WHO WE ARE AND WHO WE ARE BECOMING
LOVE IS THE UNSTOPPABLE FORCE
One significant repeated pattern in the Bible is the fact that God “calls us by name”—every single time.
God doesn’t address us by saying, unnamed “you” or “slave.”
We are not lost in the crowd.
Isaiah 43:1 records, “I have called you by name, you are mine.”
God tells us that we are His and that He calls us by name based on who we are and where we are in life. His calling for us is built on the reality that we are all unique beings, not one of us the same. Both the outcome of the calling and who we are and who we are becoming matter in this equation. We are not to be just slavish over the tasks God gives us.
For years I was lost in the tasks I was performing. It seemed to me that at the end of the day, I didn’t matter. My emotions and the deep desires of my soul didn’t matter.
“One of the deepest longings in the human heart is the desire to be loved for yourself alone…” captures John O’Donohue in Eternal Echoes.
If this is true (I say “if” but I’ve experienced this to be true in my journey), then this was the desperate void that my soul was crying out for. For years, I mainly operated out of an obedient posture of following Jesus. I was willing to go wherever and do whatever in order to “get the job done” of reaching all peoples with the gospel. To be honest, initially, it was out of guilt that I strongly felt that I needed to surrender and give up my life, including my “name,” all for Jesus, because I believed that was what Jesus required.
Later on, my motivation in following Jesus moved from guilt to obedience to the glory of God. The guilt phase didn’t last long, I must admit. As for the motivation of obedience, I mobilized others out of and toward this motivation. I myself functioned out of the motif that partial obedience was no obedience at all. I used to teach others by quoting Hudson Taylor, “If Jesus is not Lord of all, He is not Lord at all.”
Over time, the glory of God sounded significantly worthier than obedience. Even then, what I saw in myself was the familiar posture of “dying to myself” (which is not bad) and emphasizing that it is not about my glory but God’s glory (which is not wrong). Neither was bad nor wrong, but incomplete and fragmented and thus less than whole. What I began realizing was that under guilt, obedience, and the glory of God frameworks, I still did not matter. I was to die, surrender, and give up. There was no room for the discovery of who I am and who I am becoming.
In recent years, I have been operating out of love being the foundational framework for my being, identity, and work.
Isaiah 43:4 records, “Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you. . .” God calls us by name, redeems us, and protects us, because He loves us.
This love has at its origin the firm foundation that God created us and formed us (see Isaiah 43:1) and that God knows us more intimately than we can ever know ourselves.
In the gospels, Jesus sums up the entire Law and the Prophets by commanding us to, “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:34-40).
I am who I am because of God’s love. I am to do what I do because of God’s love. Loving God is the only right response, flowing out of who I am and who I am becoming. This act of loving God is identical to loving my neighbors (which is to love people or peoples who are very different from me as well as who I consider to be my enemies) and loving myself.
Ultimately, God doesn’t waste anything. He accomplishes His purpose both in the world and in us. Love is the unstoppable force both in causality and outcome.
Thomas Merton writes, “Can one say that by love the soul receives the very ‘form’ of God? In Saint Bernard’s language this form, this divine kindness, is the identity we were made for” (The Sign of Jonas, 276).
I am choosing to submit to this love. As a result, we obey because we love. We bring glory to God because we love. It is a win-win-win scenario, which only God can accomplish.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
What is your name? How are you operating out of who you are?