Eye-Blinking Change

It’s been thirty years since Stephen Covey wrote his paradigm-shifting self-help book, ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change.’ Its popularity exposes the broad consciousness we humans have for personal development. We are built for change. The right kind of change takes us from irrational to thoughtful thinkers, from immature to wise decision-makers, from dependent relationships to independence and finally interdependence within a community. Covey’s concepts have sweeping relevance to living effective lives.

If the full extent and potential of our lives was the eighty-some year span allotted each of us on this earth, those seven habits would be enough. But if the main theme and thread running through the Bible is true, our earthly potential is only the beginning of who we may ultimately become. It’s an alchemy accomplished by the most controversial historical figure ever to have walked this earth. Through His perfectly-lived life, debt-paying death, and death-defying resurrection, Jesus offers something immense to you and me. He gives us the opportunity to be changed into being (somehow) like Him.

C.S. Lewis puts it like this: “Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else…God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man…It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. Of course, once it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which could never have been jumped and thus beat the natural horse at its own game” (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity).

How does this beyond-remarkable transformation occur? It happens like all other lesser changes in our lives—four simple elements that move us from pedestrian creatures to winged Pegasuses: It’s as easy and difficult as to rightly see, think, feel, and do.

Seeing: “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith…” (Hebrews 12:2). It’s not our physical eyes we are using here—it’s a deeper vision we need to exercise. Making a priority of informing ourselves of the truth of God’s existence and of His relevance to our lives must be a moment-by-moment event. It means reading His Word with a view to seeing Christ through every genre expressed in the Bible so that we begin to see Him for who He is. And one day, “when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (I John 3:2).

Thinking: “(W)hatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things” (Philippians 4:8). Jesus epitomizes the best of these values. Aligning the myriad of choices we make each day with Jesus’ commands and exhortations builds a mind that is becoming incrementally more Christlike.

Feeling: “I will give them an undivided heart,” promises God, “and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 11:19). Our emotions are designed to follow on the heels of our thinking, giving us impetus to act cohesively with our understanding of things. We see, then we think about what we’ve seen, and then we feel motivated to act. Hearts of stone are disabled emotions, incapable of moving us to the kind of actions God designed us to participate in. One of the ways God changes us is to put into our hearts a joy of praising Him. This leads us to actions we would neither have thought of nor dared to do before.

Doing: “He has showed you, O man (and woman), what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). Justice, mercy, and a humble walk—these are high standards. We fail daily. So we go back to seeing, and from there to thinking, and so on. It’s how change happens, little by little.

But we all know things are never as easy to do as they appear on paper. We’ve all done more than our share of failed seeing, thinking feeling and doing. That’s why we’re given the key to this amazing process in the Apostle Paul’s first century letter to a group of early Christ-followers.

“Therefore, my dear friends…continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose” (Philippians 2:12,13).

Who works out this amazing transformation? You do, yes. But God does too. It’s a coalition, a collaboration on a supernatural project, a union of wills. It’s like glue that must have equal parts of catalyst and resin to create a form-setting epoxy—not one or the other, but both. So let’s resolve to be part of this project with God. Let’s see if we don’t eventually—in time for eternity—become eye-blinkingly changed.

Learning to Love (I Corinthians 13), Conclusion

Always Perseveres.

Most things on planet earth eventually change. We might even say that change is one of the certainties of the physical world: With time, inanimate objects like craggy mountains erode and cliffs crumble, rivers become cavernous gorges, oceans warm and icebergs melt. For Canadians, even the penny and the paper dollar have gone the way of the dodo bird. Which brings us to the animate world: viruses mutate, species alter their life cycle patterns or become extinct, pop cultures morph, and social norms evolve. Try as we might, we cannot avoid change.

So when we hear the closing line of I Corinthians 13 in its description of love we are brought to an abrupt and surprising halt. “Love,” says the inspired author, “always perseveres.” Never changes? Never dims, dwindles or declines? Is unfailingly, incessantly, and unceasingly constant? Who of us could ever achieve this magnitude of love?

You can.

