Belovedness

As Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” - Mark 1:10–11

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 3:16–20 NIV

We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because He first loved us. - 1 John 4:16–19

Hi Everybody

I want you to ask yourself a question; the same question I asked this past Sunday: What do you think God feels when He thinks of you? What emotions do you imagine stir in His heart when you come to mind?

Have you ever thought about these questions? I fear precious few people truly live in an accurate understanding of the real answer to them. The real understanding? Beloved. God looks at you and sees His beloved. Yet, it is hard for us to fully own the fullness of that reality. Each of us knows ourselves too well -- the bad stuff we have done, the things we wish we had not, the stray and not-so-stray thoughts that would mortify us if everybody knew them. One of my favorite songs begins with the line, "No one would love me if they knew, all the things I hide." Is that thought foreign to you? Or, is it as I suspect, a common fear? Maybe it is good that nobody knows all the things we hide. Maybe. Still, God does. God knows all the things we hide, He not only knows the things we hide, He knows us fully -- more fully in fact than anyone, including us. And what's most amazing is that though He alone fully knows, He alone fully loves. He calls us to that love, calls us to Himself, to rest in and be fueled by the reality of our belovedness. God gives everybody a call, inward to Himself and outward to the world, to whatever broken spot in the world that when we enter into it to heal it we find that we ourselves are healed. He loves us so much that He invites us into the only unchangeable thing, Himself, and then invites us into the call or the life thread that He has us to live -- we must go inward toward Him to hear His voice well enough to know where and how we are to go outward.

It is only with an experiential understanding of the love of God for us that we can face the temptation to leave who we are in order to settle for a lesser good. That’s why we need contemplation, because we need to know how much we don’t really accept and live by God’s love and how far we are from true love, and then to be once again confirmed in the love of God, the kind of love we are supposed to have. The verse above says we should be the kind of people who willing to lay down our very lives for one another. What does that mean? We don’t have that kind of love. Only with the prior experience of belovedness, can we begin to live that kind of sacrifice -- and then realize as we experience even more of our belovedness that it actually was no sacrifice at all.