66 Love Letters by Larry Crabb

Author:Larry Crabb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2009-07-19T04:00:00+00:00

PART FIVE

The Hero Takes Center Stage:

Matthew Through John

We want every love story to have a happy ending. Too many don’t. God’s does. It just takes a long time to get there. And for good reason. Our understanding of love is so twisted that it takes a lot of work, centuries worth, to straighten it out.

Think about it. Somehow we’ve gotten the idea that if God loves us, He wouldn’t let hurricanes ravage New Orleans or tornadoes devastate Myanmar or earthquakes kill thousands in China, not if He could help it. Every time I hear about the latest natural disaster or yesterday’s terrorist bombing or someone’s parental heartbreak or a good friend’s diagnosis of level 4 leukemia, a voice inside me that I can’t quite muffle whispers, “God, I know You’re good, but tell me again: What are You good for?”

Maybe the demonic twist in our understanding of love boils down to this: because God is love, the abundant life that Jesus promised us means an abundance of blessings now, you know, all the good things of life that make us happy.

Where did we get that idea? Certainly not from the Old Testament. And (I peeked ahead) not from the New Testament either.

Jesus made it clear that life, real life—the life He died to give us— centers not on nice homes, happy families, and good health in a safe world with a booming economy but rather on knowing Jesus’ Father as our Father—in good times and bad—and relating to His Father and everyone else the way Jesus does—in good times and bad. I think that’s what it means to be holy. Holiness does not consist of doing good things and not doing bad things. Holiness is wrapped up in relating well, deeply, with love.

And if that’s holiness, if that’s what life is really all about, then:

The abundant life Jesus came to give us is (at least for now) an abundance not of material blessings but an abundance of knowing God as our supreme treasure and relating to Him and to others lovingly, no matter what assortment of blessings and hardships come our way or what variety of feelings—joy, emptiness, peace, terror—we’re experiencing.

I’ve just reread everything I’ve written so far, all my dialogues with God about what He’s trying to get across to me in His first thirty-nine love letters. And I’ve come to a rather inelegant conclusion: the Old Testament is a set-up for the New. Let me put it less inelegantly: if we miss the message of His first thirty-nine letters, we’ll miss the message of His last twenty-seven. Or worse, we’ll pervert it and think we’ve got it. We’ll make it fit into our hellishly twisted definition of love and never be captured by the real story of love that could take our breath away, that could humble us enough to change us from self-obsessed lovers of short term well-being to God-obsessed lovers of others at any temporary cost to ourselves.

The crimson thread running through the entire Old Testament,

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