Living God's Love: An Invitation to Chrisitan Spirituality

Living God’s Love

An Invitation to Christian Spirituality

GARY HOLLOWAY   EARLLAVENDER

LIVING GOD’S LOVE

An Invitation to Christian Spirituality

published by Leafwood Publishers

Copyright © 2004 by Gary Holloway & Earl Lavender

ISBN 0-9748441-2-8

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design by Greg Jackson, Thinkpen Design

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without prior written consent.

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from The Holy Bible, New International Version. Copyright 1984, International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishers.

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To our churches, our colleagues, and our students who teach us what it means to live in love with God.

Introduction

Do you want a deeper relationship with God? A closer walk with Jesus? An inward assurance of the constant presence of the Holy Spirit? Do these statements express the deepest desires of your heart, but you don’t know where to begin? Bible study seems so difficult to do consistently. Your prayers seem repetitive and cold. You’re not satisfied with your spiritual life, but you don’t know where to start to find something better.

This book is for you. It does not offer easy steps, shortcuts, or sure-fire techniques for a deeper spirituality, but it points the way to the path of daily relationship to God. The Bible shows that path, but many of us have not matured beyond our childhood misconceptions of God and our relationship to him. For us and for those young in Christian experience, much of the vocabulary and practices of Christian spirituality are new.

This book is therefore by beginners for beginners. To admit we are beginners in our walk with God is not to deny the reality of the relationship we have enjoyed with him for years. Instead, it is to stand at the threshold of a deeper, fuller path to God. Like Dorothy in Oz, the landscape will seem both familiar and new. We will rediscover what we have known before––Bible study, prayer, fellowship, and service––but in deeper and richer ways. If these ways seem strange—and they seemed strange to us at first—at least give them a chance and an honest try.

But like all relational journeys, the path will bring both joy and struggle. The path we journey through the Spirit, with Jesus, to our home with God is not the yellow-brick road, but the dusty path to Calvary. It is a road that requires self-sacrifice, discipline, and consistency. It is also the way of inexpressible joy, for the God of love travels with us. This is an invitation into the very heart of God.

Learning to travel that road to God is much like learning to jog (see 1 Corinthians 9:24-26; 1 Timothy 4:7-10; Hebrews 12:1-13). We first need motivation––better health, loss of weight, time to be with friends, a picture of what we would like to be. Spiritually we need an image of what God wants us to be. But why do we need to learn how to jog? We have been running all our lives! Because jogging is more intentional, regular, disciplined running. Likewise, we also have been praying all our lives but we need more regular, disciplined prayer.

One does not learn to jog by reading books (although books may help). To learn to run, you must begin to run. It’s the same with spiritual practices. What helps most in jogging is a good coach and helpful running partners. Spiritually, we never run alone. Jesus runs with us through the Holy Spirit, and we run together with fellow believers. Jogging consistently means discipline, running daily even when we do not feel like it. Spiritual practices are also not always fun, but require consistency even when boring and painful. No pain, no gain.

But in jogging and in our journey to God, there is great gain. The path of this journey begins with the God who pursues us in love. That loving God will be our focus throughout this book. Spiritual practices have little value without centering on God. From there the path flows into God’s action in his kingdom and his call to personal relationship. We then discuss listening to God and communicating with him in prayer as ways of strengthening that relationship. This loving relationship with him requires regular practices to help us grow in love. That relationship takes place in community. As we walk with God, we must avoid rivals to his love. Finally, love for God always overflows to genuine love and service to others. This is our journey with God.

We make this journey together. God is always our Father. This book itself is the product of a community of faith. The authors write jointly; so much so that we usually use I, not we, to refer to ourselves in the book. Others shared helpful insights along the way. We particularly thank Deb Holloway, Rebecca Lavender, Melanee Bandy, Cindy Kinnie, Rosalind Powell, George Johnson, Mike Ripski, John York, Mark Black, Lee Camp, George Goldman, Phillip Camp, Steve Sherman, John Mark Hicks, Mike Williams, Terry Briley, and Carl McKelvey for their wisdom. Most of all we trust and pray that God has been at work in our writing and will work powerfully in you as you read.

God lives and works in community. That is why this book will be of more value if you study and practice in small groups. There are questions and practices at the end of each chapter for individuals, but also for group work from the beginning of this process. God works through others to draw us to himself. That’s why groups are so important.

But whether you begin by yourself, with a small group, or a larger group or class, the important thing is to begin. God invites you into relationship with him, just as you are. Even if you’re not sure about God, even if you have no religious background, even if you’ve been a faithful churchgoer all your life, God invites you to share his very life, a life richer than you can imagine.

Part 1

LIVING IN GOD’S LOVE

Father, Son, and Spirit invite us into the relationship they share. The story of that relationship is told in the Bible, which is also our story. God calls us to live in that relationship of love, to live a new life in the kingdom of God.

CHAPTER ONE

A God Who Loves

Who is God to you right now? What word first pops into your mind when you hear, God? How would you picture God?

