Connected to Love

“Peace with God paves the way to peace with ourselves and equips us to be at peace with others.” 

If we apply the Commutative Law (my math teachers would be so proud of me right now), it stands to reason that if we are not at peace with someone, we are likely not at peace with ourselves and if that is the case, it’s highly likely that we are not at peace with God.

It is difficult to be at peace with someone, or Someone, you don’t know. If you don’t know them, why should you trust them, right? Making the decision to take the time to get to know God will alter your attitude toward Him. You will begin to trust Him and He will reign as the utmost authority in your life because you have figured out that He is way more capable than you. In essence, He will be on the throne… and that means you are taking a lesser seat. As you begin to realize the unfathomable love He has for you, you begin to know you are loved and cared for in such a magnificent way that your trust in Him will start to increase. You learn to be at peace with the One who created you for a purpose.

With that peace, comes an ability to be at peace with yourself. You no longer live in fear of failure, but in hope. That hope comes from knowing that He suffered a torturous death, one that He could have walked away from, because He loves YOU. He made you and watches over you, seeing your good days and your bad, hearing your words and your thoughts. Yet, in spite of that, He was willing to go to the cross for you. You can never escape His love for you. Ever!

So, if you are learning to live at peace with God and with yourself, you can begin to realize that you are not responsible for another’s actions or words. You don’t have to own them or wear them or dwell on them. You are free from playing the role of judge in their lives because you have abdicated the throne and let God take His rightful place there. You can relax and love that unlovely person with the unlimited source of Divine love that flows through you in an ever-widening channel, as you allow God to transform you into His image. 

If anyone knows how ridiculously messed up we are, it is the All Seeing God. As a dear friend said to me the other day… we are “tore up from the floor up!” He sees the flaws that you don’t even know you have right now. He sees the flaws of your biggest pain in the neck. He will deal with them. You only have to deal with YOU. That is a critical part of learning to live at peace. Let that person be where they are on the learning curve and don’t allow them to control who you become. If you are struggling to love them and want vindication or seem to think that allowing bitterness to grow in you is appropriate, take a look at your heart. You have just dethroned Jesus and taken His place. When He is truly on the throne, He pours His love into the kingdom He is establishing in you. That love will overflow and be apparent in even your most difficult relationships.

On paper, it looks so simple. In reality, not so much. It is very difficult to allow God’s perfect will to be done in your life every waking moment. Our sinful nature has taught us that we are in charge, so letting go of the desire to dole out justice by treating others as they deserve, rather than with grace and mercy, seems to be our default setting. Jesus boiled the whole truth of the gospel into two things: Love God; Love others. Our strongest desire to do that, will not make it so. Only God can help us love like that and if He is not in charge of our heart, our relationships will suffer.

Be aware! When anger, bitterness, resentment, sorrow and frustration are your initial reactions to others, don’t waste time asking for God to deal with them… because He already knows to do that. In His time, the Spirit of God will speak to them. Don't take on His job. It's way above your pay grade. Just trust me on that. Rather, ask Him to ease you down off of that throne that is way too big for you, and allow Him to be your Authority. Let Him replace your hurt feelings with His love. Jesus has much more reason to hate your adversaries than you do, yet He has nothing but love for them. Is it any wonder that we are so miserable when we carry around the burden of anger, hatred and bitterness toward someone, when we were made to reflect God’s love?

Allow Jesus to ease you into the other side of the yoke He is wearing so that He can lighten your load. Find freedom in knowing that He alone knows the way to peace with God and with others, and, being yoked to Him, will most assuredly get you there. It is not a cumbersome thing to place His yoke on your shoulders and allow Him to guide you through living in loving relationships. Knowing that He is the very definition of LOVE, it really makes sense to allow Him to guide you to living a life of love.

Easy breezy? Not really. It is a process we work on all of our lives. But, I can testify that it gets easier to love well when you practice being yoked to Him every moment of every day. When your heart feels dark and your attitude is in the pit, have a look at your heart and your shoulders. If you are seeing an awful lot of YOU and only a little bit of HIM, you will understand why you are feeling the way you do.

Now here's my disclaimer. LOVE HURTS. His yoke doesn't take the pain away when you have been hurt by loving someone who doesn't reciprocate. However, the pain of loving while being yoked to the epitome of LOVE is much less than the burden of carrying around bitterness and anger all alone.

The Person In The Mirror

Have you ever felt that what you do and how well you do it is the determining factor of how you are perceived? That they are basing your identity on your performance or your financial status or your appearance? I am pretty sure we have all taken that trip down the road to faulty thinking, fatigue and failure. That is exactly where that path leads because we will never be all things to all people so if we are striving for the praise of one person we are failing another person because their expectations differ.

