“I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Brokenness was never supposed to be the state of things. When God designed the world and everything in it, to a certain extent it all reflected His image. It was all good. All of it. So good. As Moses describes God creating one thing after another, you can almost hear Him whistling while He worked He was so tickled at the goodness of it all. It’s like you felt when you were working on a big project and every single detail was falling exactly into place only on a much, much grander scale. It was all so good. And then it wasn’t. But brokenness was never supposed to be the state of things.
In this final installment in our series, Hard to Love, we land with both feet on the biggest and most consequential truth there is: God loves you. Read on and marvel with me at how great our God is that though we didn’t want Him, He loved us still. Let this love fill you to a fullness you’ve never known before and pour out of you onto the people around you…even the ones who are hard to love.
You Are Loved
Have you ever watched somebody get something they didn’t deserve? How’d you feel about that? Did it inspire you? Did it sicken you? Were you pretty well ambivalent about it? I would guess that most of us, depending on the exact details, would tend toward feeling inspired by such a story. This becomes especially true when the person goes on to live up to the expectations of the gift. Perhaps the most classic example of this is from the beloved story by Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, which Lisa and I actually got to see on stage back at the beginning of the month. It was absolutely amazing. The hero of the story, Jean Valjean, is set down the path of righteousness he walks all the way to the end of his life by the wildly unmerited gift of a Catholic priest. The 2012 film adaptation starring Hugh Jackman captures this scene really well. Take a look.
“The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: ‘Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because their evil has come up before me.’ Jonah got up to flee to Tarshish from the Lord’s presence. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. He paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the Lord’s presence.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Have you ever not wanted to do something God asked you to do, reluctantly did it, and then got mad when God followed through on what He said? If so, Jonah is the book for you. We are now on to book number five on our journey through the Minor Prophets, and of all the books we have or will yet look at together, Jonah is the one that stands out from all the rest. Strange as it is, though, it wrestles with some really big issues. Stay tuned for the next few days as we work through this one. There will be something for just about everyone along the way.
“For the day of the Lord is near, against all the nations. As you have done, it will be done to you; what you deserve will return on your own head.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Because it occupies such a big place in the halls of pop culture, I’m going to assume you’ve heard of the principle of karma. The basic idea of this Buddhist teaching is that whatever we do in this life will eventually be visited back upon us. If we do good things, then good things will happen to us. If we do bad things, then bad things will happen to us. Somehow, the universe will balance the scales of justice. Now, as theological concept, karma is a mess that Christians cannot endorse in any way. The basic intuition behind it that has been common across all human cultures and religions that justice will eventually be done, however, is not only one we can encourage, we see it right here in the Scriptures. Let’s talk about this for just a minute.
Knowing we’re supposed to love the hard to love people in our lives, even knowing the theological reasons for that, is one thing. Actually seeing it in practice is something entirely different. This past Sunday as we continued in our series, Hard to Love, we took a look at a remarkable story of the kind of transformation that can take place when we let love loose into our hard to love situations. You don’t want to miss this.
Love’s Transformation
Let me start
this morning with a tough question. In
fact, I want you to close your eyes in order to answer this one. How would you respond if your child was murdered? That’s an emotional question, I know, so go
ahead and feel that emotion for a minute.
Let me show you a picture. This
is a picture of Mary Johnson and her son.
In 1993 Mary’s son, Laramiun Byrd, was 20 years old. One night he went to a party with some
friends. As perhaps many young men are
wont to do he did a little bit of fronting at the party to the benefit of his
ego and his image in front of his friends.
Now, this might not be such a big deal on a normal night, but this
particular party was also attended by a 16-year-old young man named O’Shea
Israel. O’Shea took up Laramium’s
challenge and did a bit of fronting of his own.
After all, he couldn’t be made to look bad in front of his own friends. Things digressed from there and the next
morning Mary got a call asking if Laramiun had come home the night before. He hadn’t.
Not long after some officers arrived to let her know that he had been
murdered at the party. In an
instant—perhaps just as you imagined—her world completely fell apart.
The Nexus 