Free to love!

Acts 3:12-19 Peter’s message in the temple

1 John 3:1-7

Luke 24:36b-48

As I read these passages over and over, there is a consistent theme coming through, a theme of acceptance, and repentance, in that order. And not just that – what also shines through is that it is all because of Jesus. It all centres around him. Who he is and what he has done is completely new – that is, love us first, without requiring us to do anything to earn that love.

Many of us have grown up with an image of God who is angry at everyone, waving his big white stick in readiness to give us a whack when we do yet another thing wrong.

You know when you sometimes don’t know where you stand with someone? From the time we’re born to the time we die, we are conditioned into the idea that we have to please someone to be accepted by them. It happens in our families, it happens in our workplaces.and it happens in our churches. God is not like that. You always know where you stand with God. God is the one whose first words to you are ‘I do not condemn you’. To have this idea of a God who loves us first is totally foreign to our whole mindset. You actually don’t have to do anything to be accepted by God. God accepts you first.

Jesus operated like that. To the woman caught in adultery his words were ‘I do not condemn you’. He also said ‘go and sin no more’, but he said that after he said ‘I do not condemn you’. For the religious people in that time it was all about trying to earn acceptance. The Pharisees in that story all demanded that she be stoned. But Jesus said no, God is not like that. To the people in John’s time, when he wrote this letter, the idea of a God who accepts you before you do anything was completely revolutionary.

No longer was it about fear and guilt where you never knew if you were accepted or not. And the physical resurrection of Jesus showed it. The kingdom of God had arrived and you were a part of it. It doesn’t matter how bad you’ve been. It doesn’t matter how far away you’ve been. God wants you to be a part of it. As Tony Campolo has said, the kingdom of God is a party. We have so much to look forward to.

I believe one of the roots of our problems stems from the fact that we don’t really believe deep down that we’re loved. We have the belief that God couldn’t love us as we are, we have to do something to earn it. We might know in our heads that God’s love doesn’t depend on us having to do anything. But often the longest distance in the world is that between your head and your heart. If we had a sense of who we are as people loved by the creator of the universe, it would revolutionise our lives.

Like you love your children, that’s how God loves us. You know when your children come home from school and they say ‘look what I made Dad, look at this Mum!’, and you say ‘wow! that’s great!’ Right from the beginning, God has shown that he is like that. I reckon that in the story of creation in Genesis, God was like that with Adam. God gives Adam all the animals just to see what he would name them. And Adam names them and God says ‘great!, that’s what they’ll be called then’. I remember when I was a child and we went digging for gemstones in Western Australia and I found this beautiful round stone. It was shaped just like an egg. And we had it cut open and inside it had these beautiful gemstone colours. And I looked at Dad wondering what he’d say because I scared of Dad. But this time he said ‘that’s great son. That’s yours’. And I thought ‘wow!’. I wonder if Adam felt like that when God gave him all the animals to name. I wonder if he thought ‘wow! God just let me name all these creatures.’

In the Gospel passage in Luke, there is a moment when the disciples are just starting to realise, it’s just beginning to dawn on them, that this is really true. He really was raised from the dead and he really did tell us about it beforehand! And we’re told in The Message version that it just seemed too good to be true. If we really let this sink into the deepest recesses of our hearts, then we wouldn’t have these ideas that it’s just too good to be true. The idea that deep down, it’s too good to be true, is the idea of a society that has lost the ability to trust. We’ve all been hurt in life. The longer we go on in life the more we know about being hurt. And so the idea of a God in whom we can place our complete trust is foreign to us. We have learned that there must be a catch to everything. If someone offers something to us, our first thought is often, ‘what do they want?’ So to trust a God who wants nothing from us but to accept his gift of love goes against our very instincts.

Rikk Watts talks about the person who doesn’t believe in God but who is a good person. He says “I don’t know how believing in God will benefit me. I’m already a good person. I look after my family, I’m faithful to my wife, I’m honest in my work, and I give to charities. I really don’t think becoming a Christian is going to make me any better.” Rikk then asks, ‘what do you say to a person like that?’ He goes on to say that that person is actually right. It’s not about being good and trying to work your way into acceptance by God. Following Christ is not going to make him any more acceptable to God.

This is about grace, being given a free gift that we don’t deserve, and then realising the freedom that that gives. We’re free to love without having to think about whether or not what we are doing is good enough. We love because he first loved us. That’s what the first Christians did. They realised they were saved to serve. That’s how they won over the might of the Roman Empire. One of the facts not often told about the early Christians is that they often couldn’t answer some of the philosophical attacks thrown at Christianity by pagans. They often didn’t have an answer. But that wasn’t how they won the Roman Empire. They won the Roman Empire through the quality of their lives. An early antagonist towards Christians, Celsus, was disgusted that these Christians invited in “everyone who is a sinner, who is foolish, who is simple” – in a word, everyone who is an unhappy wretch”. The Christians realised they had a mission, and that their story was so incredible that they couldn’t keep their mouths shut about it. Something so amazing had happened and nothing was going to get in their way of spreading this message, in word and deed.

