To Live

This is to live: to "love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind" and to "love your neighbor as yourself". (Luke 10:27-28 (NIV).)

And to love is to know God.

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. [1 John 4:7-8. (NIV).]

But many of us don’t exactly overflow with love. I count myself among those. This is my meditation on how to learn to love.

1. Prisoners: a metaphor.

As a lawyer, I used to represent prisoners in "lifer hearings". In a lifer hearing, a prisoner with a life sentence tries to persuade a parole board to release him from prison.

Sometimes my clients had no chance. If a prisoner has a "115" within the last five years, he can’t win parole. 115s are "serious" violations of prison rules. 115s can be anything from a kitchen worker stealing food, to possession of a cellular phone, to membership in a prison gang, to rape. The parole board assumes that if a prisoner won’t follow the rules in prison, he won’t follow rules out of prison.

Sometimes, a prisoner-client had a habit of picking up 115s. I would counsel him that if he wanted to win release on parole, he couldn’t pick up any more 115s. I couldn’t tell him how to stay out of trouble. But I would tell him that he had to wake up in the morning thinking about how to stay out of trouble, and that staying out of trouble had the last thing he thought about before he went to sleep at night. I would tell him that he had to become a genius at staying out of trouble.

I use prisoners as a metaphor for Christians. That’s because we are all prisoners of sin. We hope for mercy, not from a parole board but from God. (Romans 11:32 – "God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all".)

If we are saved, love saves us – the love of God, and the love that God causes to arise in us. "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins." (1 Peter 4:8.)

We need to learn to love like some of my clients need to learn to keep away from trouble.

2. A simple plan.

"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened." [Matthew 7:7-8 (NIV).]

The Lord commands that we love him, that we love our enemies, and that we love our neighbors. He does not command us and then leave us without the ability to obey. He guides us. He tells us to ask and to seek.

3. Asking.

"Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" [Luke 11:11-13 (NIV).]

My prisoner-clients would benefit from friends to help them stay out of trouble. If they started down a path toward a 115, their friends might warn them away from what they were doing. Their friends might help by exhortation to walk blamelessly. My clients and their friends might share strategies for walking blamelessly through the maze of prison rules and opportunities to do wrong.

Like prisoners who struggle to stay out of trouble, we need allies in our effort to increase in love. The most powerful ally we can have is the Holy Spirit. To get the help of the Holy Spirit, we can ask.

And if we have friends, we can ask them to pray for us, and we can pray for them. Any big task should start and be sustained with prayer.

Asking is the first step; it might also be the hardest. Going from childhood to adulthood is a process of going from helplessness to some form of self-sufficiency. That’s called carrying one’s own weight, and it's a quality that we value in ourselves. To ask for help is to admit that we are not self-sufficient. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that Jesus said that we had to become like little children.

"Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." [Matthew 8:3-4 (NIV).]

4. Seeking.

Having asked, we seek. With so many directions open to us, we look for the path that leads to the promised land.

5. Seeking from the Holy Spirit.

Having asked, hopefully the Holy Spirit will be our guide to say "Not that way, this way". This guidance might come from within, or it might come through some agency outside ourselves.

6. Seeking from the Bible.

The Bible is a good guide. You can interpret many things that Jesus says as trail signs to direct us toward love.

For example, Jesus said:

"You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. [Matthew 5:43-45 (NIV).]

Hate opposes love. If we follow Jesus’s direction to pray for those who persecute us, we step off the path of hate and follow the path of love. This direction benefits our enemies, but it benefits ourselves, too. It puts in our minds a habit of love.

And to hold a grudge is the opposite of love. So Jesus said:

"And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins." [Mark 11:25 (NIV).]

To forgive also makes mental paths of love.

Another example – Jesus told us not to fret:

"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." [Matthew 6:34 (NIV).]

The thing about worry is this: it foregrounds self-concern. Self-concern crowds out love, which is other-directed. By setting aside any habit of fretting, we give space for love to grow.

