It's not the issue you think!

Late last year, I had one of those moments when I suddenly saw something it was then impossible to “unsee”. While you’ll be relieved to know it wasn’t something visually untoward, it was an insight that completely changed my perspective and understanding. The obvious nature of it left me feeling both a little gobsmacked that I hadn’t seen it earlier, but also thinking it must be obvious to everyone and I was the last to see it. I still think it is pretty obvious, but perhaps people put it into the too hard basket, or for other reasons don’t want to engage.

My moment was around what I see as the major issue of our times. It has probably always been a major player, but in this season of great polarisation, it must become front and centre for all, no matter which side of the great divide you live on.

While so many are engaging with issues of masks, vaccines, virus, globalisation, climate change, radical laws, or whatever other polarising issue you’d like to pick, I suddenly realised that our enemy’s actual plan is to create as much division and strife as possible in our communities, societies and culture, and many of us are jumping on board and doing all the heavy lifting. It has happened far too quickly and easily.

As I have reflected on what God has been saying and showing me around this, I found myself confronted again and again with the numbers 222. I woke up at 2:22am, I looked at the clock later in the day: 2:22pm. 222 on the odometer, and then it was the turn of 111, even to the improbably cheap price of fuel: $1.11!

In the last few years, I have become more aware of the way numbers, letters and even pictures are all wrapped up in each character of the Hebrew alphabet. Each letter contains a wealth of information, not immediately obvious to those of us only familiar with the Roman (English) alphabet and how it works. There are no separate symbols for numerals – they simply use the letters to double up as numbers. So, seeing all these 2’s and 1’s, I went to one of my sources looking at the meanings associated with the letters that represent these numbers.

It was here I had another revelation. Both 1 and 2 are to do with unity. In my research there are some interesting links between 1 and 2. It is quite obvious that 1 is about unity - the concept of being in “oneness”. The number 111 is further reflective of the unity of the trinity. However, when I read through some information about 2, the information went back to the Garden of Eden. Here, we find that God took the “one” man, and through the division of taking a rib from his side, created a second person. Through the process of division, one became two. (Beautifully, in the creation of every new human being now, we see another take on this process: first two cells come together to become one, and then, through division and multiplication, they form one new being!)

In this place of differentiation, however, the risk of disunity came into being. There were now two who had the opportunity to have different opinions, to allow offence and hurt and all other types of dissension or discord. In the middle of all this possibility for division and break down, God also illustrated the way to a bond of unity through the marriage relationship – a precursor if you will, of the pathway to unity Jesus would bring. At the end of Genesis 2, we are told in verse 24 (CJB) “…a man…will stick with his wife and they are to be one flesh”.

I found this astounding. First God divided, then He brings back unity, a unity ultimately made possible through the death and resurrection of Jesus. One became two, given the choice to become one again, the choice to be in unity or to separate.

Even more beautifully, the picture of physical unity in marriage overlays onto the Church, the Body of Christ, His Bride! Alongside my ruminations of unity, the journey has included the concept of “unveiling”. One of my favourite passages of Scripture is from 2 Cor 3:18, where Paul reflects on the difference between Moses, who hid the fading glory of his encounters with God behind a veil, and our calling to have our faces unveiled, as God transforms us into His image, reflecting His glory to the world.

During a prayer time, I had a really overwhelmingly lovely picture of us as Jesus’ Bride. It was at the point in the wedding service where the groom lifts the veil and kisses the Bride. There were so many layers to this. The kiss is about sealing His commitment to us, His people. It’s about a covenant with Him, and it is about the fact that He already laid down His life for us. Then, as He lifts the veil, everyone (the whole world) gets to see the beauty and glory of the Bride. As a female, this is an easy vision to sit with. I suspect it may be a little more challenging for men. The question in the midst of the vision is whether we are willing to allow Him to truly husband us – to be our Protector, our Guide. Are we willing to submit all our desires to Him? And even more challenging, is the Bride, the Church, ready to be revealed, and in turn, to reveal God’s glory to the world? If we sit in the mess of disunity, perhaps not so much!

