Sunday, 07 December 2008

  • Thoughts on our Ultimate Lover

    God is an incredible lover!

    • I am reading through my one year bible and I am in Hosea right now. The thing I love about Hosea is God’s expression of his jealousy and hurt.
    • God wants Hosea to be able to experience what God feels when his people cheat on him. So he tells Hosea to take a prostitute for a wife and to keep taking her back.
    • I know I’ve talked about this on my blog before, but the story of Hosea is told beautifully in the movie Moulin Rouge.
    • If any of you married/engaged/dating people have ever been cheated on by your significant other, you know the intense pain that that betrayal can cause.
    • Has it ever occurred to you that God feels this pain when we choose to find our satisfaction in some other god?
    • If God could show vulnerability (I’m not suggesting he is weak here, just honest about his hurt), Hosea is probably one of the best pictures of this.
    • I’ve not experienced this sort of betrayal, but the things I imagine people experience intense feelings of hurt, distrust, and anger.
    • If you read Hosea, you noticed God expressing all of these things.
    • I know that people want to be careful to bring God down to human levels and reactions, and I do want to be careful to not be mocking or lowering of God here, but you can’t deny the intense emotion that God feels because his people have turned to other gods, even though he has been perfectly faithful, loving, devoted and protective of his people.
    • May I suggest that the most amazing part of this is the grace that God extends in the midst of this hurt. May I suggest that this makes his Grace even more amazing than we often realize.
    • In human terms…if your husband/wife cheats on you, you might extend them grace and agree to go to counseling with them and try to save your marriage once, twice, maybe even 3 times. But there comes a point when you probably would not be able to trust them again. There would come a point when they’ve cheated too many times.
    • Do you realize that we turn to other gods almost daily, and while it grieves God’s heart deeply, he forgives and forgets every time…not on the basis of our ability or willingness to change so much, as on the basis that he is confident that His love can change us, that His Son’s work on the cross was sufficient, that Jesus’ intercession on our behalf is so moving to the father’s heart, that the transforming work of the spirit is so powerful.
    • We live under such incredible grace. I am soooo guilty of taking it for granted, but it is also what daily transforms me and helps me choose God’s perfect peace over the temporary peace that other god’s offer.

     

    • Speaking of lovers! Bryan Clark (pastor at Lincoln Berean) has recently spoke on singleness. It’s been fascinating for me to listen to the message and also listen to the reaction across the board (from married and single people).

     

    • What I loved is that Bryan laid the smack down on both married and single people and by “laid the smack down” I mean boldly declared the truth in love.

     

    • The truth is that we called to be obedient to Christ TODAY regardless of our circumstances. We are never to have the excuse that we are waiting for something to change before we live for God fully or are about His mission.

     

    • We were called to where we are for a purpose and no amount of circumstances give us an out or a free pass to selfish-ville. No amount of pain, trial, tribulation, joy, responsibility or circumstance gives us a way out. God has called us to love and know him, to build his kingdom, give him glory and invite others in…period.

     

    • I have sat with wonderful single people, who have no debt, nothing holding them back, and they feel called to over-seas missions or inner-city ministry, or full-time ministry of some sort and they say to me “Well, I don’t think I can/should/want to go serve until I get married”. And when I get to the heart of it, it’s because they are afraid that if they jump into ministry without a spouse that it means they don’t need the spouse to do ministry and God will not give them a spouse and force them into a life of singleness.

     

    • Now, this is just a low and poor view of God. This is thinking that God is trying to get by with just giving us just enough of what we need to function and that if we act like we can function with less God will be like “Phew, she can make it without a whole lot of blessing, without a spouse, without…, and that just saves me the trouble of having to bless her with more.”

     

    • God loves to give us good things, but my friends we’re not going to trick him into giving us good things that he never intends us to have. And sometimes he will call us to give up something small (that seems big to us) in order for us to get in on the Big thing he has for us.

     

    • Bryan talked about how as single people, we are in the unique situation to serve and minister to people and to share the gospel in a way that married people cannot. When people are married their devotion is divided because it’s not just to God, but they have a whole other person that requires their attention and devotion. And Bryan is exactly right. Neither being married or single is more spiritual or better, but each is unique.

     

    • One of the things I love about being single is that if I need to go meet with someone in crisis at midnight or 3am, I don’t have to justify it to anyone. I don’t have to make the decision of whether this is going to strain my relationship with my significant other. If I need hang out with a non-believer a lot because I am investing in that person, I’m not putting a marriage on the line.

     

    • Now don’t get me wrong. I want to be married. I would love to be able to do life and ministry with someone else….BUT I will not wait to do ministry, go to the missions field, or dig deep into the wealth of God’s word until I am married. I will waste these years of freedom/ability to minister if I do that.

     

    • But lest you believe that I or Bryan let married people off the hook in their work for the mission because they have someone else to focus on, let me say that they don’t have an out.

     

    • I have also sat with Godly married people who have said, well we aren’t going to serve anywhere because we really need to just focus in on our marriage and family. We need to raise our kids right and my ministry is my family right now. OK…that’s some what respectable, but it’s also too often used an excuse to check out on the mission.

     

    • Bryan boldly talked about how much selfishness is lived in under the guise of ”family is my ministry” type thinking. And as a single woman, I do not presume to judge the hearts of married people in this arena, but I do, without shame, ask you, my married friends to honestly ask God if you are doing this. If you’d allowed your marriage to turn so inwardly focuses that you have checked out of the mission?

     

    • Let’s talk about the unique position that married couples find themselves in. As a single woman, I cannot really speak to well into an unbelieving married couples life, but a Godly married couple can walk with an unbelieving couple and possibly help save their marriage or help save their families.

     

    • They can also build in to single peoples’ lives and be honest and vulnerable about how hard marriage and relationships are. Single people need to be awakened from their dream that marriage will be bliss and all of their troubles will be gone once they are married. That their loneliness will be gone, all of their sexual urges will be satisfied, and that all their needs will be fulfilled. The fact is that whether married or single we will only find true satisfaction in Christ.

     

    • I am grateful for the countless married couples that have spoken into my life about the realities of marriage and have allowed their relationship to be a mirror of my life for me to see how ill-prepared for marriage I really am. This mirror helps me to cry out to God to make me the person I will need to be if I should ever get married, but it makes me intensely content to be single as long as God blesses me with this gift of singleness. Thank you married friends for ministering to me in this way! You’ll never know how much you’ve blessed me.

     

    •  I also greatly appreciated Bryan talked to both married and single people about not viewing singleness as some sort of social disorder that needs to be fixed or treated. As long as this attitude lingers, single people will feel like outsiders and married people will have this smug sense that they’ve some how “arrived”. I
    • We have to seek to love each other and learn from each other. And as long as either or both groups is bitter toward the other we are harming the body of Christ. While there are times for us to be exclusive in our life experiences and do things as single people or married people….we can’t live there. We must be careful to live as one big family of Christ!

     

    I think I’ll stop for now, but I do intend to get back to the thing I asked you to ponder on Friday…so keep pondering it.

     

    But I am curious what your thoughts are on Hosea, God’s grace, Married and Single living.

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