Choose and Choose Again by J. Kevin Butcher

Author:J. Kevin Butcher [Butcher, J. Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RELIGION / Christian Life / Spiritual Growth
Publisher: The Navigators
Published: 2016-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

How much do I love you? I’ll tell you no lie.

How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? . . .

And if I ever lost you, how much would I cry. [2]

Then, what if God sang, “I’ll tell you how much I would cry—my tears over losing you would fill an ocean, they would reach to the sky.” I can hear some of us now. “Okay, God loves me—but not like that. If I don’t perform, if I screw up, if it becomes inconvenient, if I don’t jump through all the religious hoops, God’s love for me won’t last.”

The phrase “God loves you” has become so dumbed down or maybe just so theologically sterile that we can’t imagine him loving us with any emotion, passion, or longing. If any of my three daughters ever need me, I’ll do whatever it takes to be with them. And my greatest fear as a dad is losing one of them—the issue wouldn’t be how much I would cry but whether I could ever stop. I’m just an earthly father with unhealed wounds, baggage, and issues, and I love my girls with that kind of passion, emotion, and longing. Yet we struggle to believe that our eternal Abba, who says “I am love” (1 John 4:8), could love us even remotely like that. No wonder we find it hard to believe he could ever forgive us.

Yet Paul says exactly that: “God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),” (Ephesians 2:4-5, NKJV). In other words, our God loves us more than enough to forgive us. His love and mercy trump our deadness in sin—even the sin you’re thinking of right now that you’ve convinced yourself is unforgiveable.

But the core, ancient New Testament message of forgiveness is not that God’s magnificent love moved him to some kind of “sentimental bypass” of our sin. He didn’t simply sweep our rebellion under a thick cosmic carpet so we could all pretend it didn’t exist. Instead, his all-encompassing love moved him to sacrificial action. He sent Jesus, the one he called “beloved Son,” to a death by crucifixion—a death “for us.” He didn’t just die as an unfortunate victim of a combination of Jewish and Roman injustice—he willfully died for the sins of everyone, everywhere, for all time. He died where we should have died and paid a penalty we should have paid. For those of us who struggle to believe we can be forgiven because “someone has to pay for my sin,” God says, “Yes, justice says someone must pay. And Someone has. My Son, Jesus—because he loves you.” And then, three days later, that same Jesus rose from the dead to prove—as one of my preacher friends in Detroit likes to say—that the check cleared.

Sin’s penalty satisfied. Death swallowed up by life. Guilt overwhelmed by forgiveness. That’s the deeper truth we want to believe—that we long to believe.

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