So, how do you define yourself? Are you a success? Are you measuring up? Are you enough?

There are multiple answers to those questions, depending on your vantage point. Perhaps there is a person who has been critical of you consistently, to the point of causing feelings of worthlessness. Maybe there is that one person that you are a bit jealous of… her house is nicer and cleaner and she always has good hair days. Using her as your measuring stick, you just aren’t good enough…EVER! Maybe you have a parent you have spent your life trying to please and they consistently let you know you have missed the mark. Perhaps you have been waiting for a promotion you feel you have more than earned; or a raise; or even something as simple as a pat on the back. And you’re still waiting. None of us want to live in these scenarios, but that is where we often find ourselves.

Take a look at yourself from God’s perspective. You are here reading this right now. That tells me that He has a plan for you that you have yet to complete. The Bible also tells me that “You are His masterpiece, created anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago” (Ephesians 2:10). I believe that we are here for a Divine purpose that is completely in the spiritual realm that we cannot see with our human eyes. We are each that pebble in the pond creating ripples of impact on the lives of others. I think that is typically God’s method, as opposed to sending us in to win a war or cure a disease or eradicate abuse or be the perfect person we all aspire to be. He looks at you and sees that person whose journey, with all the u-turns and detours, is shaping you into the person that fulfills His purpose. A purpose that is so big we can’t even see it.

Picture this…. You have just been notified that a famous artist, an actual descendant of Leonardo da Vinci, is doing a masterpiece and you are his model. You show up and are given a completely green outfit to wear. Head to toe you are green. You have been taken to a pasture where you are ready to pose as instructed. But rather than pose, you are led to stand on a certain spot. Other people are entering the scene now, dressed similarly but in a variety of colors. You stand and wait, feeling rather foolish and impatient and annoyed by the crowd pressing in around you. A half hour later you are dismissed with the entire “cast” of this masterpiece. As you reflect on the time invested, you feel you have wasted an entire day and been made a laughing stock among the friends you told about your “great opportunity” to be the next supermodel/Mona Lisa persona.

Weeks pass and you see on the news, this beautiful artwork that all the art dealers are clamoring for. Now you know you have been scammed because that masterpiece has nothing to do with your day being green. Or does it? As the reporter tells the story, you discover that you and the others, were placed exactly where you needed to be so that when the photographer flew high above you, he could see the end result of all those dots of color, strategically placed to make a true masterpiece.

Here is what I want you to see… Life with Jesus isn’t about being perfect, it’s about being obedient. Being where He wants us to be even when it doesn’t make sense to us. We will stumble and we will fall and we will get off course. It's all part of our brokenness. But when we stop looking at ourselves from the perspective of others, which is often our own flawed notion, and stop being our own worst critic, we can begin to see ourselves as God does. When you look in the mirror, see a purpose and know that you are part of something so much bigger than yourself. Love that purpose and love the person looking back at you.

You are so very loved by the One who created you. But, often there seems to be a chasm between that love and our ability to accept it. That great divide is often created by our own perception that we are unworthy of His love; that our lives and our choices have disqualified us from being loveable. Pastor Chris said in his sermon Sunday the words that keep ringing in my mind.

Our “do” never determines our “who” in God’s eyes.

If His love for us brought Him to earth to experience unthinkable things, including the nails, the crown of thorns, the betrayal, the agony of being alone, the beatings and the crucifixion, then why would our imperfection now shut off His love? He could have walked away from all of that, but He chose to suffer as a way for us to see our value to Him.

Love the person that He loves; the person looking back at you in the mirror. He adores you as His precious child and sees you as His masterpiece. Accepting His loves enables us to accept the love of others and empowers us to love them with a love that is beyond our human capacity.

Peaceful Relationships

Relationships can be as calming as watching the ripples of water as they kiss the sand or as peaceful as the dancing flames of a campfire. They can bring us to a place of rest and can be extremely nurturing. Relationships complete us, bring us joy and add abundant blessings to our lives.

Or…

They can be more like a tidal wave decimating all in its path, leaving nothing but rubble and regret or a forest fire that takes something beautiful and reduces it to ash.

What is the secret to finding yourself in the first category rather than the last? Thousands of books have been written about healthy relationship and there are experts at every turn telling us how to bring that kind of success into our marriage or our parenting or into the workplace.

