Posts Tagged: John 3:16
“Love Binds. But is that Good?”
Years ago, my sponsor encouraged me to craft and live out daily affirmations. This practice remains a transformative habit in my day-to-day recovery and life. Today’s affirmation led to an interesting exchange with my sponsor. Here is the affirmation:
“Today, by God’s grace, I am welcoming love and also aiding its flow to others. I will choose to be madly in love with everything and everyone. This will be great sanity for me.”
My sponsor replied, “Love binds us all.”
I thought about his aphorism for a few moments, and then emailed him back, “Yes, it does. False ‘love’ binds us in chains. True love binds us in a freeing embrace.”
In other words, binding can be a good thing—except when it is not. There is a kind of binding that is done in the name of love that is not at all an expression of love. There is a binding that is an expression of fear, anger, and the desire to be in control. This kind of “love” is a very common form of human evil. Sometimes, it leads to terribly evil forms of bondage, but I suspect that we all participate in this kind of bondage in less dramatic ways. Less dramatic forms of evil are evil still.
But there is also the kind of love that binds us all in our common humanity. This is a freeing kind of love, not bondage. Paul encourages this kind of freeing binding in Colossians 3:12-14.
“Col. 3:12 Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, 13 bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” (English Standard Version)
Paul encourages his original readers, and us, with some difficult things: compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, putting up with one another, and forgiving. Who is up to these things?! But then, as if that were not enough, he adds one more thing that binds all these other virtues together: love.
The God who loved the whole world so much that he gave his only son (John 3:16) calls on us to also love. God bound himself to the entire world in love in order to free us from our bondage to sin. Can we strive to do anything less than this?
“LOVE IS NOT A ZERO-SUM GAME”
“One of the teachers of religious law was standing there listening to the debate. He realized that Jesus had answered well, so he asked, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
Jesus replied, “The most important commandment is this: ‘Listen, O Israel! The Lord our God is the one and only Lord.
And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.’
The second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ No other commandment is greater than these.”
The teacher of religious law replied, “Well said, Teacher. You have spoken the truth by saying that there is only one God and no other.
And I know it is important to love him with all my heart and all my understanding and all my strength, and to love my neighbor as myself. This is more important than to offer all of the burnt offerings and sacrifices required in the law.”
Realizing how much the man understood, Jesus said to him, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.” And after that, no one dared to ask him any more questions.” (Mark 12:28-34.)
Much of life seems to be a zero-sum game: winners and losers, the more of this the less of that. That probably works for many things—at least in the short-run. We’ve set things up that way.
However, in many of the most important aspects of life, zero-sum is not the name of the game. When two people who have been friends for a long time are having a good conversation, who wins and who loses? The same question elicits the same answer when a husband and wife are enjoying a walk along the beach at sunset. Who wins when your little son or daughter or grandchild draws you a picture or says that he or she loves you? You get the point.
And yet, I fall into zero-sum thinking all the time. For example, I was thinking this morning about loving God versus loving people. Did you notice the word “versus” in the preceding sentence? The word “versus” is a zero-sum word.
Jesus pointed out that loving God and loving people is at the center of the Old Testament. And I have almost completely misunderstood what he was saying. I am ashamed to admit it, but I will anyway. The unspoken, unbelieving question that I have been asking in my heart of hearts is this: “How can I love God with everything I’ve gotten, and still love other people?”
In particular, I love my wife so much that I am sometimes afraid that I love her more than I love God. If love is a zero-sum game, then this would be a distinct possibility, and my wife would be an idol.
However, if love is not a zero-sum game, then loving God with everything I am and have and loving my wife as myself becomes exceedingly unproblematic.
As often happens with me, my wrong assumptions lead to false problems.
One other thing: If love is not a zero-sum game, then God can (and does!) love everyone equally. And suddenly, John 3:16 makes sense: “For God so loved the world . . . .”
DOWN TO EARTH BELIEVER
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