Obeying Your Bridegroom

In our last Relationship Tuesdays, we looked at the aspect of love of God as Father through obedience, and how obedience to His commands is a recognition of His not only knowing but desiring what is best for us. 

Today we are going to look at demonstrating our love for God as our bridegroom or husband, which is another metaphor that God uses to describe His relationship with us throughout the Old and New Testament:

“For your Maker is your husband--the LORD Almighty is his name--the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of all the earth.” Isaiah 54:5

“As a young man marries a maiden, so will your sons marry you; as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you.” Isaiah 62:5

“Then John's disciples came and asked him, "How is it that we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?"

Jesus answered, "How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.” Matthew 9:14

And these are just a few examples.  The entire theme of the book of Hosea is God as bridegroom, and how upset/jealous He gets when His people go after idols.  And idols are not just dead images and statues that get set up and worshipped; idols are anything that takes any of your love away from God.  He wants you to love Him with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.  (Read more about this idea in Flee From Idolatry)

God basically equates anything less than loving Him with everything as adultery.

So if we are supposed to see ourselves as the wife of God, we need to look at how a wife ought to behave toward her husband:

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Ephesians 5:22

Our role as the church/wife of Christ is one of submission.

Submission shows love because it’s not a forced obedience; submission is willful/selfless obedience.  Loving wives choose not to strive against their husbands and submit to their authority.  Loving people choose not to strive against God and submit to His authority, just as Jesus submitted to the Father when He said, “not my will, but yours be done." (Luke 22:42)  Wives choose to love their husbands not just more than they love other men but instead of loving other men.  Likewise God wants us to love Him not just more than all other options, but instead of all other options.  So we choose to trust and obey God, just as a wife chooses to trust and obey her husband.

Next time we’ll be looking at Obeying our King.

Obeying God

In our last Relationship Tuesdays we talked about God’s love, specifically God’s love for us inherent in the Gospel of Love.  About how He loved us so much to send His Son to die for us, not just so that we can avoid hell, but so that we can learn to love the way He loves: loving others and loving God. Love alone paves the way for a righteous life, as summed up in the big two commandments: Love the Lord your God, and love others like yourself.  And Jesus tells us that if we love Him we will obey His commandments.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be looking at the importance of obeying God in our relationship with Him.

I think a lot of times we get this mistaken idea of what obeying God’s commandments looks like.  We seem to think that if we go to church, pray, read our Bible, and maybe sing some songs that we’re walking in obedience, that we have a right relationship with God.  But there’s a lot more that Jesus tells us to do like feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for widows and orphans, heal the sick, to just name a few.  The Bible is chalk full of things God has commanded anyone who claims a relationship with Him to do for His glory.

One of my favorite illustrations of the misconception we have about obeying God comes from Francis Chan in the Basic series, but here’s a video that sums it up with a transcript from the series below:

When my daughter comes to me and I tell her, 'go clean your room,' she's not going to come back to me and say, 'dad, I memorized what you said to me. You said to go clean my room!' because I won't celebrate and say, 'yes! That's exactly what I wanted!' no. And she's not going to come say, 'dad, I can say go clean your room in Greek.' because that's not going to fly. And she's not going to say, 'my friends and I are going to gather every week and discuss what it would look like if I cleaned my room.' None of that works. Just go and clean your room.

So why do we think that kind of teaching is going to work when it comes to Jesus?

In John 14:15, Jesus says, “If you love me, you’ll keep my commandments.”  And then in John 15:10, Jesus says, “If you keep my commandments, you’ll abide in my love.” 

Nowhere does He say go and learn my commandments, and that’s how I’ll know you love me. 

So for the next few weeks, we’ll look at why actual, physical obedience to God’s commandments is such an integral part of our relationship with Him, and why obedience demonstrates love.  We’ll start with Obeying Our Father.

The Man's Man

Last week in Relationship Tuesday we began to talk about the fear of the Lord.  This is the starting point for a relationship with God.  Without a proper fear of the Lord, we can’t understand all the complexities of the relationship He wants to have with us.  And this is a real fear, not simply awe and respect, though those are important.  Everyone who’s come in contact with this God who’s offering us relationship has hit the dust in sheer terror, even John the beloved disciple.

