Experiencing God: God's Loving Nature

"Experiencing God:  God's Loving Nature"
1 John 4:7-8

If we're going to have a relationship with God we need to have an idea of who we're getting into a relationship with.  We, of course, will come to find that out the longer we develop that relationship.  But we'd like to know a little about God first.  Before we start.

Like an executive, meeting with another executive for the first time to work on some kind of deal between their companies.  They try to find out something about the other before the first meeting.

Or the general of one army gaining intel on the general of the opposing army, in order to gain some perspective.  Or better yet, an upper hand in the battle.

Or a boy trying to find out some things about a girl before asking her out.  He pumps her friends for information.  Or in this day and age, looking up someone on an online dating site, assuming you’re getting an accurate picture.

(Here’s a video clip from the movie, “Mall Cop”:  http://www.wingclips.com/movie-clips/paul-blart-mall-cop/internet-dating)


What if what you find out is wrong?  By asking others, you are giving them a level of credence they may not deserve.  By checking someone out on the web, that information may not be entirely accurate, or maybe you’re not getting the whole story.  What if your own experience with "the other" is very different from what you've been told?  Either your source is wrong.  Or, the "one" you are getting to know is deceiving you.  Or, the mix between you and the "other" brings out aspects of the "other" that others did not.

So, the question is, are there basic characteristics of the "other" that will always be in play?  Deeply set attributes, no matter the circumstance or audience, that will always be part of the "one"?  A constant nature that is unchangeable?

Blackaby says, in relationship to God, the answer to those questions is "Yes."  That there are three attributes of God that are constant and unchangeable.  Always have been a part of who God is, and always will be.

I'm not going to talk about all three, this morning.  I’ll let you do that in your small groups.  I'm only going to talk about the first attribute of God that is unchanging.  That is, God's love can be trusted.

If there is anything we've learned by living in our American culture, it is that love can NOT be trusted.  We tell each other we love each other.  We speak solemn and precious vows "before God and these witnesses."

But then we hear statements like, "We've just grown apart."  Or, "My love has grown cold."  Or, "You aren't the same person I married."  Or, "I've found someone new that I'm in love with."  Or a whole host of other similar statements.

I read an interview last week with a couple who were celebrating their 70th wedding anniversary.  The interviewer asked them what has kept them together for so long.  The wife replied, "When we were growing up together, we had the ethic that if something was broken, you fixed it.  You didn't throw it away."  What the wife was saying was their love, some times during their 70 year marriage had become broken.  They ran into some hard times.  Life together wasn't always easy.  But they had stopped and fixed what was broken before they went on together.

She was also saying that you learn to trust people you work with on the brokenness that comes with life.  Especially when the broken thing is love.

It's sad that we have assumed love will be a fixer of brokenness.  That love, somehow, magically by itself, will fix things.  That if we love more, or love better, or love differently, then that will make a difference in our relationship problems. But in our modern culture, love breaks people just as much as it fixes them.  So we've learned not to trust love, or those who say they love us.  We have learned not to trust other's love.

Psychologist Erik Erikson was one of the first to identify and develop the idea that human develop happens in stages.  If we don't make it through early stages well, we will be set up to make a mess in later stages.

Erikson's first stage of human development is called Basic Trust vs. Mistrust.  Newborns and infants are gauging whether they can trust this new, harsh environment outside the womb.  They are asking themselves, "Can I trust these weird others, who babble at me unintelligently and make sappy faces at me, to take care of me and make sure I feel safe and secure--in a word, loved.”

Take a look around you.  We live in a society of fellow people groping desperately, who feel unsafe, insecure and unloved.  That's what we want and deeply desire.  According to Erikson, it is our most basic desire before all other stages of human development can be navigated.  And as infants, we are looking around to these weird others--fellow seekers, fellow human beings who, themselves, are oozing a lack of trust coupled with a desire for love.  What do we get.  A bunch of messed up people who don't know how to fix what's broken about love.  So we just replace, replace, replace.  That's us.