It doesn’t take a PhD to figure out that love has to be the core and selfishness has to be peeled away. We all know that in our heart, but somehow our body doesn’t always easily follow that knowledge. Our mind defines the love and selfishness according to our own experience without consideration to God’s definition. We tend to seek love that looks like something we are good at doing for others… those things that come naturally. I am an encourager so if I encourage, I am showing love. But, what if you don’t need to be encouraged right now? What if you truly need me to listen, or pray with you, or take you to the doctor, or help you find your car keys? All the encouraging in the world isn’t going to meet your needs and align with your definition of love.

The writer of the book of Romans, in the New Testament, tells that we must learn to honor one another above ourselves. To do that, we have to shelve our own definition of what love looks like and demonstrate love in the manner the recipient can receive it. Ladies, if your husband feels honored when you sit down and listen to how his day went, looking him in the eye, then stop putting away the laundry long enough to sit with him for however long it will take so that he sees you are honoring him above your need to make tidy happen.  In the same way, Gentlemen, if your wife feels loved when you do the dishes with her, all the flowers in the world cannot replace the honor she feels when you stand with her doing something she could easily do alone.

Honoring others above yourself doesn’t mean that you don’t matter. You absolutely matter. Jesus would not have gone to the cross to reconcile you to the Father if you didn’t. Not for one minute does he want your value to disappear. What has to happen before you can begin to honor others above yourself without losing yourself is this:

(1)   You must receive the love He offers you through His mercy and grace. You really can’t love anyone if you haven’t connected with the Source of love. There is no place else to find it. You can’t order it online or find it at the mall or in a book or from a counselor.

(2)   You must recognize yourself as the treasured masterpiece that you are, in the eyes of your Creator.  If you continually see yourself as a lump of worthless flesh, your offering to others is worthless. You can’t give what you don’t have. Loving yourself is key to loving others.

(3)   You must practice living in the image of God. God is love. We must reflect His love. There is no amount of will or strength that can create a loving relationship that withstands the storms of life. Without Him as the Captain of your ship, you are going to end up shipwrecked. Love isn’t an action, although loving brings you to act. Love is who we become as we spend time with God and learn His ways. That often comes in the silence, a rare commodity in our lives.

Let God love you. Don’t push Him away. Be his beloved child and learn from Him. He wants your relationships to succeed. After all, He created us for relationships. He wants to steer you away from those that are unhealthy and empower you to flourish in those that He knows are right for you. 

Who Is In Control?

On Good Friday I watched The Passion and, apart from reality of the extreme cruelty and pain Jesus willingly endured for us, the words that He said to Pilate linger in my mind. In an attempt to get Jesus to say something that would enable the ruler to release Him, Jesus looked Pilate in the eye and said, “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above…” (John 19:11).

As that phrase rings in my mind over and over I reflect to the number of times that I have heard a child pass blame for their actions to another or a wife accuse her husband for her actions or a husband accuse his wife for his attitude. It is our nature to release ourselves from the responsibility of our actions and assign them to the one we have offended. Pilate wanted no part in Jesus trial or punishment, but Jesus made it perfectly clear that it was not a political leader, but indeed it was sin that was responsible for His crucifixion. The blame didn’t belong to one action or one individual, but in the fact that the people, created for connection with God and each other, had hearts that had become selfish and hardened. The separation between God and His people that began in Eden, must be repaired. There must be a sacrifice, and this was God’s plan.

Perhaps, the next time we excuse our actions or our words or our feelings, we need to consider that Jesus paid a significant price so that we could rise above all of that. We have no power to control the actions of that person who hurts or frustrates us, but the sacrifice of Jesus, in obedience to the Heavenly plan, makes it possible for us to own our weakness, and simultaneously be strong enough to follow God’s plan. His desire is not for us to continue to live our life controlled by our circumstances, but to realize that He has made a way for us to take up our cross and make the sacrifice of pride, of being right, of being the victim, and allow it to die so that we can live in the abundance of His love and grace and peace.

My prayer for you, and for me, is that we realize that the supreme sacrifice was made so that we can live full and meaningful lives, victorious over the sin that will never stop trying to drag us down. May we realize that Jesus’ sacrifice is meaningless if we continue to cave to the desires of the flesh to get even or prove our point or be angry and bitter … to live as though others don’t matter to Jesus… to seek our own gain at the expense of another. May we, rather, look at the cross and the blood and the sacrifice that makes it possible to own our sin, our issues, and take them to that place where they no longer have power over us.

There is great liberation and peace in the knowledge that God will take the wheel … just as soon as we let go of it. He will show us the way, if we will open our eyes. He will heal our relationships if we let go of our pretense that we must fix or defeat our “opponent.” Refusing this offering of a merciful Father is allowing His suffering to have been in vain.