Love, fear and pride

Continuing our look at man-made religion versus life with Christ, let’s compare the key element of the Christ-filled life with the two key elements of man-made religion.

From what I have seen, I agree with the writer, Dallas Willard, who says that religion has to do with pride and fear. The Christ-filled life, on the other hand, is meant to be defined by love.

Let’s first consider this word, “love.”

LOVE IS “WILL TO GOOD”

The word, “love,” is thrown about very casually these days. People say that they love their car, or that they love pizza. And people fall in and out of “love” all the time.

However, the proper meaning of real love is “bene-volence,” which means “will to good.” In other words, it means to want good for the other, to honestly desire the best for them. It is NOT the same thing as desire. We can have evil desires and selfish desires, but those aren’t love.

Dallas Willard writes:

Love is not the same thing as desire, for I may desire something without wishing it well, much less willing its good. I might desire a chocolate ice cream cone, for example. But I do not wish it well; I wish to eat it. This is the difference between lust (mere desire) and love, as between a man and a woman. Desire and love are, of course, compatible when desire is ruled by love, but [many] people today would, unfortunately, not even know the difference between them. — “Renovation of the Heart,” Pp. 130-131

None of us accomplishes this “will to good” toward one another all the time, but when we begin to let Christ form our lives and change us from the inside out, this is the kind of love God wants to form in us.

Man-made religion, on the other hand, tends to be dictated by pride and fear.

PRIDE

St. Augustine taught that the opposite of love is not hate. It’s actually pride.

Why? Because pride is all about getting “my way.” It’s not about willing the best for the other person but for myself. This leads to manipulation, power plays, and all the other things that some unhealthy churches might refer to as “a board meeting.”

Yet love pushes pride away because when we truly begin to be concerned about the other person’s needs and concerns, there’s no room for manipulation techniques and the determination to always be “right.” The determination to prove myself is never about love; it’s always about pride. But when I learn to let God’s love take its rightful place in my heart, proving myself begins to be less important than the more important issues of helping those who are hurting and meeting the needs of those who are hungry, lost or poor.

FEAR

As I said in my last post, fear involves torment. God doesn’t want to be our tormentor; He wants to be our lover, our Father and our friend.

“Religious” Christians become obsessed with “holding on” to the people. They want to fill their churches and so become afraid of doing anything that would push them away. As a result, they start making more and more demands of them in order to get them to conform to their ways and ensure their power over them.

But that has NOTHING to do with Christ’s love.

Fear pushes people away by trying too hard to hold on, while love is rewarded as it willingly ‘lets go.’

When we let God have His way in our hearts, we begin to desire the best for the people who come into our lives. We no longer need to be worried about “holding on to them” or “getting them into our church.” All we have to do is love them, share God’s message of hope with them, and be available.

We don’t have to make them conform to our patterns of life or ways of thinking. Everybody’s different, and God uses us in our diversity. We can point people to God’s Word and let God do His work in their minds and hearts, but we don’t need to expect that He will always speak to them in exactly the same way He spoke to us. He has a unique plan for every life, and it will look different in some people than it will in others.

The funny thing is that, as we start to live our lives in this way, holding loosely to our own agendas and to other people’s lives, often our churches WILL begin to fill up with people and more and more will be attracted to us. This will not be because we are trying to make them come to us, or make them look like us, but because they will begin to see that we really do have their best interests in mind… that we love them as God loves them.

May God deliver us all from religions of fear and pride and fill us with His genuine love for one another.

This concludes a 3-part series that started with
Is Christianity Religion?
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Prostitutes and the Kingdom

Jesus once told a bunch of church-goers that prostitutes would enter the Kingdom of God before they did. I bet they didn’t like that much! Of course, Jesus wasn’t a people-pleaser. He was more concerned with truth.

Let’s look at the story where he said that…

“What do you think? There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work today in the vineyard.’

“‘I will not,’ he answered, but later he changed his mind and went.

“Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, ‘I will, sir,’ but he did not go.

“Which of the two did what his father wanted?” 
 “The first,” they answered.

Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him. — Matthew 21:28-32

The people Jesus was talking to in this chapter were his culture’s version of the faithful church-goer. In fact, according to verse 23, they weren’t just the church “goers,” they were the “chief-priests and elders,” the leaders of the religious people.

