lt used to be enough that God loves you. You remember those days, right after you internalized, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whosoever believes in might not perish but have eternal life." John 3:16
And it felt so good, so freeing. All of a sudden, you felt humility and self-worth bleeding together, overlapping. But it didn't take long. A few sermons, a few calls to start serving, to do your part, to use your gifts, to fulfill your "calling"; a few failures, a few skipped Bible studies, angry outbursts or nasty thoughts and suddenly you aren't so sure God likes you.
Sure, sure, He loves you. He promised to never leave you and you know all the verses about His lovingkindness that endures forever, but yeah, not so sure He's really all that proud of you. His love is obligatory, kind of like a parent's. But He's not calling you His friend. You're pretty nervous to imply that you and God are all that close. So you cringe a bit when it's your turn to pray out loud. You pick up dime-a-dozen devos instead of the real Word of God. God loves you, He has to, right?
You're not the first Christian to feel this way. That's why most of us spout off, "We are saved by grace through faith and not by works", but then try ever so hard to do just the right things. The pulpit preaches that Jesus paid the price and we cannot earn salvation, but then, once we're saved we discover the checklist of all the things we ought to do to insure our salvation. Sound familiar?
But if it's true that God's gift of salvation is free, then how is it possible that the maintenance of the same is so expensive? And if security does not come at a cost, then how can we convince our hearts to rest in the truth that God not only loved us enough to save us, but that He likes us enough to stay present with us in all our failures, to endure our screw ups, to fellowship with us in our weaknesses, to invest His Holy Spirit in us, to speak to us, to comfort us, to assure us of our salvation?
The secret is much simpler than you might fear. It is gratitude. In the KJV, Hebrews 12:28says, "Wherefore we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear:".
In the English Standard Version, it reads, "Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe,".
The word translated as "grateful" in the second version is the same as is translated "grace" in the the King James. A succinct definition of the Greek word is this: The spiritual condition of one governed by the power of divine grace, the merciful influence of kindness by which God, exerting His holy influence upon our souls, turns them to Christ.*
In both translations, it is easy to see that the kingdom has already been received, therefore the readers (you and I) are assumed to have accepted Christ as our personal Savior. The next step is to worship the King of this kingdom with gratitude.
When we gather around the thanksgiving table each November, it's common to pass our plates with the query, "What are you thankful for?". This is the same principle we must apply to our worship: What do we worship for? What are we grateful for?
The difference between "love" and "like" is gratitude. The concept of love has the potential to remain nebulous, but when that love is expressed in terms of gratitude it takes on a gritty tangibleness. Thankfulness requires knowing someone, recognizing their contribution. Thanksgiving requires that we internalize God's love and recognize Him as good.
The next time you are fearful that you've let God down and imagine Him standing over you saying, "I will always love you, but I'm so disappointed, I don't like you very much right now," pause to thank Him. Thank Him for the factual evidence of His love. In this thankfulness it will become apparent that He does indeed like you. His affection for you overflows the boundaries of unconditional love into the confidence that He treasures you, has secured you and that you have no need to impress Him.
* Lexicon and dictionary notes taken from Blueletterbible.org
It doesn't take too long on my Facebook newsfeed before I can see posts about either hockey, football, baseball or basketball and hear about how "OUR TEAM IS THE BEST". It seems like competition is woven into the heart of man and some would say that is a bad thing. I think competition gets a bad rap these days, which is a bummer because I think competition speaks to the heart of what it means to be a man.
Believe it or not, the Bible addresses this topic. Mark 9 tells the story of the disciples arguing amongst themselves about who was greatest. This is classic masculinity in action. Let's keep score and compete to see who wins. When people teach this story, they often teach it like the disciples were doing something wrong, like this desire to be first was a bad thing.
But it wasn't. Jesus doesn't scold them for wanting to be first. Instead, he sits them down and tells them how to actually do it! He says, "Whoever wants to be first among you must be the servant of all." He affirmed their desire to be first, their desire to compete for honors; he just told them they had been keeping score the wrong way. And that's it.
Like I said, competition does get a bad rap, because the gap from healthy competition to unhealthy is very narrow. When we call a person "competitive," what we usually mean is that they like to win and they get very bitter if they don't. The desire to be first place in some sport often goes hand in hand with the desire to cheat or to use performance-enhancing drugs to get there. Things like that cause people - usually women - to look at competition on the whole and say that it's a bad thing, that we should all just get along and be nice to each other so nobody has to lose.
Yet I would observe that those things are not actually the fault of competition at all. When a person cheats, his focus is not on the competition, but on the results. A "competitive" person does not like competing, most of the time; he likes winning - he is obsessed with the result. There might be great competition, but if he loses, he is still unhappy. That's the really interesting thing about the way Jesus addressed competition. According to his way of keeping score, you never really know where you are on the leaderboard. All you know is how you're doing at the competition itself - at being a servant to everyone. We'll find out the final score someday, but until then we can't know it, which keeps us from being obsessed with the results.
Believe it or not, Paul actually commands us to compete with one another. In Romans 12:10, he says, "Love with brotherly affection; outdo one another in showing honor." Find out how your neighbor is doing at showing honor, and one-up him. Love more; love harder. Something tells me men get more excited about the possibility of outdoing each other than they would about simply showing honor without the idea of a competition. See, we tend to think that comparing ourselves to other people is inherently a bad thing, because many times it is, but many does not equal always. It can be a very good thing when comparing myself to my neighbor leads me to conclude that I'm not loving people as well as he is. As a man, that competition might just be what I need to spur me to the next level. Proverbs says that friends are supposed to have this effect on each other, just like iron sharpens iron.
Furthermore, the idea of a reward for one's work is very common throughout the Bible. Hebrews 11 observes, "Anyone who comes to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him." In Revelation 22, Jesus promises, "Behold, I am coming soon, and my reward is with me." Rewards are a form of competition: some people will get the prize, and other people won't, and it all depends on how you live during your life. But the thing about God's prizes, which distinguishes them from earthly prizes, is that one person winning does not prevent the rest of us from winning. There are plenty of prizes to go around. If I compete with my friend to see who can outdo the other in showing honor, we both win. It's the healthiest kind of competition. It's all the intensity of competing, which men like, coupled with all the gentleness of "nobody loses," except for the people who don't try at all to win the prizes.
Polling company Rasmussen Reports has found that 56% of churchgoers are women. In other words, for every 2 men in church, there are 3 women. Why the disparity? What is it about the way the gospel is preached that appeals to women more than men, and why are all those other men choosing football and golf over church on Sunday mornings? I don't mean to suggest that churches are failing to reach men, because there are still a lot of Christian men in this country; nor do I even mean to suggest that all men enjoy and are motivated by a dynamic of competition. But Jesus himself affirmed his disciples when they expressed a desire to be first. He told them exactly how to do it. Shouldn't we conclude that even Jesus understood that some people simply get more excited when they have the ability to compete against other people? If we can introduce that dynamic back into faith somehow, won't we reach a lot of men who feel that Christianity is a good story but is lacking something?
Of course, the man in me wishes there was some way to actually watch my score go up, because that's what I like about sports and video games: I always know exactly how I'm doing at all times. Showing love is tougher. Do I have a 36%, or is it more like a 58.2%? Because I don't know the score, I just have to focus on the process: loving more, showing honor more, serving everyone. And I have to know that God is watching me, keeping my score, preparing my rewards for the day I take hold of them.
