Keep Yourselves in the Love of God

Among other admonitions listed at the end of the book of Jude is the phrase, "keep yourselves in the love of God." It's a phrase that caught my attention many years ago and still does from time to time now.

I used to think it was an admonition to live such a life that would keep us under the shelter of God's love - for example, if I am diligent to practice spiritual disciplines, then I'm keeping myself in the "vicinity", so to speak, of the love of God.

There may be a sense in which that is true, but that interpretation could suggest that God's love is conditional and limited. I wonder now if it's more about doing the "work" of continually listening and watching for expressions and signs of God's affection and enjoyment of us so that we then live in love and affection towards others as an overflow of knowing we are loved by Him. It's this ongoing realization that I am loved and enjoyed by God that causes my heart to continue to expand and to be in touch with life and with those that I am in contact with daily.

The following are a couple of ways that come to mind that we can do to actively live and grow in the love of God:
1. Read and study scripture that focuses on God's unchanging love and affection for humans and ask Him to help you hear that for you personally.
2. Take a few moments in the day to ask Him, "Father, what do You think of me?", and let Him affirm you even when you feel terrible about yourself.
3. Ask the Lord to help you be alert and aware throughout the day to signs and expressions of His affection for you whether that comes through another person or circumstance...

Jude 21 "Keep yourselves in the love of God and wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life."

Words for Leaders

The following are some great quotes on leadership from Neil Cole's book on organic leadership:

                When you're finished changing, you're finished.
                                                                                    Benjamin Franklin
      

              To lead people, walk beside them....
              As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence.
              The next best, the people honor and praise.
              The next, the people fear;
              and the next, the people hate....
              When the best leader's work is done the people say,
             "We did it ourselves!"
                                                                                    Lao-tzu


             Man's rank is his power to uplift.
                                                                                   George MacDonald



             Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
                                                                                    Malcolm Forbes

Selling Water By the River - The Ever-changing Unchanging Kingdom of God

This will be the last of a series of bits from Shane Hipps book, Selling Water By the River. There's a lot more in this book and I highly recommend it as material that helps enlarge the heart. (See previous posts part 1,  No One Comes to the Bible without a Lens, Becoming Open to Love Can Be Unnerving, Jesus' Disregard for Established Religious Boundaries.)

In the chapter about gardening Hipps contrasts the special treatment that the famous Mona Lisa painting receives (encasement in a temperature controlled glass box and security guards, etc) and the treatment that a good gardener gives to plants in a botanical garden. These are both very different kinds of jobs.

"Trees don't take kindly to small sealed glass cases that prevent moisture and the sun from getting in. An ancient painting would not take kindly to a whole lot of tampering, touch, and exposure. The key to selecting the proper method of care is understanding the object so the wrong methods are not applied...The same is true when it comes to our relationship to the message of Jesus - the gospel. We must accurately understand the nature of the gospel if we are to treat it with proper care..."

In Acts 8 we read one of many conversion encounters found in the book of Acts; this one is particularly fascinating. Obeying God's direction to head to the Gaza dessert from Jerusalem, Philip comes across the "treasurer of Ethiopia", a eunuch, who was in his chariot reading from the book of Isaiah.

In the ancient world there were a number of reasons why a man was castrated; in this case it was because he served in the queen's service and had to become a eunuch so as not to "cause trouble".

"Some eunuchs would develop feminine characteristics because they no longer had as much testosterone coursing through their bodies. Many dressed in women's clothes with women's makeup and adornments, so they could serve powerful women without too many questions asked. They were considered a third gender and were often outcasts in society. People didn't know where to put them..."

The fact that this man had traveled all the way from Ethiopia to Jerusalem to worship and had acquired a scripture scroll indicates courage on his part since eunuchs were prohibited by Jewish law (Deuteronomy 23:1) from entering the assembly of God.

"God told Philip to go and share the gospel with a person who is not acceptable according to the Bible. He is from another land, another religion, and has chosen a lifestyle that is both irreversible and strictly prohibited in the Bible. And yet, God sends Philip far out of his way to share the good news with this person. Then Philip baptizes him without any precondition other than the eunuch's desire. So while the eunuch might be excluded from the religious assembly of God, he is welcome in God's kingdom."

Another fascinating thing is going on - Isaiah directly contradicts the law of Deuteronomy (Isaiah 56:3-5)! This shows the trajectory of the Bible - it's a story of ever-expanding love that moves beyond the original established boundaries.

And there's more that not recorded in the scripture about this story...now 2,000+ years later, "over half of all Ethiopians are Christians and a number of them trace the origin of their faith back to this first convert."

Shane Hipps finishes this wonderful chapter with words about the nature of the kingdom of God, proposing that perhaps when Jesus compared it to a mustard seed in Luke 13, He was suggesting that not only would the kingdom grow numerically, but that its nature includes change and reshaping...

"Perhaps  the kingdom does more than transform us; it also transforms itself for our sake. There may be dimensions of God's love that have yet to be revealed to us...it is possible that the gospel takes shapes necessary to better penetrate the hearts of people. A mustard seed in no way resembles the look, feel, or function of a mustard tree...