But he was telling them they were getting it all wrong. They were very religious in their dedication to the Temple and to religious observances, but they weren’t serious about a true relationship with God.

In the context of this discussion in the Bible, Jesus is talking about those who had been baptized under John the Baptist. Baptism was seen as a sign of obedience to God, to leaving the old life behind and submitting to Him. A lot of tax-collectors and prostitutes had taken this step, whilst these religious “leaders” had seen it as below them and refused to participate. They were good at doing the religious things that their community thought of as “religious,” but they were lacking the qualities Jesus really valued: submission and obedience to HIM.

I wonder how many of us who are church “goers,” would fit into the same category as these Jewish priests and elders? We go to church and do all the “Christian” things, but do we submit to God when he tells us to live our lives in obedience to Him? After all, that’s what he’s asking of us. Obedience to HIM.

Some think that this simply means living as decent people and going to church, but the people Jesus was talking to would almost certainly have fit into that category.

What was different about the prostitutes and tax-collectors?

A few things really:

1. They realized they were messed up.

   The people Jesus was talking to were self-righteous. They thought they could get by on their own and that they were “good enough.” The people Jesus came for, however, were those who were ready to realize that we’re all messed up. That’s what the Bible really means when it says, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We’ve all messed up, none of us is perfect, and we all need grace.

   People who truly realize that don’t feel the need to judge others anymore. They just live in an amazing appreciation for the fact that God has accepted them and forgiven them, even with all their flaws and failures.

2. They realized he was their only hope.

   The people Jesus was talking to actually still thought they could do it on their own. They weren’t going to submit themselves to anything that would suggest they didn’t “have it all together.” They weren’t ready to depend on God because they thought they could make it on their own.

   The prostitutes and tax-collectors knew that they couldn’t make it on their own. He was their only hope. Yet, in the end, I think that’s true for all of us. But too many of us go to church and go through the motions, whilst still believing we can “do it on our own.”

3. They wanted to please God.

   Many religious people are more concerned with pleasing each other than they are with pleasing God. Can you imagine the humiliation these men would have experienced if they’d gone to be baptized by John the Baptist, who was not your typical “church type”?

   But the prostitutes and tax-collectors didn’t care what the world thought. Or at least, if they did, they were more concerned about getting right with God than with getting laughed at by their friends. They knew they needed God, so they went to him.

The people Jesus was talking to would have been known in their day as the cream of the crop in the religious world, but Jesus was essentially telling them, “The prostitutes are better off than you are.” Why? Because they allowed themselves to realize they needed him, that their lives needed to change, that he was their only hope…and they wanted to please God more than to hold onto their own world as it was.

It’s so like Jesus to raise up the prostitute and humble the proud. Sadly, some of us who call ourselves his followers would more likely praise the proud and shun the prostitute. These chief priests and elders would probably have never let them in the Temple. But that was their biggest problem. Their hearts were closed to receiving grace because they were unwilling to give it. May God deliver us from being like that!

Love yourself, part 1

Jesus said there were two great commandments that He wanted us all to follow. The first was to love God; the second was,

“Love your neighbour as you love yourself.”

Was Jesus commanding us to love our neighbour and also to love ourselves? Technically, no. The command was to love our neighbour in the same way we already love ourselves. However, the assumption here was that we do love ourselves.

How can we follow this formula if we hate ourselves? Imagine looking in the mirror and scowling at yourself. Then imagine turning to the people you love and keeping that same scowl in place. That’s kind of what our attitude ends up looking like when we hate ourselves and yet attempt to love others.

I truly believe God wants us to love ourselves.

Four relationships were broken when humanity fell. 1) Our relationship with God, 2) our relationship with each other, 3) our relationship with Creation, and 4) our relationship with self. All these relationships have been broken, but I believe our Creator wants to restore us to these relationships that we may experience the joy of right relationships.

God wants us to learn to love ourselves.

But, some would ask, isn’t self-love wrong? Isn’t that selfishness?

Of course there is such a thing as selfishness, and that is destructive. However, there is also such a thing as a healthy self-love, a love that does not put self on the throne but which — at the same time — has a deep respect for the person God made us each to be. God doesn’t want us to hate what He has made. While that means we shouldn’t hate others, it also means that we should never hate ourselves.

We’ll explore the difference between a healthy love of self and selfishness more in another post but, for now, let’s begin to consider what a healthy self-image looks like.

