I am currently coming off a day spent with my wife, daughter and grandchildren. The word to describe it is euphoria. Being in the presence of a wonderful bunch of people and doing things that are building memories such as visiting museums, eating smashed burgers in an out-of-the-way hole-in-the-wall, visiting an ice cream factory and sampling the wares and having a grandchild repeatedly crawl onto your lap and lean back against you is not described by any simple word. If you’ve been there, you know what I mean. If you haven’t been there, you have my sympathy.
Then, today, as I was reading in, of all things a diet book, I came across this thought about the love of God.
“We have talked to continually of the need for you to love the father, but does He really care about you? Yes, powerfully so! He does not allow your idols to save you, and He is waiting patiently to save you with his power when you finally call on him.” p. 119It got me thinking about the different types of love and how it is described in I Corinthians 13:4-6. I think I’ve written other places how an insight into what it means to say “God is love” could be gained by studying the section of I Corinthians 13 that starts, “love is patient….” It gives us real insight into what it means that God loves us.
We tend to forget that. If we don’t forget it, we tend to misinterpret it. We tend to confuse what God means by agape with what Hollywood and Hallmark mean by love. This is not a romantic love. This is the kind of love that will do anything to make your life what it should be. What we overlook is that that often involves discipline and allowing hardship. In the book, the author is talking about how the children of Israel went through the desert and how God was trying to mold them into a godly people in that process.
We go through a similar phases. If God just wanted a bunch of fruit salad, you could’ve thrown it together very quickly and its value would be very questionable. If He wants a banquet of nutrition, it takes a little bit more planning and expects us taking of that which is offered in the right methods and measurements.
God loves us. That means that He disciplines. It means that He denies. It means that He does a lot of things that we don’t like, but it’s for our own good. When we love others, we should have this in mind. Our purpose and loving others is not to meet their momentary desires but to mold their lifelong character.
Shamblin, Gwen. The Weigh Down Diet. New York: Doubleday, 1997.
homo unius libri
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Comments are welcome. Feel free to agree or disagree but keep it clean, courteous and short. I heard some shorthand on a podcast: TLDR, Too long, didn't read.