Easier said than done. Like increasing in love, decreasing in worry does not come automatically. In part it’s a choice: sometimes we can simply choose not to worry. In part, it’s a matter of strategy. Dale Carnegie wrote a book called, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. I recommend it. And in part, to cease to fret is a matter of prayer.

I'm far more likely to behold these radical words than to follow them; but there little distance between them and love:

Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. [Luke 12:33-35.]

These words fortify love two ways. If we obey them, then our heart will follow our treasure. But if this commandment is too big for us, then it gives us humility. And we love God more easily if we are not too big in our own minds. 

7. Seeking from any source we can find.

If we really want to find our way through undiscovered country, we don’t despise any good guide.

To increase in love, we might learn from any friend who’s habits of love we admire.

We might learn about love from a movie, like Babette’s Feast. (A tolerance for subtitles is needed to enjoy this movie.)

We might learn about love from books. Years ago, Chuck Coleson’s books always moved me. Lately, I’ve traveled in St. Augustine’s Confessions.

8. Just do it.

But maybe Nike owns the secret: Just do it. A habit of hateful acts, hateful words, gossip, slander, unkindness in general, and sin takes us away from God. But a habit of loving acts makes a loving mind.

I envy parents. I think that raising children can be a school of love.

I try to do acts of love. I tithe, splitting my tithe between my church and the Salvation Army. I also give to an organization that gives aid overseas. And I help a friend financially from time to time. This is not a boast, because I do far less than I could.

I once read the words of a man who was baffled by sexual frustration in modern society. He argued that the near-infinite number of persons created near-infinite opportunities for sexual release. Thankfully, this licentious chirp hasn’t been widely repeated (though it seems to be practiced in some conjoined circles). But in a sense, his idea applies to good works: opportunities to do acts of love are near-infinite to one who looks for them.

I’ve heard that everything we do leaves a mark on our soul. The grace of God means that marks left by our sins are not indelible. But efforts to do right can’t help but decorate our souls with marks of love.

9. Grace.

But effort to do right can puff us up. It can makes us feel spiritually self-sufficient. Then we’re no longer the like the little children we must be to gain entrance into the kingdom of heaven. We become like the Pharisee of Jesus’s parable, who stood before God and gave thanks that he was spiritually excellent. We become unlike the tax collector of the same parable, who cried out "Have mercy upon me, a sinner!" Jesus said that the tax collector left the temple justified before God, but not the Pharisee. (Luke 18:9-14.) As we strive, we need to remember that we always rely upon the grace of God.

If effort can make us feel spiritually self-sufficient, it can also make us feel spiritually inadequate. Spiritual disappointment with ourselves is like the wall that athletes sometimes hit, when their race-times stop getting better or get worse. That is discouraging.

Grace rescues us in that, too . When we hit a spiritual wall, we need to be gracious to ourselves. We need to be self-forgiving, we need to be patient, and we need to not give up.

10. Self-examination: doing a new thing

From time to time, we should assess our progress in love.

But this self-examination shouldn’t be hyperactive. That can discourage us. And it can lead to a Pharisee-like over-focus on the self.

Hopefully, our self-examination will lead us to do new things. As a competitive swimmer, I’m alert to how I swim, and I look for ways to swim faster. As a believer, I want to be as attentive to ways to increase in love as I am to ways to win races.

Everything that I have talked about in this essay once was a new thing to me. And I have no idea what new things I might learn in the future about love and how to grow in it.

And sometimes old things become new. I read the Bible more deeply now than I did twenty years ago. Things stand out that didn’t stand out before. Also, I’m not new to prayer, but I depend on prayer these days more than I did in times past.

11. Self-examination: doing away.

Self-examination might lead us to cut loose some guides and some principles that we once relied upon. I think that obedience to God is fundamental and crucial; but lately I have tilted somewhat more in my thoughts toward grace, more than in years past.

Self-examination might lead us to unburden ourselves of things that hold us back. That might be certain friends who draw us away from God.

My habit of getting into political arguments doesn’t help me grow in love. I’ve tried to cut back. But I backslide. It’s a work-in-progress.