You and I can with the stipulation of one little caveat: To learn to love with infinite perseverance and constancy we must enlist ourselves in Christ’s School of Love. We won’t find this academy listed in any register of ivy-league schools. We cannot complete it in four years like an undergraduate degree—it extends into eternity. We cannot access it by through a Masters of Divinity programme (could we ever master divinity?). We won’t even be able to find it referenced in the Bible under this name. But if we look closely that’s where we’ll find hints of it.

The curriculum works something like some contemporary education structures which utilize an upward spiral approach to learning: topics are covered in increasing gradations, revisited and reexamined over and over again in more depth, building a broader, higher, more thorough learning than the once-over approach could ever accomplish. It will take a determined student a lifetime and more to master its lessons.

Lesson 1: We are all plagued by our natural bent to fickleness and inconstancy. “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, “ bemoans the prophet Isaiah, “each of us has turned to his own way” (Isaiah 53:6). The discerning student of love sooner or later comes to recognize that a primeval selfishness within us obstructs our best intentions to love long and well.

Lesson 2: God loves with infinite perseverance. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us,” breathes the Apostle John in wonder (I John 3:1). Jesus confirms the sentiment saying of those who accept His love, “…no one can snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:28).

Lesson 3: When God’s Spirit indwells a person, persevering love begins to develop. “May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope,” invokes the Apostle Paul, “encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word…May the Lord direct your hearts into God’s love and Christ’s perseverance” (II Thessalonians 2:16,17; 3:5).

Lesson 4: The path to persevering love is generally through suffering. “…(W)e know that suffering,” explains Paul, “produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us” (Romans 5:3-5). John adds, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth” (I John 3:16-28).

Lesson 5: The end result of persevering love is Life. “Blessed is the man who perseveres…” instructs the Apostle James, “because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him” (James 1:12).

Are we students of love? Do we put ourselves under Jesus as His fledgling novices and apprentices? If so, Jesus is delighted to teach us everything He is as an infinitely persevering love-giver. Without doubt, we will fail repeatedly (read ‘daily’, even ‘hourly’) to love as Jesus envisions us loving, and we must return repeatedly to lesson one. But then we will also revisit the heartwarming lesson two, God’s great love for us. This gives us courage to step back into lessons three and four with our eyes set on the glories of lesson five. That is how the process works. It’s about grace and mercy, humility and determination. It’s about the love of God.

Learning to Love (I Corinthians 13), Part 14

Always Hopes.

“Hope,” wrote Victor Hugo, “is the word which God has written on the brow of Every Man.” That is a thought-provoking description of hope. Primarily, it explains hope as a gift from God imprinted upon each of us. Hope offers us clarity to see through the fog of the finite and of the distressing. It pictures hope blazing before us like a headlamp giving us purpose for the paths we take in life. Without hope, we wander in the dark, experiencing all manner of griefs. And without hope, the human spirit withers, disintegrates, and eventually dies.

Hope is a notion the Bible addresses frequently; it conveys the recurring motif of a unique and specific hope: not a groundless, useless or foolish hope, but one of certainty; not hope centred on wishful thinking or on anything arising from this world, but hope centred entirely upon God.

“Do you not know? Have you not heard?” asks the prophet Isaiah, “The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint” (Isaiah 40:28-31).

Biblical hope is based entirely upon the self-revelation of God—what He has told us about Himself that impacts our existence. This hope is comprised of three things: God’s character, God’s creative works, and God’s vision for His creation.

To explore this hope, we begin by asking, ‘What has God revealed to us about His character that gives us hope?’ Several things. He is the eternal, uncreated, always-existing One, in whom is no caprice or fickleness, so we can rely fully upon Him; He has supreme power to accomplish all that He purposes, so He never makes a mistake; He is good and His acts toward humanity arise from this goodness, so we can trust Him; He is personal—fully accessible to us when we submit to an all-consuming relationship with Him, so we can interact with Him; and He is loving—gracious, compassionate, patient, comforting, strengthening and desiring of each of us to develop our eternal potential, so we can find fulfillment in Him.

Secondly, we must ask, ‘What has God revealed to us about His creative works that gives us hope?’ He created the universe out of nothing by His command—He spoke and it was; all energy and all matter arise from Him and He sustains all His creation by His own power; we humans are the apex of His creative work, designed to reflect such aspects of God that we alone of His creation are said to bear “the image of God” and thus are incredibly valuable to Him. He is in the midst of creating an unimaginable eternity for those who choose to be in relationship with Him.

