GOD'S HOLY LOVE: INTIMATE

Recently I’ve written two blogs on God’s holy love guided by two Hebrew words for love found in the Old Testament: hesed meaning steadfast, loving kindness and covenant loyalty you can depend on, and aheb meaning practical love reflecting personal commitment and responsibility.  God’s holy love is both steadfast and dependable yet also practical and responsible.

God’s holy love is of a third kind found in the New Testament we may know best, agape.  God’s agape love is unconditional and self-giving, sacrificial and other-centered.  It is more than friendship, compansionship, family love (phileo). It is love seeking ever increasing intimacy with God.  Agape love is deeper, purer, and transforming.  It is the kind of love that is pure and purifies when implanted in the hearts of those whose obedient faith seeks the infilling of the Holy Spirit.  It is obedient love  given over to God and others living life in the likeness of Christ to the glory of God.

Hesed, aheb, and agape are three words used in the Bible to capture the essence of God’s love and may be used as descriptors of God’s nature, the essence of his holy love.  His love for us is steadfast, dependable, and never changing.  It fails not.  His love is personal and intimate.  He cares for you and me.  In response to His love, he desires our love in return to him, for him, and to others.  His love is unconditional, other-centered, self-giving, and sacrificial. 

Amazing love how can it be

That Thou, my God, should die for me?

- Charles Wesley

O Love that will not let me go,

I rest my weary soul in thee

That in thine ocen depths its flow

May richer, fuller be.

- George Matheson

WHY ARE YOUNG PEOPLE NO LONGER IDENTIFYING THEMSELVES AS CHRISTIANS

More and more young people no longer identify themselves as Christians.  It would seem that they abandoned Christianity.  Older generations are worried and saddened believing that younger generations are giving up on their faith in Christ.  However, this may be a problem of mistaken perception.  Talk to young people.  Ask them about Jesus.  What are they thinking and feeling with their head and heart.” Many will express something like this:

“I love the true and living Christ.  I follow the one who was a Friend of Sinners; the one who was the enemy of religion, the one who loved people more than events, the one who was embarrassed with the religious/ spiritual expression in His own time, and who came to show us a new way.”

Many young people are beginning to understand that the Gospel is very different than Christianity. They see the Gospel as all about love and Christianity as just a response to that message, the Gospel as embraced as the Good News of Salvation, to all people, everywhere and Christianity as an imperfect expression of the people who receive and acknowledge that news, the Gospel as the finished work of Christ, Christianity as the unfinished work of men.  They embrace the Gospel that to them communicates Christ’s forgiveness, their reconciliation with God, and the continuing journey of obedient fellowship and intimacy with Christ by Holy Spirit as they are being restored and perfected, not by the church or Christianity, but by the living Christ.

Bravo for so many young people who are figuring these things out.  They’ve not given up following Jesus.  Their choice in how they articulate their identity though is both a critique of Christianity and an affirmation of their true faith.  Thanks be to God!

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GOD’S HOLY LOVE: PERSONAL COMMITMENT

In my most recent blog, I discussed God’s steadfast love.  The Hebrew word for it is hesed meaning loving kindness and covenant loyalty.  God is absolutely faithful in his love for us.  You can count on the sustainability of his love.  The other Hebrew word for love that we find in the Old Testament is aheb which is more commonly used meaning practical love reflecting personal commitment and responsibility.  It is the practical love we observe when one cares for the other.  One of many examples in the Bible is the love between Ruth and Naomi when Ruth says –

Where you go, I will go.  
Where you lodge, I will lodge.

Your people shall be my people 

and your God my God.

Where you die, I will die – 

There will I be buried.

Ruth 1: 16 & 17

Aheb is the word used by God speaking to Moses when he describes his love for Israel, a love so great that he desires them to be holy after his likeness.  God’s love is an expression of God’s character and his desire that they love him and others as he loves them in the most practical, relational way as individuals and as a people.[1]

Isn’t God’s aheb love what we desire for ourselves and for our children, friends, and neighbors.  When we see all the sin and suffering in the world, we desire the aheb of God to wash over humanity in the most practical, relational ways and bring joy and peace to this troubled world.  It is a loving, personal commitment of thanks, praise and obedience to God in all we say and do, and commitment to the wellbeing of all others, the whosever that God loves and for whom Christ died.

Hesed and aheb love, steadfastness with personal commitment, is the essence of the love of God for us and for all the world.  Thanks be to God!  The third and final love of God that I’ll talk about in my next blog is one you are likely most familiar with, agape love.

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[1] Dr. Alan Coppedge, “Holiness and Love,” in High Calling newsletter of the Francis Asbury Society, March-April, 2015, www.francisasburysociety.com

GOD'S HOLY LOVE: STEADFASTNESS

On April 15, 1965 Hal David and Burt Bacharach released their hit song, What The World Needs Now Is Love, Sweet Love.  It was first made popular by singer, Jackie De Shannon.  If you're over sixty, you may remember.  Two years later, on July 7, 1967, the world started to sing, "All you need is love," one of many musical gifts from the Beattles.  The 60s was the "love" decade.  While both songs expressed a lovely human sentiment, what the world really needed was and still is God's pure, holy, steadfast love.
In 1 John 4:16m the Apostle writes, 

"God is love.  Whoever lives in love lives in God,and God in him (her)."
         - John 4:19

When we appreciate that the Almighty is the God of holy love, we understand that neither holiness nor love may be conceived apart from the other.  A holy God is transcendent, almighty, distant, and separate from us.  A loving God is  near, immanent, intimate, in-dwelling.  How can he be both distant and separate and at the some time near and intimate?  So much of God’s nature is conjunctive and paradoxically “both-and.”  His essence is not just any kind of love.   Because God’s holiness is pure, perfect and spotless. His love is pure, perfect, and holy [1] and the good news is that it is accessible.

Allan Coppedge[2], evangelist with the Francis Asbury Society, discusses God’s love in relation to holiness quoting Moses (Ex. 15:11,13),

Who is like thee, O Lord, among the Gods?

Who is like thee, majestic in holiness. . .

Thou hast led in thy steadfast love

The people whom thou has redeemed.

Thou has guided them by thy strength

To Thy holy abode.

Dr. Coppedge helps our understanding of the steadfast love of God pointing out that the word in Hebrew for such love is hesed.  Hesed is covenant love.  It’s relational, a love full of grace, mercy, faithfulness, goodness, and loving kindness.  Such love is absolutely faithful.  God in covenant is faithful in His love for us. When it comes to his nature of holy, perfect love, He is the God who makes it clear, (Malachi 3:6), “I do not change.”  He calls us to be steadfast in our love for Him and all others in the likeness of his steadfast love for us.  In such steadfast love for us, His grace and loving kindness always comes to us first and with it God anticipates from us a steadfast reciprocal response of thanks, praise, and obedient faith in Him.

Let us strive to be steadfast in our faith and love.  Take the lead from our Savior who was steadfast and obedient to the Father as he loved us with perfect, holy love, humbling himself, and becoming obedient to death even the death of the cross. Philippians 2:8)

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[1] Kenneth Collins, The Theology of John Wesley:  Holy love and the shape of grace (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007)

[2] Allan Coppedge, “Holiness and Love” in High Calling: a bimonthly publication of the Francis Asbury Society newsletter, Mar-April 2015.