Not That We Have Loved God

My dad and I were conversing last night. We were celebrating my birthday a couple of days late. He said something to the effect that he was proud of me and wishes he could surrender his life as I have. I certainly don’t see myself as a poster child for surrender, and I related to him that I didn’t like the word surrender because it indicates that I have something of value to defend from God. I have nothing of the sort. He said, in effect, that what he means is that he wishes he were willing to embrace God whole-heartedly. That spoke volumes to me and forced me to think a few things through.

What would you think if I said that the human will has very little to do with faith? I truly believe that it has little to do with our coming to faith (as Jesus said in John 6:44, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.”) and I also think it has little to do with our remaining faithful. If the human will were capable of doing such as loving the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul and strength or loving our neighbor as ourself, we would have no need of redemption. We could simply exercise our will to be in line with the will of God and it would be done. Christ on the cross becomes a waste.

How many Christians are sitting in pews every week bemoaning the fact that that they are not willing to serve God with all their heart? I have no idea, but the percentage is probably pretty high. We rail all the time against this attitude we have as a church that we can just tack Jesus onto our already ‘decent’ lives and make them better, and yet that is what we preach. We express the gospel as an exercise of the will; “Turn from your sins and trust in Jesus”. Perhaps it is because words fail to express the depth of the gospel that we preach it as such, but more than likely it is because this idea of ‘willful goodness’ is deeply entrenched in us. It is that one form of self-serving that is considered acceptable in Christians. It appeals to us because it is the last vestige of legalism we can hold onto without people recognizing us as legalists.

I think the best way to get the point across is to speak it plainly: you will never love God completely by an act of your will. It is not possible to do so. You will never surrender your idols as an act of your will. If we could do that, God would not need to dislodge them violently by the intrusion of the gospel. This is where it helps to think back to when you were first saved. There was a sense that you had been aggressively pushed out of the world. You could not have put it in words at the moment, but you could sense that something had been done to you. You were still close enough to the acknowledgment of your sin to know that the changes taking place in your life were not an act of the will. You felt that you had been rescued, and you acted as would a shipwreck survivor who had been plucked from a lifeboat after a lifetime at sea. Every bite of food, every drink of water, every bit of human companionship was special beyond words because of the rescue; because without that rescue you would have not been able to enjoy any of them.

Unfortunately the subtle message of the will is always creeping back in to make us forget that we have been rescued. “Sure you were rescued. We were all rescued. But hey, that was a long time ago. You need to stop being so ridiculously happy about being rescued and get down to the business at hand.” For us, faith ceases to be a miraculous salvation from certain death and becomes a matter of exhausting ourselves trying to repay our rescuer. We work hard at forgetting that we are sinners and covering up our sin, and in the process we lose the joy of being rescued from the reality that sin still plagues us. We are told that as Christians we have it together and we ought to be ‘getting better’ and we believe it. So we put on a happy face and become, by an act of will, the best Christians we can – working with all of our might to love God as we should. When we inevitably fail to do so, rather than scanning the horizon for the funnels of the ship that can rescue us we row harder and harder until we are exhausted.

Hear the words of John: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 John 4:10 ESV) If you want to love God with all of your heart, if you want to surrender to him, stop depending upon your will. There is nothing you can do by an act of your will that will bring God’s approval. God’s approval of you is wholly dependent on Christ, which means that so far as God is concerned you are wholly dependent on Christ. There is no real ‘love’ in your will to love God. That is nothing more than legalism dressed in Christian clothes – an attempt to make yourself worthy in God’s eyes and earn the approval which has already been given you in Christ.  It is the greatest insult to God that we should, by an act of our will, try to earn something that it cost him dearly to give us. The greatest joy you can find is to rest in his love with gratitude as you would in the company of the captain of a ship that rescued you from sure death in the open sea. That is what God wills for you.

Get hold of the fact that you are desperate and let it sink deep into your soul. Embrace the fact that you are still a sinner and acknowledge your sin out rightly and then out rightly accept God’s rescue from it. Don’t even think in terms of surrender as if you have a leg to stand on, but recognize and openly acknowledge that you have nothing at all to offer God, and yet he rescues you without your having the ability to repay him with something as simple as proper gratitude. We know that he’s okay with that, because if he weren’t he would not have freely given his son for that purpose. That is what it means to be a Christian. That is the gospel truth.

God Bless.