A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all men, women, and children. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. Brene Brown
Love and belonging is what we seek. And when we fail to experience love, we fail to experience being. We become broken, lost wanderers in a wasteland of desperation, impatience, entitlement, greed, addiction, and emptiness. Our substitutes for love forever fail to fulfill, and we flounder.
Conversely, when we experience intimacy with another, we are struck by something beyond ourselves. It is if the energy of being itself suddenly takes hold of us and carries us helplessly toward the other. The woman who you will one day propose marriage in hopes of even greater intimacy. The baby who did not exist one year ago but now inexplicably interweaves itself into your soul. The best friend who gets you.
Your best friend gets you because she gets you. Your presence. She is privileged to know you intimately and loves you deeply. With her you have trust and vulnerability and peace. You have being.
But how do we find love? Where can we discover belonging? Especially in a world where everyone wants to take and no one wants to give?
The answer comes to us as we review the last six episodes of Awestruck, where we see Jesus revealing the culmination of all of the Old Testament Law and Prophets – in him. In his life. In his words. In his actions.
And as Jesus weaves together the entirety of the Old Testament into a living portrait of himself, what we see in that portrait is divine love. We see a God whose sole purpose is to bring us into perfect union with him and with each other.
Source Scripture
See episodes 71-76
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
But I say to you, the Lord says, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who persecute you. Why did he command these things? So that he might free you from hatred, sadness, anger and grudges, and might grant you the greatest possession of all, perfect love, which is impossible to possess except by the one who loves all equally in imitation of God. Maximus the Confessor
Imagine a reverse wedding ceremony, where the climax occurs as two people stare into each other’s eyes and declare for all to hear, I don’t.
The bride’s wedding dress is blackened with soot. Thorns are strewn in place of flowers. Writhing snakes replace candles. On either side of the aisle there are opposing forces who shout at each other.
And leading the ceremony is zombie-like creature, who says, “Dearly be-hated, we are fractured here today to part these two by breaking the bonds of love and fueling the fires of fury.”
There is a reason why we do not see such ceremonies – they are devoid of beauty.
Weddings are filled with beauty, and set the stage of hope that love will forever bind two people.
Reverse weddings, where two people decide that they are enemies – whether husband and wife, or father and son, two former friends, or perfect strangers who meet on conflicting terms, are filled with darkness. And yet, such ceremonies occur in the privacy of our hearts.
We decide that someone in our lives, whether the crazy neighbor next door or the ruthless dictator of another country, is our enemy. We know that they have no good will toward us specifically or humanity in general, and so we feel justified in assuming the same posture toward them – precisely because we are right and they are wrong. And right must prevail.
Yet perhaps the real reason that we declare war on this enemy of ours is because they have robbed us of beauty and love. And so, wounded by this loss, we exacerbate the issue by living in hate, robbing ourselves – and the world around us – of beauty and love.
We become that which we hate in an effort to extinguish it and hope that beauty returns when the smoke clears.
If we truly wish lost beauty to return, then we must stoke its fire – both within and without.
Source Scripture
Matthew
Matthew 5:43-48; Luke 6:27-28,32-36
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
(Apple I Spotify)
For Further Contemplation
Recommended Reading
The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
To have faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you. C.S. Lewis
Is it a sin to….. fill in the blank. Yes, or no!!
The formulation of such questions and the hands-on-hips scrutiny that awaits their answers disclose an underlying, dualistic paradigm that we might call religious meritocracy.
Do the right thing – earn your way to heaven. If, then. Yes, no.
Religious meritocracy produces, as its logical conclusion, rigid boundaries with which to declare judgement, excluding those on the outside and self-righteously promoting those on the inside to elevated status. Everything becomes about the boundaries, where all troops are amassed. And yet, in so doing, the interior state becomes entirely devoid of the life with which the boundaries were intended to cradle.
It’s easy to fall prey to this paradigm if you take only a cursory glance at sacred Scripture, particularly the Old Testament. The law given to Moses and the message preached by prophets often center on those deeds that, if committed, warrant punishment. Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Or else.
And yet, as we will see in today’s episode, the sacred rarely emerges from cursory glances, just as the breathtaking experiences of vacation in a beautiful country does not come by walking its borders heal-to-toe all the way around and then returning home.
Today, we cross the threshold of the borders outlined by the letter of the law and go deep into the interior – to the breathtaking Spirit of the Law – that brings life and love to otherwise dead religion.
Source Scripture
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
(Apple I Spotify)
Read Romans 8-13. Compare Paul’s explanation of what it means to live by the Spirit and his religious establishment’s failed attempts to find the kingdom of heaven because of their focus on the letter of the law.
Read Luke 24:13-35. Note the reaction of the two men walking back to Emmaus on the Sunday following the crucifixion when a stranger explains everything from the law and the prophets.
Related Quotes
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.– G.K. Chesterton