A Love We Need to Imagine - Lesson 2 LYLS

If, by chance, you have been following, this is in fact the second session of teaching for Let Your Light Shine. I didn't forget...this is really it! This session is based on the content in the first chapter, A Love We Need to Imagine. Grasping how wide and long and high and deep God's love is for us will be a process. My goal with Chapter One is to provide a spring board from which we can begin to transform our knowledge of His love from, "Jesus loves me, this I don't understand," to "Jesus loves me, this I know."

I'm working from the following premise this week: I think we often hold a skewed view of God's love for us and it's dimming our lights. While teaching this lesson to my home-church Bible Study ladies, the homeschool mom in me began with a little object lesson depicting our view of God's love for us. So, picture this, if you will...

                A teeny, tiny Dixie Cup, with holes all over it...
                
                A pitcher of water attempting to fill the teeny, tiny Dixie Cup, which proceeds
                    to leak at every hole...

You guessed it! Teeny, tiny Dixie Cup = our inadequate, minimized view of God's love for us. Holes...all those things we do (and don't do) that must inevitably make His love
                                 
                                             leak
                                                   out
                                                        of
                                                                 our already small view of that love--graceless!
                                                                                                                                          drip!
                                                                                                                                         drip!

We aren't spending enough time in the Word and prayer--there's a leak. We decide not to make a meal for the family in church who just had a baby--more love leaking out. By the end of the week, our little Dixie Cup is empty! Now, Monday rolls around, we've been spiritually reenergized at church on Sunday, so we are determined this is going to be a better week--set the alarm an hour earlier, read the new devotional, skip our favorite program on Monday night so we can make it to that church meeting, and we imagine that our Dixie Cup is filling up again. But wait! More holes! Kids were super bratty, lost my patience--leak! Had every intention of making it to Bible study, but didn't want to face the ladies again--leak! And so on and so on, until the Dixie Cup is empty again.

This little Dixie Cup not only misrepresents the size of God's love for us, it also misrepresents the unconditional factor of His love. Why do we do this? Why do we Dixie Cup a God-sized love?

I believe one of the reasons is because we measure His love through human eyes, and in our humanness, we are conditional and we fail. We give love that is often conditional. We have many things that poke holes in our love for others (and even for God), therefore we think His love can leak just like ours does.

Beth Moore beautifully illustrated God's loving character in this way in a women's retreat study: She said that she is a woman. She is a woman and that is unchangeable. First John 4:16 tells us plainly that, "...God is love." In fact, it begins by telling us, "And so we rely on the love God has for us...". God is love. Nothing can change that, just like nothing can change the fact that you are a woman. Love is who He is.

He's written a love letter to us, filled with statements of His love. There are over 600 references to love in the Bible. It's a message He wants to sink in. Sometimes the only way that can happen is if we read it, read it, and read it some more. I've provided some of the many references here. Keep them, read them, treasure them often!

Psalm 36:5, 7; 52:8; 136:26; Jeremiah 31:3; John 3:16; 15:9; Romans 5:8; Ephesians 2:4-5; 3:17b-19; 5:2; 1 John 4:9-10

If you completed the "homework" in Chapter One, you saw that it is what was done in sacrifice that most assuredly demonstrates that love for us. That sacrifice--what the Christian faith hinges on--is a BIG love. We must move from Dixie Cup thinking to JUMBO CUP reality!

It's at this point in the teaching that I pull out my giant ceramic mug. (You've seen them; the ones used for potting flowers. Super big!) It's the visual for God's Jumbo Cup love for us. God demonstrates a big love for us and it does not leak out, it pours out (here is where I began to pour water from the pitcher into the jumbo mug until it's overflowing). This is the love we need to imagine. This is the love that makes our lights shine.

Feel free to get up and take a stretch. I'd say we've completed about half of this lesson. Grab a warm cup of coffee and a tasty chocolate!

We want to look at what makes God's love Jumbo. In the first chapter of Let Your Light Shine, we studied the characteristics of God's love--unfailing, everlasting, supportive, etc. What if God's love was all of those things, but not everlasting? Or what if it was all of those things, but not sacrificial? It just doesn't work does it? God's love is Jumbo because it is every aspect of love, all the time.

I was listening to Christian radio on my way to the grocery store the other day and one of the song's lyrics went like this: "...God is love and love has come for us all." "Love has come for us all." "Love" is referring to God. So it got me thinking, what if we just start referring to God as "love"--use love as a pronoun for God. What if we chose to call Him "Love" out loud? Would it help us view what we expect from Him differently? If, for example, in reference to a sick child's daily anguish we responded, "Love is in control. Love is going to do a work in her life. My hope is in Love."

You can fill in your own blank. Maybe you're praying for healing in a relationship. Could you say, "I need Love to bring forgiveness. Love is the power at work within me"? God is love and He will always operate from the mode of love in all He does in our lives.

If we can come to an understanding of the size and unconditional factors of His love, we must then move to accepting it. I want to expound here on a concept from the chapter--a broken and contrite heart--and then move on to a beautiful New Testament story that pulls these concepts together.

Let's start by looking at Psalm 51:16-17 again. Here David has poured his heart out to the Lord regarding his sin and is desiring to be once again in right standing with the Lord. He realizes God has not left him, but that he needs cleansing. And to get to that place, he also realizes that what is most important to God is not the sacrifice of a burnt offering, but the heart behind it: David's own brokenness about his sin and about the division it has placed between his Lord and him. He knows  that is the place where he can receive the love the father delights in lavishing on him.

