This is kind of like an open letter to a lot of Christians out there who will be offended by reading this. If you’re not offended, this wasn’t meant for you. If you stand up and shout “AMEN!” then I congratulate you. Stop shouting and go love on somebody. If you read this and your initial reaction is “I HATE YOU MATT SNYDER” and you then attempt to email me a letter explaining all your frustrations with this post, I will read it. I will listen to you. And then I will do my best to love you in a way that might usher you into the arms of Jesus… and then I’ll stick all my other loving friends on you and leave you without option to be loved by God. You’ll be so overwhelmed you won’t know what you hit you. It will be like… like… well, just read…
There
are things that are a lot bigger than me. Bigger than my imagination.
Bigger than my heart or the courage that it takes to muster up the
strength to stand. And I’m not ever sure what those things are. They’re
beyond me. They’re beyond what I can dream or what I even desire to
dream. It’s these things that captivate my attention, that imprison my
thoughts and steal moments from my days – chances at life from my life,
itself.
I can’t help but think about the love of God. It’s
beyond me. It’s bigger than me, than my imagination. Thank goodness
that it’s bigger than my own heart. I just read a book a few hours ago
that attempted to break apart the love of God into understandable
chunks. They were very uneven chunks, yet I didn’t even realize that
the love of God was so easy to compartmentalize. If I had known that I
would have written about it years ago in attempt to work off my
unnecessary college loan. I would have been top of my class. I could
have taught classes for that matter. My wisdom would have easily
outweighed my professors’. They probably would have wanted to take me
out for coffee or buy me dinner. Shoot, I could have signed autographs.
Too
bad that didn’t happen. But it’s probably a good thing because I
already wrestle enough with pride – in thinking that I’m better than
you.
I’ll quote this guy, “Today
most people seem to have little difficulty believing in the love of
God; they have far more difficulty believing in the justice of God, the
wrath of God, and the noncontradictory truthfulness of an omniscent
God.” And he asks, “How is God’s love tied to God’s justice?” He
basically explores, although not too much, as to why there seems to be
a chasm between God’s love and God’s justice. He briefly mentions that
some people don’t believe in the love of God because of the lack of
God’s justice in the world (my very loose paraphrase of what he says in
a lot of words). Hm. I wonder why this could be?
Could it be because of lazy Christians?
It
enrages me the amount of “Christians” who go around proclaiming the
love of God while they continuously walk by those that need to
experience God’s love the most. The moment that the love of God demands
something from them, they choose to create a doctrine or new theology
around why they don’t act, why they can’t find it in themselves to move
at the impulse of love. And really all they’re doing is creating a
bunch of excuses.
It breaks my heart that I know a lot of these
said “Christians”. Maybe it’s that my patience has run out with putting
up with their nonsense ‘love’ or maybe it’s that I’m pointing fingers
in order to mask a fear that I have of becoming what I hate the most.
D.A. Carson says, “Christian faithfulness entails our responsibility to grow in our grasp of what it means to confess that God is love.” And
yes, I think it’s important that we understand God’s love, however, I
don’t think it’s something that we, as humans, have the ability to
‘grasp’ objectively.
I would have never understood God’s love if
I had never experienced it. I would never have experienced it had
someone not been willing to become a vessel of God’s love, to become
His hands and feet, Love that I could touch and feel – that I could put
a face to. And that person wouldn’t have been able to do that had they
not been obedient to Love, Itself.
I think people are afraid to
admit that God might actually use them to show His love to another
fellow human being. Why afraid? Because it actually asks something of
us. It calls us out of our selfishness, out of our own little bubbles,
and into something bigger and greater that God is doing. It’s beyond
us, beyond what we can imagine or even begin to fathom. Because it’s
Life calling our life. It’s Love pleading for love.
There’s a
reason God asks us to love others. Why don’t we? Might it actually
change not only someone else’s life, but ours as well? Might it
actually usher God’s justice into the world’s vision? The possibility
of God’s love is endless. It creates. It sustains. It transforms.
So
for Jesus’ sake, be obedient to Love for the purpose to love… and
stop creating excuses. It’s really beginning to piss me and all the
other people who desire to experience God’s love off.
**And I should mention that I have nothing against D.A. Carson. I love the guy. He’s brilliant. Go read his stuff. I just think it’s too easy for us to limit not only our faith, but God’s love to the pages of a book (that includes the Bible). There comes a point where we’re called to take the stuff off of paper and implement it into our lives, folks. The love of God wasn’t something that was just meant to be stared at on a dead tree (no pun intended…)
