Know, Love, Live
So, this year’s Seattle District Foursquare JH/HS camp theme was “Know, Love, Live“. I explained to my cabins that I really wanted to challenge their understanding of who God was, to turn it inside out and upside down. I wanted them to re-consider everything they thought they knew about God, because I felt their knowledge needed to be more concrete. You can’t love something that you don’t know. You can’t love God if all you think about God is some half-formed thought that He is some floaty old man in the clouds a million miles away from you. You can’t love a cloud.
You can’t love an arbitrary person in Croatia like you can your family members. You know your family, are known by them, have invested much time and emotion into their lives, as they have yours. You know their voice, you know their character and personality.
So, you have to know God to love Him.
And this is important because you cannot truly live life without knowing God.
I wanted to start with the creation of our universe and everything in it. Why did God create us? So, at some time in the ancient past, God decided to create our universe; He decided to create us. Why? Was He bored? Was he tired of playing chess against Himself and always stalemating?
Did He want slaves, people that He could tell what to do? No. If He did want that, He could have done a lot better than us. Because how often do we obey Him and do what He asks? Exactly.
So, why?
Because He was a dad who wanted some kids. Kids who would choose to build relationships with Him, who would choose to hang out with Him. He wanted to show love to them and receive love back. But to do this, He needed to create them with the freedom to choose. It wouldn’t be much point in Him making robots, because they just do what they’re told; they have no choice in the matter. So He made us.
Now, He knew what was going to happen before He even started creating anything. He knew about Adam and Eve, about David and Goliath, about Moses and the burning bush and the Israelites being slaves to the Egyptians. He knew that His creations would choose not to follow Him, would choose to disobey Him, would choose to hurt Him, to disown Him and say that they didn’t know Him. He knew that we would get hurt accidentally, that we would willfully put ourselves in harm’s way, and that we would even choose to hurt His other children, their brothers and sisters. But even with so much potential for heartbreak–even though He knew there would be heartbreak, in His heart was so much desire for being able to hang out with us, to talk with us and build relationship, to love us, that He still did it. He knew it was worth it. He knew the life and love that would come out of it.
So He made us. He wants to see us play, to learn and be happy and full of joy. “God’s glory is man fully alive” (St. Irenaeus of Lyons).
Now, There are three characteristics of God that are important, here.
God is a God who:
- Knows everything (omniscient)
Proverbs 3:19
- Can do anything (omnipotent) and is everywhere (omnipresent)
Isaiah 46:10, Revelation 1:8
- Is the embodiement of love
1 John 4:8
So He knows what we need, He has the power to do what is required, and He has the love to actually do it.
So, what is love? John 15:13 says, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” So, God is the embodiment of that. He laid down His life, He opened His heart to us. We can all think of a time where we were reluctant to tell someone something because it was so close and near to our heart, and we were afraid of being rejected or of being laughed at or mocked. We’ve also experienced both the joy of that part of you being accepted, and the pain of it being rejected.
God feels that pain a billion times a day, and this is not hyperbole. He has opened up His heart to each and every one of us fully and continually. He doesn’t build walls around His heart to protect it, because He knows it’s what we need. Jesus came down to earth to walk among us for more than thirty years. Thirty years of giving up “God mode”, of being trapped inside of a human body. Thirty years of know that, every second, He was fully able to transform out and fly around and nuke the stuffins out of anything. Even when He was walking the cross to calvary, when He was being whipped, when He was dying on the cross, He was intensely aware of His deity and Godhood.
Yet He chose not to. He laid down His life for His friends. Laying down one’s life is not just in death; it’s an ongoing life process of constant decisions to put others before yourself.
And He feels that for each one of us. He loves us enough to meet us wherever (WHEREVER) we are at. Whatever we’ve done, however low we feel like we’ve gone to, like we’ve hit the bottom of the hole, someone tossed us a shovel, we dug, we hit stone, someone tossed us a jackhammer, we dug more. He still meets us there. Even if we feel that we can’t even forgive ourselves, God is there. God loves us enough to meet us where we are at.
But God also loves us enough to not leave us there. He wants to revive us, to get us back on track. And He’s right there in the hole with us. He wants to show us the things that we are doing that are not productive and that are hurting us. But He’s not doing this to show us how bad we are, but so that we can see them to break away from them. If you’re in the dark and keep getting hit by punches, you will never see what is hitting you. If it goes on long enough, you might just live with it. But you’re still getting punched. So God gave us the law to show us what’s punching us. The law is the light that shines on the bad stuff so we can identify it and take care of it. It shows us where we are sinning.
Now, the word “sin” has gotten some pretty negative connotations. It’s understood as a noun, like there’s an universal scoreboard of how many sins we have next to our name, that God’s counting down the time until it’s lightning time. This is not the case. “Sin” is not when we’ve broken a rule; God’s not interested in keeping records of how many sins we’ve committed. The Greek word for sin, hamartano, means, “To miss the mark.” So all sin is is us deviating from God’s plan. God has a road for us to walk, and when we walk off it, we’re missing the mark; we’ve gone to the side. So God made the laws (10 Commandments and such) to show us the boundaries of that road so we know when we’re getting off-course.
When you look at it in this way, you see that the law is not an end in and of itself, but a means to the end of the restoration of our lives by a God who is a father to us, who has our best interests at heart (Jeremiah 29:11); that not only does God have no need to keep track of sins, but it would be an entirely fruitless endeavor.
Please, even take what I’ve said and line it up against the Bible. Don’t let it just end with me.