We might need release from addictions – certainly from addictions in the literal sense of substances that we put into our bodies to our detriment. But addictions can take many forms – persons, pleasures, things, ideas.

Some addictions are things that aren’t necessarily bad in and of themselves. Apart from their merits or demerits, Fox News or The New York Times could be addictions if we cherish them too much.

I once read parts of choreographer Twyla Tharp’s book about creativity. She wrote that she loves movies, but she gives them up for the sake of focusing on her art. Like Twyla Tharp gives up movies for dance, we might give up things that seem like harmless pleasures for the sake of love.

One young man came to Jesus earnestly seeking guidance. He was morally scrupulous, but he believed that he lacked something. Jesus told him that to be perfect he should sell all that he had and give the money to the poor; then follow him. (Matthew 19:16-28.)

We might need to give up some things right away. Others we might give up as time goes by. Our self-examination will take place over months and years and decades. What we will find in ourselves in a month won’t be the same as what we find in a decade.

We’re taking a journey through our minds from selfishness to love. Like a cross-country traveler, as we go the terrain changes. As terrain changes, our strategy to move forward also must change.

12. Time well spent.

We tend to get good at what we work at. Over time, a person who conscientiously works at archery gets better at archery. The same is true for swimming, writing, carpentry, driving, dancing, leadership, and art.

And love.

The two greatest commandments are to love God and to love our neighbor. Archery and swimming and all of the things that I just mentioned will end. But love is forever. Time spent learning love is well spent.

To Know God Better

There are five parts to any good plan to replace the god of the imagination with the God That Is.

I mean this essay to elaborate on this promise:

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. [Matthew 7:7-8 (NIV).]

1. Humility.

God is vast. The first step to know him better is to know that there is more that we don’t know than what we do know. If we know that we are largely ignorant, then hubris won’t stop the flow of knowledge of God into our hearts and minds.

If we don’t know how incomplete our knowledge is, then we need to just assume that our knowledge is incomplete and proceed. As we gather more knowledge, we become aware of our prior ignorance. That will help us know that we need to build upon our knowledge of God.

It’s like a wilderness hiker who sees a peak in the distance. Every time the hiker advances on a peak, the hiker discovers a new peak behind the one that appeared before. In time, the hiker comes to assume that the farther he or she hikes, the more he or she will discover.

2. Effort.

A lot can be learned without much effort. It takes little effort to use bare hands to stick naked wires into an electrical socket. But that exercise will cause learning.

And sometimes knowledge of God comes with little conscious effort. Sometimes it comes as inspiration while we are thinking about something else. Maybe your love for your children teaches you about the love of God. C.S. Lewis wrote of a military pilot who flew across the desert at night and encountered a sense of the mystery of God.

But many of our greatest skills come from deliberate learning. We learned to read in school, and it took many years to achieve our present skill at reading. The same is true of writing and math. And I think that there is no job that doesn’t have a learning curve. A seasoned worker is almost always superior to a novice.

Knowledge of God is like that. Knowledge of God is improved through effort. That effort can be reading the Bible with a curious mind. Or hearing sermons by mature Christians. Or listening to hymns. (I have a strong preference for the old hymns; I’m old-fashioned that way.)

Effort can be reading books by spiritual giants, or at least by persons further along in knowledge of God than we are. It can be taking time to meditate on the nature of God. It can be talking about God with our friends.

Michael Phelps is a champion swimmer. Some have called him the greatest swimmer who ever lived. He has vast natural talent. But that natural talent wouldn’t have made him the most winning athlete in Olympic history if he hadn’t driven himself to swim countless laps with great effort. That effort rewarded him.

We might never be the spiritual equivalent of Michael Phelps. But it’s probably also true that we will benefit from every effort that we make to better know God.

3. Persistence.

Michael Phelps probably had times when felt like not going to workout. If he had worked out for a few years but then quit or took it easier, he might have benefitted from that, but he wouldn’t have become the athletic phenomenon that he became. Persistence pays off in the pursuit of knowledge of God, too.