John and Jesus were tight.  John even rested his head on Jesus’ chest at the last supper.  There are very few people I would let cuddle up with me like that, and all of them are family, namely my wife, my son, and my little sisters, though they’ve stopped doing that so much now that they’ve grown up.  If any of my guy friends said, “hey let me rest my head on your chest”, I’d probably laugh and punch them in the mouth.

Seriously though, John and Jesus were close, and to be fair John was probably a teenager at this point, just a boy, so it’s not so weird as all that.  Jesus was like his father or older brother, and John loved Him. 

Everything John writes is about love, but we also read that he was a bit surly.  Jesus calls him and his brother “Sons of Thunder”.  They sound like a professional wrestling tag team group.

They’re the ones who ask if they can call down fire and consume people.  They’re the ones who ask if it’s time to go to war with Rome and bring the kingdom.  They’re the ones whose mother asks if they can’t sit on Jesus’ right and left in the kingdom.  John was the only disciple that went and stood at the crucifixion even though it meant he would be seen as a disciple and could have been arrested and killed too. There were two things you can be sure of when reading the Bible: John the apostle loved Jesus, and he was fearless.

And yet, when John stands face to face with the glorified Christ in Revelations 1:17, he “fell at His feet as though dead.”  And like every human being who ever has had contact with God since Adam’s fall, Jesus has to reach down and say, “do not be afraid.”

So, why then does this same John, who turns into a quivering pile of Jell-O at the sight of the glorified Jesus, write, “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18)?

If that small phrase were all John wrote, then it would seem strange. But most people who use that phrase to suggest we ought not be afraid of God anymore, don’t quote everything John wrote here: “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.” (1 John 4:17-18)

John is talking about being afraid of the Day of Judgment and being afraid of punishment.  In that respect, if His love is perfected in us, we do have no reason to be afraid of God’s punishment.  There is no punishment for those who know God and are known by Him. 

However, not being afraid of being punished does not preclude that we have no more reason to fear God.  In fact if punishment is the only reason you’re afraid of God, you don’t know Him. 

We fear Him for the same reason we serve Him--because of who He is not what He can do to us or for us.

Next Week: The Fear of Claymen

Does God Know You?

Last week in the Relationship Tuesday series, we talked about the difference between Knowing About God and Knowing God.  This week we’re going to talk about God knowing us.  That is after all part of a relationship right?  Both parties know each other.

When I use the word “know” here, I’m not talking about know as in the omniscient way He knows everything.  I’m talking about a more intimate knowledge, a familiarity or a relational knowledge, if you will.

In Matthew 7:20-23 Jesus says, “"Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. Many will say to Me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; DEPART FROM ME, YOU WHO PRACTICE LAWLESSNESS.'

Clearly there are those who think they know Jesus, that do amazing works in His name, I dare say more than most of us have done, but who do not have a relationship with Him.  They think they know Him, but when they claim to know Him on Judgment day, He doesn’t recognize them as His own.

It’s like knowing about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.  You can read all the tabloids, see all their movies, join their fan clubs, follow them on Twitter, even get your hair cut to look just like them, but if you were to show up on their doorstep claiming to know them, you’d be promptly dragged away by their body guards, turned over to the police and imprisoned for harassment.

And I don’t choose my analogy lightly.  These Hollywood icons are in many ways defining what relationships should look like whether that’s civil, friendship, marriage, or even family, and a lot of those ideas are superimposed on our relationship with God. 

Now, scripture does use a lot of earthly metaphors to describe our relationship with God such as Father, brother, bridegroom, friend, king, etc., but too often our ideas about these metaphors are informed by the imperfect rather than by the perfect—God Himself.  Our relationship with God as Father for instance is different than our relationship with our earthly father, and it’s far different than the fatherly relationships portrayed in movies.

