we guard our trust and our hearts lest someone betray us?  Do we even have a frame of reference for envisioning a world where everyone wants the best for us and will do anything to make sure we feel loved and appreciated, and where we do the same for everyone we see?

The running theme here is emotional intimacy.  I said at the conclusion of chapter four that anything involving God is essentially emotional, because his glory awes us, humbles us, and moves us, and we respond with love.  All of those are emotional in nature.  I see the new earth being a place where I could be walking down one of the streets in this new Jerusalem and suddenly think about how incredible God is, and just bow down on the street because I just have to praise God right there.  Strangers who never knew me during my life will stop to praise with me, simply because we share a bond of love in Christ.  Every time we leave this city (and evidence indicates that we can and will), we’ll be walking over hills with our friends, continually dazzled and in amazement of God for the beauty of his creation and the perfection of the new world.  Our hearts will be open, constantly full of wonder and admiration for the God who saved us from sin, which by this point is merely a distant memory.  We’ll leap for joy when we think about how much better this new life is than the old one.  And this will be a daily, commonplace occurrence.  Our constant outpouring of love and respect will glorify God like nothing else.  We won’t need to take time out of our schedule to sing a million praise songs.  Simply being alive, and enjoying the life God has given us, will glorify him more than a million songs ever could.

Are you eager for it yet?

Literally everything we do on this earth will glorify God perfectly.  Our perfect friendships, our exploration of his new creation and the beauty he has made, the way we’re totally dependent on him for everything, and yes, even our praise and worship, all of these will be ways that we honor God and show him our respect.  It will truly be the culmination of a line Paul quoted in Acts 17: “In him we live and move and have our being.”  No longer will there be a division between sacred and secular.  All of life, even the most mundane of acts, will glorify God because it is done by his power and honors our dependence on him.  Whoa.

This is especially true of the unprecedented unity that we will enjoy.  Billions of people living in the same city, with no conflict whatsoever, speaks of a unity that only God can engineer.  Language will no longer be a barrier; God will supernaturally empower us to understand them all.  Distance will no longer be a barrier, with God giving us power to move as quickly and as far as we want.  We will have everything in common with every person, enjoying amazing, satisfying, love-filled friendships with all of them, with no rush because we have all of eternity to know them better and glorify God merely by having those friendships.  Meanwhile, God is reaping untold glory from having a world that functions so perfectly together.

The question to ponder

Now that you’re excited about your eternal home, let me ask a question that may unsettle you.  God is going to remove every imperfection from you.  Anger, jealousy, bitterness, unforgiveness, a controlling or manipulative nature, lack of self-esteem, greed, sarcasm, inability to trust, and everything else.  You know yourself better than I do so you know what those things are.  The question is: how much will it change you when he conforms you to the image of Christ?  Will anyone recognize the new you?

Of course they will physically recognize you, I made that apparent already.  But I know some friends who, without their constant sarcasm, will be nothing like the people they currently are.  I’ve already confessed a number of the things about myself that I’ll be glad to part with, and I’m sure that I will be quite different without those things plaguing my character.  It will be awesome to see how God changes us and makes us perfect, but I think it will also be a little bit (or a lotta bit) heartbreaking to see just how flawed our personalities were during our lives, and to see the extent to which our sin, our persistent refusal to be born again, harmed us and the people around us.  I think that, if God had not already promised that heaven would be a place free from tears, we would spend the first part of eternity wailing uncontrollably at the years we wasted here on earth selfishly doing things our own way, and at all the people we hurt with our failures.

How different will you be in eternity?  Will you be recognizable, or does sin so dominate your personality that you will be a totally different person without that sin?

This is the rallying cry that I have voiced for this entire book.  Be born again.  I have said all that I can say about the new heart and how to live from it, and now you have seen, with this picture of eternity, what you will look like when the process is perfected.  How close can you get now?  Can you seize a little bit of heaven here on earth, and become a little more like the person you’re already going to be for the rest of forever?

I believe you can, because the power of God is already in you, giving you the desire and ability to do what pleases him.  You have been born again, and even now, you are being born again.  Be mindful of your purpose.  Be mindful of your eternal destiny.

May God’s grace and peace be with you.

About the Author

Jim Barringer is a worship leader, teacher, author, traveler, and speaker, serving at The Church of Life(.com) in Orlando, Florida.  He can usually be found with his head in a book, playing guitar, or eating seafood with his wife Andrea.  His first full-length novel, New Heart Church, is due out in 2010.  He can be contacted at jmb783@gmail.com, befriended on Facebook(.com/jmbarringer), or followed on Twitter (@jmb783).

Table of Contents

Prologue: How to Read This Book

Chapter 1: Jerusalem, Night, 27 A.D.

Chapter 1.5: What chu talkin’ bout?

Chapter 2: Love, Identity, and Purpose

Chapter 3: The Myth of the Good Person

Chapter 4: Sin, the Scourge of the Dead Heart

Chapter 5: Love the Lord Your God

Chapter 6: Love Your Neighbor As Yourself

Chapter 7: The Final Rebirth

About the Author