Maybe you heard this when you were children, or maybe you’ve said it to your own children. “The rules aren’t because I hate you, we have rules because I love you. They’re like guardrails on a windy mountain road that keep you from going off a cliff.”
And this kinda relates to the world we live in. Often we hear someone equate something like “God is love” with meaning “He loves me no matter what I do.” Which is true…there’s nothing my own children could do that would cause me to stop loving them.
But that doesn’t mean…either for our children, or as human beings made in God’s image, that there aren’t consequences from breaking the rules.
With Christmas coming, we spend a bit of time pondering the gift of Jesus coming on a rescue mission. We rightly celebrate what an utter act of love that is on the part of a God who didn’t need us because He is perfect and whole in relationship in Father, Son, and Spirit, but He wants us.
I’d argue, however, that we how much we fall in love with Jesus and the people in His world has a lot to do with learning every day to see Him more clearly. Listen to Jesus’ own words, starting with the most famous verse in the Bible, but then continuing on a bit. And I’m going to share from the New Living Translation just to jolt your brain out of a past rut:
16 “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. 17 God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.
18 “There is no judgment against anyone who believes in him. But anyone who does not believe in him has already been judged for not believing in God’s one and only Son. 19 And the judgment is based on this fact: God’s light came into the world, but people loved the darkness more than the light, for their actions were evil. John 3:16-19, NLT
Today’s connectorship lesson is a theology lesson: When Jesus came on Christmas day, what was His mission? To seek and save the lost. Not to judge…at that time. But Jesus Himself right after that says what? People are already judged for not believing, for loving darkness more than light.
So answer this honestly: Are people still just as broken as ever?
The good news is that Jesus did come to offer us a gift…being saved from ourselves into restored, right relationship with God and others.
And what does this mean for us?
Every relationship, every business transaction, every service rendered, every conversation over the holidays with some distant cousin that’s so weird you don’t even know how they’re related… each is an opportunity to take a risk…a risk to live out that tension of truth and grace that Jesus extends to us.
Remember, truth without grace leads to legalism. And grace without truth leads to chaos.
And dare I say, that none of this happens without risking that someone will prefer the darkness to the light, their own darkness to truth, isolation instead of relationship. Just like when you set rules for your kids, they might sometimes have a fit and say, “I hate you!”
But we do it anyway. We love, as best we can, like God loves us. And it’s going to feel risky.
In the words of C.S. Lewis,
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable. ~ C.S. Lewis
Roger Courville, CSP is a globally-recognized expert in communications, an award-winning author and speaker, and a passionately bad guitarist. ForTheHope equips on-the-go professionals with biblical principles to engage marketplace relationships with competent humility. On Twitter can follow him @RogerCourville and/or his podcast @JoinForTheHope, or get all updates by email subscription at www.forthehope.org.