The God who is Love
Loving the God who is Love
Showing posts with label the love of God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the love of God. Show all posts
Monday, August 25, 2008
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Bernard of Clairvaux, on loving God
John Calvin's favourite twelfth century writer (and there weren't many on his list), Bernard of Clairvaux understood very well the fullness of what our love for God should be:
Admit that God deserves to be loved very much, yea, boundlessly, because He loved us first, He infinite and we nothing, loved us, miserable sinners, with a love so great and so free.
Admit that God deserves to be loved very much, yea, boundlessly, because He loved us first, He infinite and we nothing, loved us, miserable sinners, with a love so great and so free.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Being Loved - not as easy as it sounds...
How do we respond to the love of God? Well, to modify Baz Luhrmann:
The greatest thing you'll ever learn/ is to be loved and just love in return.
At this point we make it far to complicated. It is very hard to just accept the love we are offered; we always feel like we should be giving something back. Or worse, we cannot put aside our pride.
Ephesians 5 is interesting here: if Christ takes the husbandly role of sacrificial love, what role is the church to take? She is to take the wifely role of submission: which is not much more than allowing yourself to be loved. This might be harder than we think. We have to surrender ourselves to him.
I was talking to a female friend of mine who asked me: "is it hard to relate to this as a guy, because I reckon it'd be heaps easier as a chick [her word!] to desire these kind of attributes?" It was a really good question. We are dealing in stereotypes of course, but males on the whole do find help hard to accept, let alone love; especially when there is such an imbalance in a relationship like there is with God. We like to feel we are independent, or at least contributing.
But a response to the God who dies to love you requires us setting aside our futile, petty male (or female) independence, and allowing Christ to husband us. It may seem frustratingly passive. But we need this husband more than we can ever know. Let him love you.
The greatest thing you'll ever learn/ is to be loved and just love in return.
At this point we make it far to complicated. It is very hard to just accept the love we are offered; we always feel like we should be giving something back. Or worse, we cannot put aside our pride.
Ephesians 5 is interesting here: if Christ takes the husbandly role of sacrificial love, what role is the church to take? She is to take the wifely role of submission: which is not much more than allowing yourself to be loved. This might be harder than we think. We have to surrender ourselves to him.
I was talking to a female friend of mine who asked me: "is it hard to relate to this as a guy, because I reckon it'd be heaps easier as a chick [her word!] to desire these kind of attributes?" It was a really good question. We are dealing in stereotypes of course, but males on the whole do find help hard to accept, let alone love; especially when there is such an imbalance in a relationship like there is with God. We like to feel we are independent, or at least contributing.
But a response to the God who dies to love you requires us setting aside our futile, petty male (or female) independence, and allowing Christ to husband us. It may seem frustratingly passive. But we need this husband more than we can ever know. Let him love you.
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