But there’s a difference between Michael Phelps’s pursuit of athletic victory and our pursuit of knowledge of God. Athletes have a relatively small window in which to be Olympic heroes. Dara Torres has lasted longer than most. But now that she’s in her forties, her Olympic time is over.

But as long as we have healthy minds, nothing holds us back from learning more about God. To study about him for a year is good. To study about him for a decade is better. To study about him for a lifetime is best.

4. Grace.

What I just said is almost true. Let me take a little of it back.

The Westboro Baptist Church puzzles me. That’s the church that pickets the funerals of American soldiers who have died in war.

I’ve looked at their website. I’ve listened to a sermon by their pastor. They lack neither knowledge of the Bible nor zeal. But their message is a message of hate, and that makes me doubt their knowledge of God.

So even with zeal and effort and persistence, we might make grave errors about the nature of God. Zeal and effort and persistence can make us proud, which is the opposite of humility, which is necessary for knowledge of God.

So we need to persist in prayers for ourselves and for our friends and loved ones that our zeal and our effort and our persistence won’t be wasted. And hopefully the grace of God will be with us.

5. Love.

Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. [1 John 4:7-8.]

Again to speak of Westboro Baptist Church, I hazard a guess that love is the quality that they lack that makes them bray instead of sing to the glory of God.

I love imperfectly. That limits my ability to speak about it. But I picture it as the roof on the four walls of knowledge of God: humility, effort, persistence, and grace.

I’m not a carpenter, so it’s probably dangerous for me to use a carpentry metaphor. But it seems to me that you can start with a roof and raise walls under it. Or you can build the walls and then install the roof over them. But, like I say, I’m not a carpenter.

I envy the person who is filled with love to build knowledge of God on. But if we don’t feel love, we can do acts of love, and the feeling will come by the grace of God.

And if we love, as John said, we will know God.

Obama and Strange Fire

Jesus said to his disciples: "Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come. [Luke 17:1 (NIV).]

I hope I am not a rock of stumbling. This isn’t for my friends only; it’s for me, too.

1. Obama-hating.

I believe that some people hate Barack Obama more than they love America. When the economy ticks up, they’re not glad. They see America’s climb from this slump through the crystal of Obama’s re-election chances. So good news is, to them, bad news.

Likewise, a friend of mine heard early in the Obama administration that Defense Secretary Robert Gates was going to resign. My friend couldn’t conceal his percolating glee. He didn’t regret America’s loss of a competent leader; he rejoiced in potential disruption of the Obama administration.

2. More Obama-hating.

But it’s more than a willingness for America to sink as long as Obama sinks with it. Recently, partisans have been exploiting Obama’s verbal hiccup in his you-didn’t-build-that speech. In context, it’s clear that Obama knows that people build businesses by their initiative and hard work; his point was that America helps. His point was that the help that America gives includes help from our government. Government supplies (for example) roads, educated workers through free public education, fire protection, and police protection (so that you don’t need an armed posse to keep your business relatively safe). Non-partisan fact-checkers have shown that the partisan attacks on this speech are untruthful.

I have debated what Obama said with my friends. I have pointed out what the fact-checkers say. And I have pointed out other parts in his speech where he pays tribute to the initiative and hard work that business owners dedicate to their businesses.

What amazes me is this: some of my friends now think that context doesn’t matter. If somebody says something that sounds crazy, these friends now don’t think it’s necessary to look carefully at what that person said to make sure that they really meant that crazy thing. It’s legitimate, apparently, to lift a statement out of context, and impose on the speaker a belief that he doesn’t hold, and to judge him harshly if that belief happens to be crazy.

In other words, my friends hate Obama so much that they are willing to abandon logic, reason, and truth in the service of their hatred.

3. Defining evil and good by what Obama is and is not.

I lived in China for two years. A Chinese man compared America unfavorably to China. He said that America is young, implying that it is immature compared to China, who’s civilization goes back thousands of years. When I pointed out that the United States is older than the Republic of China, he missed a beat. Then he rejoined that China is "young and vigorous". In other words, whatever China is, that is good. Whatever America is, that is bad.