Then Jesus comes a long.  His whole ministry is a banner that says, "God's Love Can Be Trusted!"  The people who read that banner, during Jesus' time on earth, these people who had no further reason to trust anyone's love--the prostitutes, the demonized, the chronically ill, the blind, the tax collectors, even a thief on a cross--were the ones who tried, one more time and found with God, finally, a love that can be trusted.  If people like that can take one more chance at a love that can be trusted, can't you?

There was a couple.  Dorothy and Bill.  Dorothy felt like she really did love her husband, Bill.  But she was a contrary, irritable, self-centered, and sometimes thoughtless woman.  Knowing Bill's love and tolerance for her, she took advantage of that and was often short and impatient.

Bill died unexpectedly, of a heart-attack shortly after turning 40.  While Dorothy set about the business of cleaning out Bill's dresser drawers, she found short loving notes to her, special cards he was saving to send to her.  At his office she found that at least once on every page of his date book was written, "Call Dorothy," or "Take Dorothy out to dinner."

Now, Dorothy spent long, sleepless nights as she recognized, too late, how Bill's love was exemplary, and how she had made him suffer under her childish irritabilities.  She had a hard time forgiving herself for her thoughtlessness.  Again and again she cried, "Oh, if only I could see him once more, if only for a moment to tell him that I loved him.  He never, never knew."

What Dorothy did, we all do to God.  We don't trust love when it's staring us in the face.  We don't trust God when God has given us so many reasons to trust him and his love.  We look at the banner that Jesus lifted across his time on earth (God's Love Can Be Trusted), and we just shake our heads and disbelieve.  That which you desire above all else--a trustworthy love--is right here, right now, being offered by our God.  What will it take to trust that love?

I like how Blackaby weaves personal stories in and through this book.  I encourage you to do the same as you meet in your small groups.  Take the risk and see what happens.

Most of you know that I've been dealing with some heart stuff.  Over the last six months of last year, the pumping function of my heart has decreased markedly.  This comes with a lot of new symptoms I've never had to deal with before.  As well as a host of medications new to me, as they try to bolster the strength of my weakening heart.  So far, not much has worked.

So the heart doctors recommended, and I agreed, that I have a defibrillator installed in my chest.  This is simply a life insurance device for me.  People with my combination of heart issues, if they have a heart attack, it drops them and they are gone almost before they hit the ground.  So I've got this little implant in my chest to keep me alive in case that happens.  It's a constant reminder that I'm not in the great health I used to enjoy and take for granted.

We all face that, I know.  Some of you have the little black box in your chest, like me.  Some of you have dealt with cancer.  Some have chronic illnesses, like MS, that isn't going to go away.  We all have problems and issues with which we struggle.  For me, this all has hit me on an emotional level I didn't see coming, nor was prepared for.  When things like this happen to us, we find ourselves asking questions that we naively thought we'd never be asking.

But there's one question for me, that I've had to face, as I deal with all this.  Maybe you've asked this question also.  You may find it an odd question for a minister to ask, assuming that I have, on some intellectual or theological level, already got this question figured out.   It wasn't until I was facing issues of the reality of my own mortality that I asked such a question seriously.

The question is this:  No matter what happens, can I trust God?  I've helped so many people struggle with that question as they dealt with a whole host of bad human circumstances.  But at the time it was their question to ask, and to find not just an answer, but the loving God behind the answer.  I could keep myself at an objective distance from their struggle as they had that conversation with God.  Not any more.  Now it's my question.

What I have found is that there is a huge and strong element of love in this conversation with God over this question.  It isn't just a matter of coming to the point of trusting God no matter what.  God's love is wrapped up in that conversation.  It's more than just trusting God with your life and death.  It is knowing that that trust is coming out of the very heart of God and God's love for me.  For you.  No matter what.

I have released myself into that loving embrace of God, because that's who God is, and who God will always be--the embracing, loving God, who no matter what holds us, in life and in death.  That's who God is at God's best.  It's part of God's unchanging nature.


As you talk about the three attributes of God's unchanging nature, or as you ponder them this week in your journal, don't look at them as theological concepts.  Instead tell your stories of how you have come to know, personally, how these attributes of God are really true.  Encourage each other with your stories of faith.