All that to say, we ought not treat God as we would treat any old relationship, and we certainly ought not imagine that our knowledge about Him and scripture, our good deeds done in His name, or even seeing miracles happen in His name are the same as knowing Him or even more crazy that these things mean He ought to know us.

But how do we know that God knows us?  Jesus says He doesn’t know those who practice lawlessness.  What’s lawlessness?  Jesus also says that all the law and the prophets rest on two commandments: Love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22:37-40).  If you love God with everything and love others, you’re not lawless.

Paul spells it out in very simple terms: “If anyone loves God, then he is known by Him” (1 Corinthians 8:3). 

Our quest isn’t to learn about God, so we gain a lot of knowledge: head or heart knowledge for those who speak Christianese.  Our quest is to love God with everything we’ve got regardless if we understand Him or His ways because we’ll never really understand the infinite, unfathomable God, but we can know Him, and if we love Him, we can be known by Him.


Next Week: The Fear of the Lord

Don't Be a Digital Christian

You’ve no doubt heard the saying “Don’t be a Sunday Christian.”  The sermons incorporating this phrase often go something like this:

Too many Christians profess their faith in Jesus on Sunday here in church, but then when they leave these walls, they go home or to work and no one would ever be able to tell them apart from the world.  They curse in public, they watch inappropriate movies, they lust, they covet, they lie, they steal . . .

When speaking to the church at Laodicea, Jesus didn’t call this being a Sunday Christian; He called it being lukewarm.  “'I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish that you were cold or hot. 'So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth.” (Revelations 3:15-16)

With that in mind as I’ve been networking more with my blog, I’ve come across so many amazing Christian bloggers who have learned and shared great lessons about Christ and life, but at the same time, I wonder how many digital Christians I’ve stumbled across.  Sometimes, I wonder if I’m just a digital Christian. 

It’s easy to sit behind our computer screens and talk about how we should be living life for the glory of God, but if we’re spending all our time behind our screens; how are we reaching the lost, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the imprisoned . . . For the record, we aren’t doing those things by sending a digital donation.  That’s just enabling someone else to do things.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with sharing our faith on the Internet, blogging about what God’s taught us, even digitally donating to Christians doing the Lord’s work, but I for one don’t want to mistake the things I talk about in the digital world of the Internet for living the real life God’s called me to live.  The Internet is a great tool, but the real life people on the other side of the connection need real life people to invest in their real life.

I was recently convicted with the following words: “don’t talk about things so much that you think you’re doing them.”  And I think that applies to my blog as well.

My Prayer:

Lord, break my heart with the things that break yours.  I want to live as hot all the time: in church, online, at work, at the grocery store, at the park, at a restaurant, wherever You lead let me burn for You. Amen

One Step Closer to Death

Take a moment.  Breath deeply.  Do you feel that?  That’s one less breath you’ll take in this life.  When you lay your head on your pillow tonight, you’ll have one less day to live.  Every step you take is one step closer to death.  There’s an old saying that goes something like “only two things are sure in life: death and taxes. “  But that’s not true.  People cheat on their taxes all the time.  No one cheats death. 

Time is marching ever onward and just as surely as you are reading these words; you will die.

The Bible says, “You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.” (James 4:14)  

There are a few more sayings out there about the certainty of death: “Carpe Diem (Seize the Day)”, “Live everyday like it’s your last”, and "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we may die."  You may recognize that last one from Isaiah 22:13.

Jesus brings up the idea again in Matthew: “For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be.” (Matthew 24:37-39)

None of these Biblical contexts hold the idea of “Carpe Diem” in very high esteem.  Yes, death can come at any moment, but that is no reason to live like it’s at your doorstep, trying to get in all the physical experiences you can before you’re gone. 

As an alternative I would humbly suggest that you spend your time on Earth preparing for eternity.  Spend everyday God gives you on this Earth getting to know Jesus better.  Learn to recognize His voice and follow His commands.  Love God with all your heart, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. 

These are the things that will bring joy on this journey into the grave, and these are the things that will bring us into our Master’s arms on the other side of it.