You might respond that you really don’t picture God at all. God might just be a word to you, with little specific content. You might take God for granted. He is a convenient God who helps you when you want him. Or your God may be a distant God who did great things in Bible times and is up there somewhere watching over things, but not active in today’s world, much less in the daily struggles of your life. Perhaps your God is a religious God, found in churches, active on Sunday, but far removed from the office during the week. He is an out-of-date God who doesn’t understand contemporary life.

Perhaps you have an angry, demanding God. No matter what you do, you feel his disapproval. You can never be good enough for him, but still you try. Talk of God makes you feel guilty. You don’t love him enough, do enough for him, or care as much about other people as he wants you to.

Or you might be angry at God, thinking he has a lot to answer for. God to you is the tyrant who allows others to abuse you. He can cure cancer, stop war, and feed the hungry, but for some reason he will not. Or maybe he wants to but simply can’t. He’s a nice God, but powerless.

It may be that all of these images of God flow through our hearts at different times. Why bring this up? Isn’t this a book about spirituality? Why begin with talk of God? Must we fully understand God before we are spiritual?

Of course not. But this book is not about generic spirituality, but about relationship to God. We define spirituality as the mysterious process of God at work in us. As mystery, we cannot fully explain this process. God cannot be fully explained, but he can be genuinely experienced. And so we ask, who is this God at work in us? What kind of God is he?

An Active God Who Pursues Us in Love

In the Bible, God reveals his true character (that’s why we sometimes refer to Scripture as special revelation). God pulls back the thick curtain of our misconceptions to walk boldly onto the stage of history and make himself known. From Genesis to Revelation, the picture of God is consistent. He is a God who loves his creation forever. He created all things out of love. He lovingly molded humans from the ground, breathed life into them, and made them in his image (Genesis 1:27; 2:7).

But we humans soon rejected the love of God, preferring our own desires to his, wanting to be our own gods (Genesis 3:1-7). But even so, God does not reject us. He continues to pursue humanity in love. Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Rahab, Samuel, David––all are beloved by God.

Yet it is not only the heroes of Scripture that God loves. His love is for everyone, even those who hunger for him in ignorance of who he really is. From creation, people have hungered for God, because he made us for himself. God alone can satisfy our deepest longings, but we try to satisfy them in countless ways. We pursue pleasure, success, security, wealth, romance, and numerous other ways to fill the deep longing within. We worship other gods.

God clearly condemns idolatry, but does not condemn that craving for something to make us whole. Indeed, when Paul goes to Athens, the city that epitomized the best of culture in his day, he finds it full of idols. Asked to speak about his God in front of a group of philosophers, Paul does not condemn their hunger for gods, but praises it. Having found an altar inscribed To An Unknown God, he says, Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you (Acts 17:23).

The God Paul proclaims is the loving God who made heaven and earth. He created humans so he could have relationship with them. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us (Acts 17:27). Paul then quotes, not the Bible, but pagan poets who say, ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring’ (Acts 17:28).

So what’s wrong with paganism? It’s not simply that these idolaters are wrong about God. What is devastating is that their erroneous view of God kept them from fully embracing his love. Although they do not know it, these idol worshippers are beloved children of God.

Our God is not distant, angry, or powerless. He is a God who is near to us, near to all. He wants us to come close to him in love. He became one of us in Jesus to captivate us with gentle, endearing words, and self-sacrificing acts. At our births, he placed within each of us a hunger for happiness, wholeness, and meaning. A hunger for him. God loves and wants you for his own.

A Trinity of Love

This God reveals himself as a Trinity. It is not necessary for us to fathom the Trinity completely. We cannot, for he is the ultimate mystery. We cannot define God, but we can find him. We are invit- ed into a relationship with the Trinity, a God who reveals his love for us in three ways.

God is a loving Father. He is the Father of all creation (we are his offspring) and our Father through his Son Jesus Christ. As Christians, we are as much the beloved sons and daughters of God as Jesus himself. God loves us as much as he loves Jesus. One of the great expressions of God’s love for Jesus came at his baptism. When Jesus is baptized, the heavens open, the Spirit descends, and a voice speaks, You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased (Mark 1:10-11).

What we may not realize is that what happened to Jesus at his baptism also happened to us. When we were baptized, the heavens opened. No barriers stood between God and us. He removed the curtain of our sin, ignorance, and unbelief and showed himself to us. When we were baptized, the Spirit descended on us. God himself through his Holy Spirit now lives within us and makes us his. Most amazingly of all, when we were baptized, God said, You are my son, my daughter, whom I love. I am pleased with you!

And what had Jesus done to deserve to be called the beloved Son of God? What do you mean, What had he done? He didn’t have to do anything; he simply was the Son of God. Exactly. And so are we. We are children of God by birth and new birth. We have not earned our status, but God freely gives it. God is a Father who loves his children unconditionally.

But what happens when we spurn God’s love? Do we then forfeit our standing as his children? Does God quit