In New Light

I sat on a black stackable chair several rows from the front in the modest room in which God’s people meet every Sunday morning in the middle of the city I now call home, the capital of a small Central Asian Republic. In calm, measured, simple language, a man in a blue checkered shirt stood at the front with an iPad and a book purported to be word of God opened in front of him. He drew the onlookers’ attention to a couple of paragraphs we’d all heard a hundred times. The words of 1 Corinthians 13 appeared behind him, projected on the white wall. I knew where he was going. At least, I thought I did.

Then he said something that suddenly changed the entire light in which I’ve come to read the all-too-familiar passage.

“I’m going to read this passage twice,” he began.

That way there’ll be twice the chances of feeling the Spirit’s conviction about how I fall short of measuring up to this chapter, I assumed.

“The first time I read these verses, I’d like you to hear the words as a description of God’s love toward you.”

I didn’t really hear what he said after that. It was something about what we were supposed to focus on the second time he read it. But my mind had been jolted, and I needed time to process the first thing he said. I had never thought of this chapter, often called the love chapter of the entire book, as being first and foremost a description of what God’s love for me is like. I’ve always thought of it first and foremost as the standard of love to which we as believers in the risen Christ must try to measure up.

That was not the kind of reading the man standing at the front wanted to reinforce that morning. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if it were up to him, he’d utterly obliterate that reading of this passage from the minds of his listeners altogether.

Of course, we’re to love with the kind of love described in 1 Corinthians 13, but if we reduce this chapter on love to being merely a description of our marching orders of how we’re supposed to go out and love others, we turn it into a legalistic list of ways of thinking and feeling and acting towards others that we satanically try to carry out by the power of our dead flesh. Instead, and precisely to the point of the speaker that morning, how much better would it be for us to first encounter personally and experientially the radical and completely counter-human-like nature of God’s infinite, unconditional love? It is then, and only then, as we bathe our dying souls in the life-giving water called the love of God and as we are transformed into that love as a result of having been submersed in it, will we ever be capable of manifesting that very same love to those around us.

We have a problem loving others because we do not know ourselves so unimaginably loved by God. The secret to living a life marked by the kind of love described in 1 Corinthians 13 is not will power motivated by guilt but rather an acceptance of God’s unfathomable love for us in spite of all we are that makes it possible for us to imitate him in his love and love others in spite of what they are. If you try to short circuit this in any way—that is, if you try to read 1 Corinthians 13 as I have for so long, as being mainly a description of the kind of love towards others that we need to work up within ourselves and by our own power—you will be left with dead legalism, and you’ll never even come close to attaining your end.

We have a problem loving others because we do not know ourselves so unimaginably loved by God.

Instead, if you were to let the tidal wave of divine love knock you over where you stand, releasing in the rushing water all your sin and regret and guilt and shame, assured that God sees all that is in you yet rejoices that his Son Jesus willingly stretched out his arms and bled and died in your place to make a way for you to come back home, then you’d finally be in the one and only position in which loving others in that same way is possible.

You can’t give away what you don’t have. If you’re short on love, the invitation is to come to the source and drink deeply of how much you are loved. Only then will you have something worth sharing with others.

The question becomes, of course, are you willing to be loved as God desires to love you? It might sound like an absurd question. Who wouldn’t, right? But the reality is that coming to a point at which you’re able to receive such love is risky. It’s risky because you don’t get to earn it. In fact, you can’t. It’s humbling beyond belief. The human nature kicks against handouts. Handouts, free grace that you haven’t earned and that you’ll never be able to repay, make our souls cringe. Is that not why it’s so hard for us to accept help? We want to do it ourselves! That way we have something to boast about.

But God is not so keen on sharing his glory with another. He will receive all the praise for our eternal salvation on that day when all mankind bows the knee to king Jesus. We will have contributed nothing to the pot. He will have given us everything. Only if you’re able and willing to come to God like that will you know the radical kind of love described in 1 Corinthians 13, and only then will you ever begin to be able to imitate it.

How will you ever be able to love someone who doesn’t deserve it? You bask, soak, and rejoice in the magnificent love of God that loves you even though you don’t deserve it. There is no other way. So bask, soak, and rejoice in this great love. Make it your daily aim, higher than any other aim, to know yourself this amazingly loved, and live out the rest of your day beneath that banner. Only then lift your eyes to the world around you and go and do likewise to them.

That morning as I sat and heard the man in the blue checkered shirt read a few short paragraphs about love, and as I realized that God loves me with exactly that kind of love, I almost couldn’t believe that such love for me was possible. What a joy to let such extravagant love wash over my parched soul. May God’s love find your soul, too, and may it leave you forever changed.