The first Christians realised that they didn’t have to spend their lives trying to get acceptance from God. They didn’t have to do that anymore. They were free, free to serve and love without wondering if what they were doing was good enough. They realised that in Jesus there was something much better and it wasn’t about trying to be better, it was about following a way that was better.

The great story of Odysseus in Greek mythology shows this beautifully. Odysseus and his friends need to get somewhere in their boat, but they need to go past this island which no one has ever got past before. The reason that everyone has floundered on this island is because of the beautiful seductive voices of the sirens on this island. When they would sing no man could resist and they would turn their ship toward the island and be wrecked on the rocks. So Odysseus thought of a way to get around this. So he told his crew to lash him tight to the mast of the ship, and then he told his crew to put beeswax in their ears so they couldn’t hear the sirens’ song. He was determined that they were not going to be seduced. He told his crew that when he heard the singing, even though he would desperately want them to unleash him and let him join the sirens, to not let him. And they made it through. But he was a wreck afterwards because he had put so much effort into resisting. People in 12 step programs refer to this as ‘white-knuckling’ it. When you’re tempted to drink or gamble or whatever it is, you can either surrender it to God or ‘white knuckle’ it which means that you try to resist using your own power (I won’t do it, I won’t do it!). Doing it that way though eventually wears you down and you give in.

But then Odysseus realised there must be a better way. So he took Orpheus with him, who had the most beautiful voice in all the land. And when they were approaching the island from where the sirens’ song could be heard, they heard the sirens starting to sing, luring them over. But then Orpheus started to sing, and Orpheus’ voice was more beautiful than that of the sirens, and they made it through unscathed.

That’s what the good news of Jesus is like. It’s not about not doing this and not doing that. It’s about coming to see how attractive following Jesus is that everything else fades into insignificance. That’s what repentance is. Knowing deep in your bones that you are loved and wanting nothing else but to express that love to the world.

The first Christians in the stories we had read out to us today, suddenly got it. We’re told that through the prophets and psalms it said that the messiah would have to suffer and die and be raised. And now they got it. For all the time that Jesus was with them they could never understand because they had a different mindset. In their minds, and in the minds of all Jews of that time, the messiah would be a conqueror and come to defeat the tyranny of Rome once and for all. But now, finally, after Jesus had been raised, it hit them that this was a different kind of God, that this God doesn’t use the methods of the world, that this God doesn’t use the methods of power and tyranny and violence. This is a God who is glorified in weakness and failure.

Isn’t it interesting that some of the most enduring things that we celebrate in Australia were complete failures in the eyes of most people. We celebrate a bush ranger, Ned Kelly, who in the end failed and died a horrible death. And we celebrate Anzac Day which was a military disaster. I think there’s something biblical about that. It’s sort of like victory in defeat. Because the thing we really focus on on Anzac Day is not the massacre that it was, but sacrifice and mateship. You’re probably aware of the heroic actions of Simpson, who was shot while carrying wounded men from the front with his donkey. This is the life of Jesus lived out in bloody, life-threatening, gutsy action. On every Anzac Day memorial you’ll see the verse from John’s Gospel that greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for his brother.

Repentance is about turning your life around and finding the life that is truly life. The word ‘repentance’ has terrible connotations. Immediately you think of hellfire preachers shouting at you, saying that if you don’t repent you’ll burn in hell. But it’s not about that. In each of the 3 passages above, the sequence is what Jesus has done through amazing, unconditional love, and that we then have a mission. We are saved to serve. Immersing ourselves in Jesus and turning our lives around is more seductive than any sirens’ song when we see what we’ve come from and when we see how attractive Jesus is – the Jesus who says ‘I do not condemn you’. So turn your life around. You don’t have to live in that crap anymore. You’re worth much more than that. Choose life.

The Christian hope is that in the end it’s all going to be ok. The swords of war will turn into ploughshares, tears will be dried, pain will end. You are loved, no strings attached. We are free at last to serve the Almighty and in that, in forgetting ourselves, finding life. Transformation, showers of refreshment. ‘Peace I give you’ he said, not as the world gives, where you try to look out for number 1, but the peace of Christ that comes from the freedom of knowing that you don’t have to try and prove yourself anymore. You are loved, now love others like that.

by Nils von Kalm

http://soulthoughts.com