Do We Want God to Love Us Anymore?
By: Chris Price, Assistant to the Bishop
For the first time in almost four decades, I have been able to do a little channel-surfing on some Sunday mornings. While most of my colleagues are busy opening church buildings, checking on microphones, lights, loaf and cup, OR composing the ending to their sermons for the day, I have been able to sit in front of the TV and view the competition – oops, I meant to write “view fellow preachers and evangelists”. Or did I? The basic premise of some popular TV preachers leaves me wondering, “Do we want God to love us anymore?”
I suspect this strikes you as strange. You would think that everyone wants God to love him/her. But I wonder. I wonder if we really want God to love us…because what so many people seem to want is for God to like us. That’s the popular god: the god who likes me – my ways, my personality, even my foibles. But I wonder if God “likes” us all that much. In fact, I wonder if God did not decide to love so utterly an unlikeable creature that God created human beings! The astounding thing about grace is how unconditionally God loves us…even when God does not like us.
There’s a big difference between liking and loving. The god who likes us always endorses our lifestyle, while the God who loves us always transforms our lives. The god who likes me always affirms my right to live my own life, while the God who loves me never lets me deny my need for the right way to live. The god who likes me knows how to embrace my way of really living, while the God who loves me understands what is really killing…me. The god who likes us says that we are fine just the way we are: “What’s not to like?” But the God who loves us promises that we can face our need to change and repent, or to risk and dare, all with the gift of our God’s unswerving and undeserved support.
The god who likes us is the god of “nonjudgmental love”…which, I’m beginning to believe, is an oxymoron that delights Satan no end. But the God who loves you and me makes judgments about our lives because God’s Love has a passion for our lives, a passion that brokers no compromise with anything less than what would be right and good for our fulfillment as God’s beloved children. The culture of self-satisfaction wants the god who likes us; but the humanity of messed-up lives needs the God who loves us…in Jesus Christ our Savior and Lord. I wonder how well I give witness to the God who loves us so terribly – or whether I too often acquiesce to the popular god who likes us so terrifically. What do people hear when they tune in…me?
Pastor Chris Price
Assistant to the VA Synod Bishop
