The closer we look
at the true morality of our heart, the less confident we become of ever having
a family resemblance to Jesus. Our
actual affections should sicken us if we care much about being holy. If we have come to the conclusion that we are
spineless and lack integrity between what we confess about Christianity and
what we are, then something supernatural can begin within us. God is not waiting breathlessly to see if we
can make something good of ourselves; the opposite is actually the case. He is watching for our tipping point when we
become available for Him to rework. At
the point of our hopelessness, we may open ourselves to the intervention of
Holy Spirit and His marvelous transforming power. Jesus Christ did not tell us that we were to
love our neighbors as ourselves because He thought we could ever do it. We can barely love our children in some
approximation of it, love our best friends as best friends, but our love of the
neighbor who takes our legs out from under us somehow is not going to be adored
with the affection God wants for him. We
can only hope that Jesus Christ will do our loving for us; that He will assert
His will and power in our actions. The
cross dangling from our mirror or hidden within our heart is not a reminder of
distant God keeping an eye on us. It is
the statement that Christ in us is the hope of glory and that He is violently
at times working His way out of us and into our world. Let us not try to love through Him but rather
let Him love through us. The purity we
seek is not some gilded try on our part but rather bloody holiness brought in
by the presence of the Lord Jesus Himself.
True loving of your neighbor as yourself happens only if you give Christ
room to do that loving, if you make yourself available to Him to bless those
who hate you and cherish the enemies God died to save. Nothing is more sure than the ability Christ
has to make you full of love; your faith
in Him will do the trick.
...grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the
love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge — that you may
be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Ephesians 3:18-19 NIV