And thirdly, we must ask, ‘What has God revealed to us about His vision for His creation?’ God created humans to have the gift of free will—we are not programmed robots doing God’s bidding without any choice in the matter. This is a difficult concept for us to understand, but perhaps it is because automatons cannot be in relationship with their Maker, cannot house the dignity that God designed us to contain. While each of us humans have misused our free will and rebelled in some way against Him (which He knew would happen even before making us), God set in motion a solution. He devised a ransoming rescue for humanity’s self-destructive rebellion: the dying and resurrecting Jesus. God’s vision is for a community tied so closely in relationship with Himself (as Father, as Jesus, and as the Holy Spirit) and with one another that we are to be called the “body of Christ.” And finally, God reveals to us His vision for an eternity in which we are completely unified in Him, accomplishing for Him and through Him glorious tasks as yet untold.

How does this all relate to love? We’ve been exploring the love chapter of I Corinthians 13 and we need to find the connection. How is it that “love always hopes”? It comes back to God (as everything ultimately does). God is love embodied, and God is the source of all hope. We cannot separate hope from love. A full understanding of God’s love for us is all-important—even non-negotiable—to experiencing real life-giving hope. Hoping in God is the only cure for the weariness that comes from disillusionment with this world. God’s promise to lovingly redeem even our worst situations to bring about ultimate good for those who love Him is the hope to which we must cling.

So let’s step into this day with a new reason for certain hope. Let’s be people who exude confidence because we are loved by the One who gives us the assurance that all will be well. So then, it is well, and it is well with our soul.

Learning to Love (I Corinthians 13), Part 13

Always Trusts.

Taking something at face value can be instinctive. It can be an almost unconscious reflex to unthinkingly react to the surface appearance of something. Yes (we admit later, when we are in a more reflective mood), we failed to employ deep thought and discernment but it seemed efficient at the time to just ‘see and do’ or ‘hear and say.’ Author Os Guinness tells the story of the blatantly chauvinistic Norman Mailer’s invitation to speak at the University of California Berkeley in the early 1970s amid a crowd of young feminists. Recognizing the brewing friction, Mailer invited his adversaries to speak up.

“Everybody in this hall,” invited Mailer, “who regards me as a male chauvinist pig, hiss.” “As if perfectly on cue,” chronicles Guinness, “the feminists broke out at once in loud, derisive hissing and booing…Mailer stepped back to the microphone, looked over to them, paused just a second or two, and said, ‘Obedient little women, aren’t you?’ (To sanitize his words somewhat).” Rather than freeing them from Mailer’s misogynistic domination, the audience’s surface reaction had reinforced their rival’s potency.

God is not like that. He never encourages superficial thought or action. Perhaps that is why our species contains little of the instinct the other creatures on this planet possess. Rather, God provides humans with the ability to access a higher-level process of thinking and problem solving; we observe something in our environment, we reason so as to fit this information into a coherent worldview, and finally we respond with fitting emotions and actions. The deliberate and conscious use of each of these steps will help us delve deeper and respond more wisely than superficially reacting to prima facie stimuli.

As we explore the ‘Love Chapter’ of I Corinthians 13, we come to the phrase “love…always trusts.” What does that word ‘trust’ mean? Is it blind hope in the midst of hopelessness? Is it a crutch for the slow-witted and aged? Is it nothing more than Marx’s “opium of the people”? No, God never invites shallow, mind-numbing confidence.

The word ‘trust’ is translated from a Greek word meaning to believe in someone or something to such an extent that one entrusts oneself to the not yet fully fulfilled promises of that person or thing. Wedding this definition with the above-mentioned higher-level process of problem solving, we can understand the Corinthian phrase better—but only if God is the sole object of our trust. To “always trust” then means to observe the love and faithfulness of God toward people—most notably in the ransoming achievement of Jesus’ death and resurrection; then it means to reason that God will for eternity personalize that faithfulness individually to each of us who embrace His gift (we call this ‘saving belief’); and thirdly, it means to respond with emotions of thankfulness, faith, and joy which lead us into actions aligned with our well-reasoned belief.