The starting point to having unity with each other is first to walk in unity with God. John 17:20-26 has been another scripture I have been sitting with for a number of years. As one of the longest recorded prayers of Jesus, it is obviously important. It is where Jesus prays for the unity of all believers; that our unity would be like the unity between Father God and Jesus – that we would be inseparable. I think it is one of the key areas the enemy likes to attack us in: divide and conquer!

The antidote to our disunity is all wrapped up in the two commandments Jesus gave us. Love God and love each other as ourselves.

Hmmm, how good are we at loving ourselves? 1 John (chapter 4 particularly), gives us a very clear insight into the Source of love. We must first receive God’s love, allow His love to impact and transform us, to lift us up, which requires us to see our own value and identity through His eyes, before we will be able to adequately love others. We must stop getting our identity, value and love primarily through the imperfect reflections we get from others. It must come from our ever deepening relationship with God.

Unity is all wrapped up in love.

We don’t have a hope in any relationship, in being the Church, or in impacting the world around us with the Kingdom of God until we can love unconditionally – not just when we’ve been “good”; not just when we agree with each other; not just when we have the same views about the “important” issues, but when we are (again!), willing to lay down our need to be “right” to preserve relationship. We can’t do it without God’s help though.

As a third wheel to all this, my word for this year is peace. I rejected it the first time round, and when it came up again, I groaned. I saw it as the cousin of patience: you only get it by experiencing the opposite!

However, as I took time to reflect on it and ask God about it, the Hebrew word “shalom” came to mind, so I went on a deep dive into its meaning. Some of the associated implications are: wholeness; integrity; harmony; completeness; unbrokenness; full; undividedness. Further, the post on Abarim Publications suggests that “peace-making” is about “Achieving such a level of understanding of irreconcilable elements that these can be understood and joined in…” Such promise! So much joy contained in these ideas!

Unity!

We can’t have unity without shalom-peace and unconditional love.

I suspect most of us have a significant journey of experience before we come anywhere near to doing unity well. I know I do. I know how much of a journey it has been to come to any place of unity and unconditional love within myself and I don’t claim to be at the end of that one. However, I do know that it is not something God expects us to do alone, to do in our own strength. He has given us His Holy Spirit for precisely that purpose – to help and guide us through, to show us the way to love well and to live in unity. All we need to do is decide whether we partner with Holy Spirit, or with the enemy of our souls. Every moment of every day is a new opportunity to choose!

(These photos were taken on our walk on Valentine’s Day in lockdown - someone had placed them at various places along the path. Such a lovely treasure hunt!)

Do you remember your first love?

With Valentine’s Day safely out of the way, it seems a good time to reflect on love. My thoughts have particularly focused around the topic of first love. For many of us, looking back on our first love can leave us with warm fuzzy feelings - for me, looking back on this cute very early photo of my parents’ relationship certainly gives me a different perspective!

But is there anything new that can be said about first love?

When I hear the term “first love”, it usually takes me straight to Revelations 2:4-5. How many messages have you heard where this passage is used to try to kick start a congregation into activity? The disappointment God had with the church of Ephesus was that they had forsaken their first love. He calls them back to “doing those things you did at first”. Many a pastor or leader has called out a congregation on the same. It can seem quite a harsh word, but I am wondering if there could be some connotations of this topic that are less about condemnation and more a call to be…well...loved.

As 1 John 4:19 was quoted in a message I heard the other day, I had one of those moments where I lost track of where the speaker was going, because I was getting my own download:

“We love because He first loved us.”

“First love”!

The passage in Revelations is usually presented from the perspective of when we first loved God and that it is our love for God that motivates us, energises us, provokes us to action. But perhaps this is all wrong. In fact, I think it is categorically wrong!

And further to this, in 1 John we find a book that is all about God’s love for us - in a nutshell, it tells us we really cannot give love to anyone else, including God, effectively, or maybe purely, unconditionally, unless we have first experienced Father God’s love for us.

