More than Keeping the Card Handy

Yesterday, we began breaking down unconditional love.  Unconditional love is one of the core values of BridgeWay and has been essential in creating a contagious culture.  However, yesterday we started to discuss how difficult that value is to embody.  So for the next few days, I am going to break down in detail what I shared briefly yesterday: Uncondtional Love is an Experience, an Orientation, an Encounter, a Way of Being, a Struggle. 

An Experience:  When you are playing Monopoly, everyone likes to keep a "Get Out of Jail Free Card" handy, just in case.  It means we get off free and don't have to pay a dime.  You never know when you might need that.  Unfortunately a lot of Christians treat salvation like a Hasbro Monopoly Card.  When we think of salvation, we often think solely in terms of exchange. - I did bad.  I deserved jail time (hell).  Jesus rolled the dice.  He paid the price.  He gave me the card.  Now I get off free. - Sound familiar.  If you've grown up in a protestant evangelical church, you've probably heard some version of this exchange.  So our appreciation for what the Story of God reveals in Jesus can be boiled down to God dealing with the guilt I have over the my sin.  Is that really it?

I'm sorry, I can't believe that's it.  I really tend to believe that something bigger is happening here.  I believe that what salvation restores is a relationship and doesn't simply offer a convenient card.  According to the story of God, relationships are restored through the actions of love.  In the case of humanity and God, the relationship is restored through the Self-Giving Holy Love of God.  God gives himself in the person of Jesus as an act of superabundant love, a love that knows no boundaries or limits.  It is a love that springs from a resevoir that never runs out.  It is a love that plumbs the depth of human brokenness and sin, a love that confronts the darkest evil and most vehemently rebellious.  It is love that isn't easily deterred.  It is love that reaches down into the muck and mire of this world, risks all measure of pollution, perversion, and pain in hopes to reclaim what we lost...us.

The call to unconditional love begins at the point of experiencing that unconditional love.  When the full power of God's passion for us, the full weight of His patience, the full grit of His tenacity meets us head on, the journey begins.  In that moment we are undone.  We are unraveled.  How is it that the One who is Holy Love, whose identity is pure love would rescue a sinner such as I.  Our "who is man that you are mindful of us?" is eclipsed by God's response "you are mine, I love you and would do anything for you."  This love overwhelms, overshadows our shame and guilt.  It encompasses, wrapping us in a shroud of God's intimate desire to know us and be known by us.  It is a love that pierces through our most fortified resistance and peers into the darkest corners of our lives.  It is a love that dismantles our insecurities.  The story of God is NOT about a Hasbro Monopoly card transaction.  It is about a love affair.

It is here that the response to live by unconditional love begins. 

 Ephesians 3:14-20 (The Message)
My response is to get down on my knees before the Father, this magnificent Father who parcels out all heaven and earth. I ask him to strengthen you by his Spirit—not a brute strength but a glorious inner strength—that Christ will live in you as you open the door and invite him in. And I ask him that with both feet planted firmly on love, you’ll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.
God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.