Living Boldly in a Fallen World
We are living in a fallen world; a world ravaged by sin; a world into which Jesus brings to our remembrance the distance we have fallen from our first love. Revelation 2:5 That love Jesus states in the form of a commandment. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul.” Matthew 22:37 To love God in such a complete way is impossible considering the fallen state in which we exist.
Therefore, to hasten to love one’s neighbor as one’s self before we come to a full understanding of what loving God means would be like putting the cart before the horse. Back in the years of our youth we would sing the song “Tell me why.” The conclusion the song draws is that because God made you, that’s why I love you. Drawing whatever conclusion you wish from the song, we exist and can love each other only because God first loved us. In fact it is the first and greatest commandment.. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. Deuteronomy 6:5. The Hebrews called this the schema, the law of a perfect God. This law had to be perfectly kept.
We live in a fallen world where we are all sinners, of whom Paul said he was chief (1 Timothy 1:15) It is impossible to keep the perfect law of God. Permit me to tell a story George Orwell tells that might help us to better understand this impossibility.
“A wasp was sucking jam from his plate. Orson Orwell cut the wasp in half. The wasp just kept sucking the sweet jam from the plate as it poured out the other end from his severed esophagus.”
Like the severed wasp, sucking the sweet juices of love that this world gives does not satisfy our souls longing. Our hearts and souls are restless until they rest in God. Gone is the myth that biological love in all its distorted and twisted forms is enough. Gone is the myth that by loving others, God will love me.
Love that satisfies the longing of our restless souls is born of God in us. The apostle John writes He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might [be born again and] live through him. 1 John 4:9 We are now talking about love as a Spirit. The Apostle Paul uses the expression “Spirit of God” to identify its source much in the same way as because God made you, that’s why I love you.
It is so important to come to a full realization that without this love we remain severed from God forever. Filled with this love, the world will do whatever it can to cut us off from the source. When God poured out this Spirit at Pentecost, Peter and John, filled with this Spirit of God, went about telling people salvation has come to their souls. Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” Acts 4:12
List in your mind the physical healings Jesus performed while here on earth. Then tell yourself “All those healings came about through the power God gave to the name Jesus.” What is more, though threated to be censored by the religious leaders of that time, Peter and John who had seen this Jesus rise from the dead healed a crippled man in His name and they boldly proclaimed the power in His Name.
If you are able, find the hymn, My life flows on in endless song. Sing it. Singing great hymns is a way of boldly freeing the soul.