"Like a seed that becomes a tree, (the gospel) changes, grows, and is renewed

in each culture, context, and generation. The good news began as a message to Abraham of the blessing of land and descendants for an ethnic group. But through the course of history it became the blessing of an abundant life beyond land and children, beyond ethnicity. It became good news for anyone who wanted it...The good news grows and in that sense, changes. And yet...its basic DNA does not change. It both changes and is somehow unchanged."

Finally, Shane Hipps suggests that the kingdom of God is more like a plant than a painting. It's not an ancient artifact that needs protecting: "The kingdom is a lot more like a tree. God is looking for gardeners, not guards. A guard is trained in a defensive stance of fear and suspicion. A gardener is motivated by love and creativity...A friend, who is a landscape architect, once told me about a special kind of cell in plants that is called 'meristematic.' It's a cell that is ever-growing, ever-changing, ever-living. Jesus proclaimed the meristematic kingdom of God. Are we prepared for this never-changing kingdom to change? Are we open to the ways we might understand it anew?"

Selling Water By the River - Becoming Open to Love Can Be Unnerving

I've discovered over the years that we who name the name of Jesus can be some of the most uptight people around, fearful of making mistakes and/or wrong decisions or of being in error or just not being spiritual enough, etc, etc. I've actually found at times that people are offended by the idea that we don't have to fear God's disapproval or that we are going to "miss it". So I was especially struck by the chapter on "touching the stove" in Selling Water By the River. In it Shane Hipps says the following:

"Those of us raised in Christianity often live with a lot of fear. Fear that we are doing it wrong (whatever 'it' is). Fear that some unfamiliar idea might hurt us. Fear that God may not like who we are, or what we've done, or what we think. Fear that a particular interpretation of the Bible is hurting the Bible or even God. Fear that we, or others, might be offending God, who apparently has quite fragile feelings, and a hair-triggered temper. Some religious people are even afraid that other people are not frightened enough."

Hipps goes on to say that fear has a legitimate initial role in our early formation in God in that it teaches us what is needed in order to stay safe. He uses the illustration of teaching his small daughter to fear the stove with the instructions to not touch the stove. However, as we mature we must "leave the fear behind or we become paralyzed or pathological. If a 20-year-old is frightened of stoves in the same way he was as a 2-year-old, we have a problem.

"Fear is a developmental ingredient in the life of faith. It is useful in learning to prevent harm and nurture wisdom...and helps us develop basic impulse control...But fear also has some serious limits...

"The first stage of development is a much safer place to be...But as we grow, we are more and more moved and opened by Love, or God...we could say that fear is about closure and contraction, whereas Love is about opening and expansion. Love by nature is free from fear. The process of becoming open by Love can be unnerving, and it is not for the faint of heart. Doubts emerge when what we thought were solid foundations beginto feel like shifting sands beneath our feet. Love opens us more and more to a freedom that moves us beyond self-justification, self-protection, and self-preservation...

"If we are to access the Living Water Jesus promised, ultimately Love must become the only thing that governs behavior, not fear...Love does not do away with all boundaries; instead, it makes use of them in ways that serve the purpose of Love. 

"As we grow, the question we learn to ask moves from What is right or wrong? to What does Love require?"...fear is actually the absence of Love, not the opposite (of Love)...ridding ourselves of fear is as simple as letting Love in."

Selling Water By the River - Jesus' Disregard for Established Religious Boundaries

In his chapter about "wind and sails" in Selling Water By the River, Shane Hipps shows how Jesus went out of His way to disregard the boundaries that religion had established. In His first miracle of turning water into wine Jesus "sets the stage for his way of operating in the world. It frames his entire ministry."

In this miracle, what's astonishing is not only that Jesus changed the chemical composition from one liquid to another but that He flagrantly broke the ceremonial rules which insisted that wine not be put into vessels that were dedicated for ceremonial washing. This is exactly what Jesus did - he had the servants use the  jars that were for ceremonial cleansing rather than use the empty wine jars. By doing this, He was mixing wine and water thereby defiling both and causing the people to be unclean.

Why would Jesus do such an offensive thing (and continue doing this sort of thing throughout His ministry)? Hipps contends that it was because He was always trying to get people beyond the banks of the river and into the great expanse of the river of God's love. "He kept moving people toward the vast ocean, beyond the narrow confines of the riverbanks."

"Religions have a tendency to get stuck. Institutions aren't made to stay limber...Thus the trajectory of any religion is always to become brittle. A basic law is at work in most things we humans create: whatever the intended purpose of our creation, when overextended, it can reverse on itself...when it (Christian religion) becomes overextended, the impulse is to preserve the institution rather than the message...Jesus consistently undermined the natural inertia of institutions. He was the embodiment of pure, unbridled creative force. Creativity is often disruptive. It has little interest in preservation; it is about making new things and making things new."

Jesus is not against religions. The author says that Jesus is the wind while religions are the sails. His own conviction is that the Christian religion is the sail that best catches the wind but adds the following, "Just because Christianity claims Jesus as its own does not mean that Jesus claims Christianity as his own. Christ does not bind himself to a religion any more than wind binds itself to a sail...We must never make an idol of the sail and thereby miss the wind. But it is also a mistake to say the sail doesn't matter. Without a sail, the wind is difficult to catch..."

(But always remember): "It is not the sail, but the wind we are after." Jesus continually broke the rules and boundaries established by religion so that people could get to Him.