A broken and contrite heart, which the world thinks is weakness, is where we come to accept His jumbo sized love. I think that in our day and time, we've come to view the concept of a "broken and contrite heart" with a negative connotation. The world today sens a message that being broken is weak and means you have low self-esteem.

These are some quotes I took off the Internet on a random day:

              "Building self-esteem and self-confidence is the key to happiness and success."
     "To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."
              Oscar Wilde said, "I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me. I am me, and I am Okay."
     "The most important starting point for all humans...to love oneself."

This philosophy has led to a lot of empty people trying to love "me" with superficial means. They disappointedly put their confidence in a bunch of external stuff.  When people are confronted with their sin, they see it as weakness to come to a place of brokenness before the Lord. Unfortunately for them, the place of being broken and contrite is also the place where we are able to accept the love the Lord desires to lavish upon us.

It doesn't have to be sinfulness that brings us to the place of a broken and contrite heart, but the place we come to of accepting His great love is a place of humility before Him. Humility is what the world views as weak. Humility, though, is realizing how big He is, how big His love is, and how much we are in desperate need for all of Him. Humility is where God can fill us with His love and power.

I want you to read a passage in His Word, Ephesians 3:16-20. In this passage, Paul specifically points out that to really know and grasp this love, His Spirit must infuse in us the power to do so. We can also see this same concept in Romans 5:5. With the heart preparedness that you studied in Chapter One, God can infuse in you the power to grasp and accept the jumbo size love He has for you. In the Ephesians passage we see words like power, rooted, established, filled, fullness, surpass knowledge. These words are all associated with His love for US! This was Paul's prayer for the church at Ephesus.

There is a familiar parable told by Jesus, recorded in Luke 15:11-31. You know it as the parable of The Prodigal Son. It's a lot to read, but I want you to do so because I think it perfectly pulls together all that we have been talking about today. So although you know the story, as you read it, I want you to think about Dixie Cup love, Jumbo Cup reality, and a broken and contrite spirit of acceptance and how each character in the parable illustrates these concepts.

You're reading....reading....reading...reading...reading...

Okay, do you see the Dixie Cup view of love from the prodigal? He thought his squandering and sin had created leaks in the Dixie Cup of his father's love. Like the prodigal, his older brother thought there should be leaks in the Dixie Cup. He showed great displeasure in the fact that his father had a Jumbo-sized love for his young undeserving brother that was not leaky and conditional. So, although he had done all the right things and was more deserving of the love of the father in his own eyes, he actually had the same view of love as the prodigal--Dixie Cup, leaky love. But there was one difference and it was a difference that allowed the prodigal to receive the love and make the older son miss out on accepting the love: a broken and contrite heart. The younger son realized he was undeserving of such greatness from his father. He knew he was unworthy, but what did the father do? (see vv.22-25) He lavished his son in his love. See the true picture of the father's love was that he had the same love for the son who stayed as he did for the one who was the prodigal. (v. 31) The prodigal son was able to accept the father's love and the older son was not; he never came to that heart preparedness.

God has a jumbo sized love to pour out on us that we can receive by the power of the His Spirit. Our lights will shine when we come to a place where our hearts are ready to accept it.

We made it! Phew! God loves you! Believe it! Accept it!

Let the Word of Christ Dwell...

This is not lesson two from Let Your Light Shine, but the words of the following verse have been repeating again and again through my thoughts for the past two days, so I thought I might share them...

"Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God."      Colossians 3:16

I have a Bible verse app as the wallpaper on my phone, and a couple of days ago Colossians 3:16 popped up. One word caught my attention in particular: dwell. "Let the word of Christ dwell."

I began to think of the other things that dwell inside me--my heart, my stomach, my bones, muscles, you get the idea. We'll stop there before we get too graphic. Those body parts just reside inside my body (dwell), functioning, giving me life, keeping me going.

Colossians 3:16 tells me that the word of Christ is also supposed to dwell inside me, with all my body parts. How does it dwell?

The psalmist says in Psalm 119:15:

          I meditate on your precepts and consider your ways.

                                 In verse 97:
                                           
                                             Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long.

Reading, studying, meditating, praying. Oh how I fail to do this consistently! I dwell on a lot of garbage far more than the word of Christ; far more than eternity! Lord forgive me!

If I dwell,  I think the word of Christ functions quite the same as my other body parts--giving me life, keeping me going. Without it, spiritually I cease propelling forward. When I think of who I am--fleshly, natural me--without the word of Christ dwelling in me, I am wretched. I catch glimpses of that ugly flesh now and again, and every time become acutely aware of the kind of person I'd be without Christ. The things that tempt me, my knee-jerk reaction to what life throws at me, my harsh judgements; these all make me see a picture of Angie without the word of Christ dwelling in me.

Without the word dwelling in me, I also lack the wisdom to encourage others and spur them on to love and good deeds. And this is so important in the faith. Fellowship with other believers and productive conversation on the word enriches my walk tremendously. Many times I don't realize how much I gain from it until I've gone without it for a period of time. I feel so energized and stirred when I am once again engaged.

The remainder of Colossians 3:16 is icing on the cake! Praise and worship with a heart of gratitude. How can the word of Christ really dwell in us without us then being motivated into praise and thanksgiving? Impossible! Praise the Lord, His word sustains us and "through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of Him" (2 Cor. 2:14)! 

We're studying human anatomy right now in our homeschool science. I think as I picture all my other body systems alive and well dwelling inside of me, I'm going to picture the word of Christ right along side!