Scripture is teeming with reminders to trust in God:

“Not to us, O LORD, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness…You who fear him, trust in the LORD” (Psalm 115:1,11).

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5,6).

“This is what the Sovereign LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says: ‘In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength’…” (Isaiah 30:15).

“Then Jesus answered…Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me” (John 14:1).

We are never called to trust in people, situations, or things, only in God. Therefore, among the aspects of love described in I Corinthians 13 that can be generalized to teach us how to love both God and people well, trust is the first trait whose object is restricted. God alone is worthy of our trust. God is emphatic about this, because He knows that the object of our trust intrinsically influences us. God wants that position because He is Sovereign, and because only He can bring ultimate good into our lives. When we trust in people, social movements, finances, or anything other than God Himself to meet our needs, we will become disappointed and even jaded. We will become less and less of who God designed us to be and eventually we will be unable to trust anything or anyone at all.

Love—embodied in God—invites us to trust in God. Love encourages us to entrust everything from our daily moments to our lifelong hopes into His care. And as we practice this trust day by day we will develop the ability to respond to life’s successes and defeats, its joys and sorrows, with depth and wisdom. And the more we trust in God, the more we will be able to love people around us well. So take the leap and become known as one who “always trusts.”

(Photo Credit: Meghan Bustard Photography)

Learning to Love (I Corinthians 13), Part 12

Always Protects.

Love always protects. We know that. It’s an intuitive, maybe even an instinctive knowledge that when we love someone, we want to protect them. Anything that threatens a loved one’s welfare arouses our concern and prompts us to react in some way. We call it the ‘mother bear’ response; there is nothing angrier than a mother bear that rightly or wrongly perceives a threat approaching her cubs.

“Anger,” explains author Timothy Keller, “is a form of …(and) the result of love. It is energy for defense of something you love when it is threatened. If you don’t love something at all, you are not angry when it is threatened. If you love something a little, you get a little angry when it is threatened. If something you love is an ‘ultimate concern’ if it is something that gives you meaning in life, then when it is threatened you will get uncontrollably angry.”

If Keller’s observation is accurate, it sheds some interesting insight into the loves of our life. Our anger—one expression of our instinct to protect what we love—becomes a gauge by which we can recognize and measure our loves. Road rage indicates how much we love our autonomy on the roadways, our ‘right’ to move unhindered in that mechanical-social space. Family violence indicates how much we love our selfish ‘rights’, our desire to have our own way in the more intimate social environment of our homes. Constructive anger aimed at injustices against the poor and needy—those who can never repay us—indicates a level of selfless love most similar to the Bible’s description of the protection that characterizes God.

The great theme running through every page of the Bible is God’s expression of loving protection for the human race. It starts with creating a world that contains everything human beings would need to sustain life, limb, and a flourishing relationship with God Himself. But very soon it becomes obvious that God’s gift of freewill to His human creatures allows each of us to get ourselves into messes of mortal danger—danger arising from the sin-wounded world, our sin-stained selves, and the sin-tempting evil one. So God enacts His perfect plan to offer ultimate protection to our souls: He presences Himself as a living, breathing flesh-and-bones man to take upon Himself the danger and trouble we earned. Only this one sinless God-Man could do this for us—allow Himself to be slain like a she-bear to protect His young from evil.

C.S. Lewis pictures this significant event as the lion Aslan shorn and slaughtered on the great stone table by the White Witch. Then, in a surprise twist to the assumed outcome, He who is Life Immortal conquers death’s venom by his indomitable spirit and offers it to us as a gift called salvation. This is the quintessence and epitome of God’s love, a love that “always protects.”

Listen to how the psalmist puts it: “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the LORD, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’ Surely he will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence. He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart…If you make the Most High your dwelling—even the LORD, who is my refuge—then no harm will befall you, no disaster will come near your tent” (Psalm 91:1-4,9).

There will still be illnesses and wounds on this earth. There will continue to be injustices and wars, famines and terrors of many kinds. We will all face death. But for those who accept Jesus’ great gift, who entrust themselves to Him, and make Him the daily dwelling of their souls, there is the surety of protection from ultimate harm.

So how do we expropriate this aspect of love that always protects? First, we must entrust ourselves to Jesus, the only completely loving and protecting One. His love must infiltrate our hearts in order that we may rightly love others.