However, I think we can take this back even further, even back before creation. In 1 John 4, the fact that God is love is mentioned twice. This tells us that

before anything was created there was love.

In turn, this means that all of creation was created within the context of love; creation is a product of love. If we understand all of creation in this way, we can start to understand God’s love for creation: His love is intrinsically interwoven into every aspect of creation. We are bonded together with all of creation by God’s love. Sit with the connotations of that for a while!

Unfortunately the separation that occurred between us at the fall, meant that our relationship with the rest of creation was also fractured.

Instead of being bonded in love, we are now in competition for love.

We have put conditions on love and we live out of those conditions.

And so, for most of us at least at some level, we still believe that, or act as if God’s love is conditional on our behaviour. We still live our lives at certain points feeling distant from God because we feel we may have failed Him, that we may not be living out of our “first love”, or that our continuing mistakes prohibit us from His love. We work so hard to make ourselves acceptable to Him, to make ourselves good enough to deserve His love.

Two verses stand out for me in opposition to these thoughts. The first is Romans 5:8,

“But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Surely this is a central (if not the central) facet of the Gospel message: We don’t have to be good enough to receive God’s love, to get to have relationship with Him. In fact, He already went ahead of us and fixed the problem before we could even try! This is so liberating. This is FREEDOM!

God’s love is not based on our performance! Hallelujah!

The second verse comes from the story of the “sinful woman” who came into a dinner Jesus was at and washed His feet with her tears, dried them with her hair, kissed them and then anointed them with fragrant oil. When the Pharisee Jesus was eating with got upset by this, Jesus talked about the experience of forgiveness, ending with the statement that she who was forgiven much, loves much, while those who are forgiven for little, love little. (Luke 7:36-50)

Over the years, I have often reflected on this. While we can read it at surface level, particularly that some are worse sinners than others (aka, “I thank You God that I am not as bad as that tax collector/banker/politician over there”), I personally don’t believe this. I think that it probably relates more to how much we have experienced or seen our own sinfulness and brokenness.

There have been suggestions that this woman was perhaps the woman caught in adultery. Her sin was in full view, and she was about to be killed for it, had Jesus’ wisdom not prevailed. She could not escape, hide, or minimise it. Jesus’ forgiveness for her was the very difference between her life and death.

Unfortunately for many of us, we don’t see this distinction clearly at all. We often have no idea or perception of the way in which so many of our actions, attitudes or words are heading us down the path that leads to spiritual death. We are in happy oblivion or denial. It is only as we become aware of how destructive our brokenness is, that we realise more fully how lost we were and what danger we were in.

It is from this perspective that we begin to have a “grasp of

how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ”

(Eph 3:18). If you read the whole passage here, it returns us to our experience of God’s love for us.

The reality is that we don’t have a capacity for love outside God. If we want to love God more and love others more, then we have to humble ourselves and allow Him to love us: to pour His love into us and over us, again and again. As we are filled again, our response is naturally to love Him in return, and from here, our love flows out to others.

It can be a challenge to return to the first time you were really aware of experiencing God’s love. For some of us, it is a very long time since we have truly experienced the absolute joy found in the realisation of how much God loves each of us. For some, sadly, we may not feel as though we have ever really experienced this love. It may be that although we have given intellectual assent to the idea of God’s love for us, we still grapple with living from this place. The place of experiencing God’s love for us, however, is a place of surrender. Unless we are prepared to let go of some of our ideas and beliefs about the way in which the world operates, to humble ourselves and accept our need, it can be quite difficult to allow God to unleash His love on us.

My prayer is that you have had at least one experience like this that leaves you aching for more. It is not a place we can reach through our own efforts, though – in the end, it is a place where we have to believe that Jesus’ gift was enough to allow us to come into this Holy Place. We have to be prepared to lay down our pride and self-serving. We have to be prepared to be vulnerable, naked and exposed before our God. And it is in this place we discover that His love for us is unending and yet somehow the beginning of it all.

“We love because He first loved us!”