The Gospel commission is one of good news and that good news is that God is love! The even better news is that I can be a person of love, also. Christians, however, don’t always have a good reputation for being loving. It is ironic that this is so.It is interesting to note that we don't really understand God's love. Love is not chocolate and roses, and smiling faces, although we love those things. Divine love is best described in 1 Corinthians 13. The list of the attributes of Divine love is daunting. Love is from God and is unnatural to our unredeemed hearts.
When Paul speaks of circumcising our hearts, he is referring to our need to have a transformation at the heart level, not just on the surface level. God doesn't want to just spruce us up as Christians; God wants us to be reborn, completely remade after the model of Christ. The only way this happens is through Christ dwelling in the heart. Paul assures us that when this happens we become new creatures.
This is difficult for us to understand because we have spent more time educating and debating as Christians than we have learning to be Disciples of Christ. The stories of the apostles give us some idea as to the struggle they had in grasping the mission of Christ and then allowing the Spirit to then transform them.
The story of Nicodemus is one that if we would take and contemplate the deeper meaning of it we would get a glimpse into the role of the Holy Spirit in making us instruments of God's love. The work of transformation is one accomplished by the Spirit. Without a total rebirth through the Spirit, the love of God will not be fully lived in us.
We will never become true lovers of all of God’s creation until we have totally fallen in love with God ourselves. It is by a daily walk with God, asking to be filled with the love of God, that we are able to put aside our own interests and see what others might need. For this is the true definition of love and that is service to others and a life given over to the interests of God's Spirit.
When you realize this it is not difficult to understand that many who call themselves Christians are not really Disciples of Christ but curious followers. This is not to condemn this but we should understand that there is a difference between being transformed and merely believing--they are different stages along the journey.
My prayer as a Christian is to become a deeper vessel for God's Spirit and to let that Spirit transform me into an agent for loving good in this world. It requires that I allow God to transplant a new type of heart into my being and that I receive spiritual eyesight and spiritual hearing from God’s Spirit. Only then will I become a vehicle for Divine love.
Comments