Currently No Line On The Horizon By U2 I'll go crazy if I don't go crazy tonight see related

More thoughts on the L word

An overdue, non-cynical post (by request of the Schwessy).

If I had to sum up the main theological stuff that has really bowled me over this year, it all seems to come under the same category. 'The furious love of God'.

This is a funny development, in that on my own terms it's a theme I'm reluctant to linger on. I think (stupidly) to myself after a few weeks browsing, say, 1 John: “Right- surely, that's the theology of 'love' sorted, now onto other things... predestination, perhaps? Or a little something on the trinity?” Sometimes I feel like 'love' isn't 'heady' enough, and I want to get my teeth in to something more 'substantial' (again, a stupid line of thought- of course, love is the most substantial thing of all. God is love, love never fails, and all that glorious jazz!). There's even an element of stupid macho-residue, which subtly echoes, “Men don't devote time to pansy theological musings on 'love'! Real men focus on getting their heads around aggressive systematic understandings- apologetics and predestination, judgement and such!”

There's something within me that always tugs against over-thinking on fuzzy philosophical notions of 'the essence of agape'. I tug against being one of 'those' Christians, who answer every theological question with wishy-washy statements of, “yeah, well, God is love, so...”. Understandable, really, since words are cheap. When I was a kid I would watch top of the pops thinking, “All these stupid pop songs with 'love' in the title! It can't be all that special! Why are they so preoccupied with it?” Indeed, if love is nothing more than the stuff Paul McCartney sang about, then I would be a bit silly to be so preoccupied with it.

It only really struck me this week that it may just be that God wants me to be (wilfully or not) preoccupied with this theme for a while. As much as I try to branch out and meditate on different stuff, I keep getting yanked back towards the same little bundle of bible verses, which never cease to pierce me with the sheer weight of their implications. They pop up in songs, sermons, study, video presentations and conversations constantly. The vast majority of my own creative ideas are stemming out of them too. It's as though God is saying, “You may want to put a mental 'tick' by these verses as 'succesfully decoded', but I'm not done teaching you yet!”

1 Corinthians 13. 1 John 4:8. And, in particular, the following (omitted from my last post on the topic):

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. -1 John 3:16+

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. -Romans 5:6-8

Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. -John 5:13

This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. -1 John 4:10

I'm reminded of a great quote by John Piper: 'You don't have to know a lot of things to do great things for the Lord. But you do have to know a few things, that are great, and be willing to live for them or die for them. … People that make a difference in the world are not people who have mastered a lot of things- they are people who have been mastered by a very few things that are very, very great.'

In more optimistic moments I think that there's a reason I can't seem to escape these verses. God is clearly intent on hammering them into me until they are second nature- truths that I breathe in constantly and that shape my conduct, rather than theological concepts that 'click' occasionally when I open my bible. After all, it would be a terrible tragedy for me to look back in a few years, at a decade of personal study, to find it was all proccupied with creating a neat 'filing cabinet' of theological ideas, at the expense of getting my hands dirty with actually sharing the gospel. The verses above, on the other hand, have been like a breath of fresh air; I can look at one of them in the morning and go into my day driven by the awesome mandate to 'love with actions and in truth', knowing that in doing so I may bring myself and others into closer communion with God. I know it's not the be-all end-all of theology, but it's a pretty fundamental part, and one i'm happy to linger on as long as necessary.

Here's my latest scribble on the theme:

It's been a while...

Currently We Shall Not Be Shaken By Matt Redman This is how we know see related

Imagine

'Progress'

And as usual, it's the things that annoy me that tend to inspire lyrics!