Many believe that 1 Corinthians 13 is the best description of what real love looks like. That description of real love helps to describe the healthy attitude we should have toward one another, but I believe that the same principles can appropriately be turned upon ourselves as we ask how to rightly relate with the one person we can never get away from…ourself.

Let’s look at just a few of the statements the Apostle Paul made about love in this chapter and consider how they might relate to our relationship with self:

1. Love is patient

   Many of us are hardest on ourselves, expecting things of ourselves that we would never expect from others. We expect more of ourselves than God does, and I believe God wants us to stop being so hard on ourselves. We need to be patient with ourselves.

   Sometimes people get a new job, and they expect to be able to do it perfectly the first day. It’s not likely to happen, however, if we haven’t learned how things are done yet. We need to give ourselves the time to learn and not be impatient with ourselves.

   I remember, when I was learning Spanish, I often got impatient with myself. I wanted to know it NOW, but it didn’t work that way. I had to be patient with myself and learn it step by step; I later reaped the benefits of that. I can speak it fluently today but, if I hadn’t been patient with myself, I would have given up before I ever reached my goal.

   You may not have accomplished everything you want to in life yet, and you may not be where you want to be, but be patient with yourself. Live life step by step…that’s part of loving yourself as God loves you!

2. Love is kind

   A lot of Christians are really good at beating up on themselves. We may try to be kind to others, but we are unkind to ourselves. Sometimes we try to punish ourselves when we don’t think we’ve measured up. However, the Bible says “there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:1)

   “Love is patient and kind.
   Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude.
   It does not demand its own way.
   It is not irritable,
   and it keeps no record of being wronged.
   It does not rejoice about injustice
   but rejoices whenever the truth wins out.
   Love never gives up, never loses faith,
   is always hopeful,
   and endures through every circumstance.”
   
   – 1 Corinthians 13: 4-7

3. Love is not jealous

   How can I be jealous of myself? Jealousy is the feeling we have when we envy somebody else, and it often has a lot to do with our own self-image and relationship with self. We may look at somebody else and like their hair, we envy them and wish we could have what they have. Why? Because we’re not happy with who we are. We look at somebody else who has a nicer car than us or a nicer house or a better job…and we yearn with jealousy for what they have. Why? Because we’re not happy with who we are or what we have.

   The Apostle Paul said he had learned how to be content in every situation:

   “I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength.” — Philippians 4: 12-13

   What did he say was his secret to living, his secret to contentment? “I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength.” Through his identity in Christ; He had learned to appreciate that whatever he had, he had because that’s what God was going to use in his life and, wherever he was in life, that’s where God wanted to use him.

   Where was he when he said this? Prison. What did he have of the world’s possessions? The best carriage or the nicest house? No, nothing. He was a prisoner at the mercy of an oppressive government that hated Christians. But he was content.

   No jealousy there. He didn’t want somebody else’s life. He realised God had given him the life he had for a reason.

In my next post, we’ll continue to look at 1 Corinthians 13 and consider how a few other statements in it about God’s kind of love can be applied to our relationship with self.

The cross-dressing drunk

One thing that I really love about the work that I do is that I get to meet many different kinds of colourful characters. In Africa, I met a very interesting cross-dressing drunk.

Now, of course, in some parts of the world such a sight might seem a bit more common, but in the rural villages of Africa it seemed very surreal. A crowd had gathered to hear us share the message of God’s love for the village and, while I waited to go up and speak, a series of local choirs were singing. As they sang, at one point a very exuberant drunken man joined one of the choirs and started dancing. The people obviously knew him and simply laughed good-naturedly.

After doing a bit of a dance, he came up to all of the team members and shook our hands with a great big smile on his face. Then he danced a bit more and left. “Where’d he go?” somebody asked. We guessed that he must have gone away and we’d probably see no more of him that day.

However, 15 minutes later, he showed up again. Only now, he had changed into an elaborate African dress. He had a handbag under his arm and was holding a large parasol over his head. He walked right through the crowd, came to us and shook our hands. As he shook our hands this time, he curtsied in exactly the way Tanzanian women always curtsy. Then he sat down with the women and listened quietly throughout the sermon.

I would have loved to find out his story. He was very different from anybody else I’d ever met in the heart of Africa.

This was originally posted in August 2006,
along with “Africa…looking back” & “The Witch Doctor“.