Secondly, we must take inventory of our own tendencies in expressing anger, specifically toward others. We must ask whether our own outbursts of protection and anger are against people or against evil. If it is aimed at people, it shows us that our love of ourselves has come to take precedence over all other love. We prefer self-protection to protecting others.

Thirdly, we must find ways to overcome the evil that threatens others, by doing good. “Love your enemies,” directs Jesus, “do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you…Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Copy Jesus. This is how love always protects.

Learning to Love (I Corinthians 13), Part 11

Rejoices With the Truth.

“(It) is as temperamental as an opera singer,” complained John L. Smith, chemist and executive of Pfizer Pharmaceutical Company, regarding a new drug soon to be on the market. “The yields are low, the isolation is difficult, the extraction is murder, the purification invites disaster, and the assay is unsatisfactory.” But Smith and his retinue recognized and rejoiced in its unprecedented value: They were referring to penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic. Infections up to that time had resulted in a multitude of unnecessary suffering and early deaths. Now they could be treated. World War II was producing untold casualties but now penicillin would save many of those lives.

The author of I Corinthians 13—the Bible’s Love Chapter—explains that love “does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.” We have observed that God designed our hearts to delight, to experience pleasure to such an extent that we become bound to what we delight in. We have agreed that delighting in evil puts us into a bondage that eventually results in our own disintegration. It also ultimately destroys all relationships with others, especially our relationship with God. So the author explains how we avoid that outcome. We rejoice with the truth.

To rejoice with the truth means three things. It requires accepting, it requires recognizing, and it requires submitting. Firstly, rejoicing with the truth necessitates that we accept the exclusive nature of truth. If something is true, then by necessity its opposite must be untrue. If it is nighttime in Paris, it cannot also be daytime there. If the sun is ninety million miles from earth, it is not also immeasurably distant from earth. If penicillin destroys bacteria, it does not also support those same bacteria. This is the nature of truth. Its exclusivity enables us to separate things that are true from things that are false, deceiving and erroneous. Think about it. The very fabric of our society is built on accepting truth—from the realms of law, science, research and education to engineering and construction—even down to assembling our IKEA furniture—we accept the existence and value of truth. Everything we absorb through our five senses or manipulate with our bodies we test to ensure what we are seeing and hearing is true.

Secondly, rejoicing with the truth necessitates recognizing truth when it appears. When data is measurable, it is relatively easy to recognize truth from error. We pay for a product with cash and immediately recognize if the change we are given is accurate—if the cashier’s accounting is true or false. Some truths, though, are more difficult to ascertain: when two individual’s claim exclusive ownership of the same object, or in the application of certain laws that are conflicting, truth must be recognized and discerned in order to know how to act in line with truth.

Thirdly, rejoicing with the truth necessitates submitting to truth’s demands. We cannot manipulate truth to satisfy our whims without the result of becoming dishonest and reaping its twisted harvest. “You cannot go against the grain of the universe,” advises C.S. Lewis, “and not expect to get splinters.” The concept of submitting to truth brings us to the pinnacle of our discussion of truth. Truth is bound up in a Person, Jesus Christ who called Himself “the truth.” Submitting to truth ultimately brings us to the necessity of submitting our intellect and worldview to God, the author and sustainer of all truth.

As we do these three difficult tasks we find something extraordinary beginning to happen. When we accept truth we accept Jesus (and vice versa). When we recognize truth for what it really is, we will recognize the deity and Lordship of Jesus. To fully submit to truth is to submit to Jesus. Jesus is the kingpin of Truth. To grasp Jesus is to fully grasp truth. As He Himself explained, “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Jesus brings expanding freedom for us, not the shackling restrictions and limitations we had feared when we were distant from truth and from Him.

And that is not all. When we come into community with Jesus, we find Him to be joy incarnate. He is the epitome of gladness and exultation, of true happiness and delight. This is why the author of I Corinthians 13 says that love “rejoices with the truth.” Rejoicing “with” is all about relationship. Christ’s unbounded joy as Maker of the Universe is only exceeded by His joy in ransoming those of us who were lost in the personal darkness of deception and rebellion to truth.

So come to Truth and rejoice with Him. This is what we were designed for. This is love.