I find hatred of Obama is like this. Just like good or bad is defined to this Chinese man by China in comparison to America, so also, to Obama-haters, bad and good are defined by what Obama does or does not do.

No act by Obama is too trivial to overlook in the gathering of scorn. Do Obama and his wife tap their knuckles in exuberance and joy? That becomes a "terrorist fist-bump". Does Obama drink a Budweiser? Budweiser is foreign-owned!

Some hatred is directed at actions not so trivial. Obama kept America’s economy from sinking by bailing out American car companies. This saved jobs not only at those companies, but also at the American companies that supply parts to those companies. Almost all of that bail-out money has come back to the treasury now that those American car companies have regained their footing. Was this a worthy policy? Not to hear some say. To them, it was "socialism".

Recently, Obama expressed solidarity with families of victims in Aurora, Colorado. His said that his daughters like to go to movies; he expressed what it would be like for him if they were harmed in a movie theater. Naturally, this mourning with those who mourn (Romans 12:15) was a bad thing. According to Rush Limbaugh, it was "egomania" because it showed that to Obama the tragedy in Aurora was supposedly all about himself. Limbaugh is widely followed; I assume that that means that his words find many listening ears.

3. Obama-hating as a rock of stumbling.

It dis-eases me a little bit to tease out the implications of all of this. One of those dis-easing implications is this: if my friends hate Obama more than they love truth, then I worry that they hate Obama more than they love the one who is truth personified, namely God.

This is truly a dreadful thought. But it is not shocking.

We love God with our lips, if not with our hearts. Jesus knew this. "But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all people." (John 2:24 (NIV).) One evidence of this is our preference for our own comfort. When we cherish our comfort instead of helping our needy brothers and sisters in Christ, we show where our loyalty lies. (1 John 3:17.) I don’t exclude myself from this judgment.

Barack Obama is a Christian. He is a flawed Christian like the rest of us, but a Christian nonetheless. He attended a Chicago church with his family. He professes Christianity. Recently, he recited very appropriate scripture when speaking words of comfort about the tragedy in Aurora, Colorado.

My brothers and sisters stumble over Obama. If we trembled before the word of God, and we don’t, we would tremble before this:

Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. [1 John 4:20 (NIV).]

If these words don't stir the waters by themselves, consider them with these words:

Jesus replied, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.  Anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching.  [John 14:23-24 (NIV).] 

4. Furnaces of hatred.

Jesus said to his disciples: "Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come." Luke 17:1 (NIV)

We spend an hour or two in church; more time in front of the television. Some media companies are in American society great furnaces of hatred. Fox News might as well call itself the 24/7 hate-Obama network. And Keith Olbermann used to hate deeply on MSNBC. (I’ve watched almost no MSNBC lately, so I don’t know any current haters.)

This is the problem: we become what we behold. That’s why we are urged to keep our eyes on Jesus. (Hebrews 12:1-2.) Keeping our eye on the media haters, their strange fire touches us like a profane Pentecost, and we ourselves become little furnaces of hatred.

6. Hatred separates us from God.

As we hate, hatred marbles itself into our psyches. It becomes increasingly ingrained in our thoughts.

Jesus knew the danger of hating. That’s why he warned us not to oppose evil people, but to yield to them rather than to struggle against them. (Matthew 5:39-41.) (Yes, I know it’s hypocritical for a litigator to point this out.)

7. Better fire.

Not to finish down, but up:

"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another." [John 13:34.]

Also: John 13:35; Romans 12:10; Romans 13:8; Galatians 5:13; Ephesians 4:2; 1 Thessalonians 4:9; 2 Thessalonians 1:3; Hebrews 10:24; 1 Peter 1:22; 1 Peter 3:8; 1 John 3:11; 1 John 3:23; 1 John 4:11; 1 John 4:12; 2 John 1:5 (in case we didn’t get it the first time).

I write this essay as much for myself as for my friends. I will try to regard those I disagree with with sympathy. Maybe this will ripen into kindness, which will ripen into love. By grace.