Infinity and Beyond!
And
we have known and believed the love God hath to us. 1 John 4:16
To know and to believe something to
be true or real is not the same thing. The Apostle John, writing about the love
of God, qualified it as something he both knew and believed.
“Jesus loves me this I know.” Why?
How? “For the Bible tells me so.”
This simple song is a profound statement of truth.
Throughout the Bible God’s own words and demonstrations of His love are
documented as reminders of how much He cares. We’ve heard and read “God loves
you” over and over, but do we really believe it?
To know and to experience are two
different actions. Author E. W. Kenyon wrote about “sense knowledge evidence”
which is often mistaken for faith. We “believe” someone loves us because we see
their actions, hear their words and feel their affectionate touch. When what we
sense no longer lines up with our definition of love, the validity of the
relationship comes into doubt. Our judgment is based solely on experiences in
the natural, sensual realm. Disappointment and discouragement can result from using
sense knowledge evidence to confirm God’s love for us.
E. W. Kenyon also warned about the
danger of substituting “mental assent” for real belief. Mentally assenting to
something is agreeing with it but not necessarily believing it to be true. We
read a passage from the Bible and, because it is written there, we agree in
principle that it’s true. Unless we put what we’ve read into practice, we
really don’t believe it. Faith requires action, not just agreement. It’s easy
to amass a storehouse of head knowledge without any practical application. Ultimately
sense knowledge evidence and mental assent will fail us when difficulties
arise.
A deep, personal relationship with
God is built on intimacy not information. Interactions with God, like those
with people, open the door for disappointments. God never fails nor does He
make mistakes. He steadfastly refuses to confine Himself in boxes based upon
our comfortable proportions. He systematically disrupts any attempts to reduce
Him to a formula guaranteeing success. His idea of neat and tidy can be chaotic
and messy to us; He colors outside the lines. He won’t be relegated to the
sidelines saddled with the responsibility of smoothing out the rough spots of
life and keeping us appeased. His plans and designs for our life outstrip our
wildest imaginations. For these to succeed, we need to truly believe He loves
us, not just know about it in theory.
Jesus and John were very close
friends. The bulk of John’s life as a Christian, however, was spent without the
physical contact with the Lord he’d once experienced. Like the majority of the
readers of his letter, John had to know and believe something He couldn’t see. He’d
have never endured the hardships and persecutions he suffered if God’s love was
only a cute idea or some pipe dream.
Experiencing God's love will stabilize our
lives in ways that sense knowledge evidence and mental assent never will. The
good news, God desires a deep, intimate, personal relationship with each and
every one of us. His love provides the fuel to take us past the confines of our
small thinking and into His wildest dreams…“Infinity and Beyond!”
No comments:
Post a Comment