Love Supreme

Reading for me can be frustrating because I often read more than one book at a time. I've read a few books cover to cover but mostly, I just sift through a book's different sections, take in the ideas that interest me and when I'm satisfied, I move on. Knowing my erratic reading habits, I wasn't very enthusiastic when someone this past weekend handed me a book she thought I should read. It was a book on the Holy Trinity that I hadn't read and come to think of it, it would be the first I've ever read about the triune God of the Bible. With some down time later that day, I decided I would flip through it. It's an easy read, the whole book containing just 130 pages. It's called Delighting in the Trinity - An Introduction to the Christian Faith by Michael Reeves and I'm going to buy it for myself. It's one of those books every Christian should own and read through often just to reset themselves in the Faith.

The Christian apologist, Ravi Zacharias, once called love "the supreme ethic". Whether he realized it at the time (and I'm sure he did), he was citing the great battle of not just our time but of the ages. The Bible says God is love. Jesus said the greatest commandment was to love God with all that is in us and the second greatest commandment for us is to love one another. Since we are created in God's image, we humans are created to love...and everybody, even the worst of our species, loves. It's true. Hypocrites, criminals and terrorists all have the capacity for love and act upon it. If it is the supreme ethic and we are created in the image of the supreme Being, then we are born to love. As we sit in the highest position of the created order, we are unique among beings. It is, at once, our greatest blessing and our greatest curse because though we love, we don't love as we ought, and that's where things go wrong.

From the book: "What, then, went wrong? It was not that Adam and Eve stopped loving. They were created as lovers in the image of God and they could not undo that. Instead, their love turned. When the apostle Paul writes of sinners, he describes them as 'lovers of themselves, lovers of money...lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God'. Lovers we remain, but twisted, our love misdirected and perverted. Created to love God, we turn to loving ourselves and anything but God. And this is just what we see in the original sin of Adam and Eve. Eve takes and eats the forbidden fruit because a love for herself - gaining wisdom for herself - has overcome any love she might have had for God." This was the same sin that an angel named Lucifer committed - a love of himself rather than a primary love of God. See Ezekiel 28:17.

Self love is inordinate. It is pride and pride is the root of all sin. How different the love embodied in Jesus was. He loved His Father completely and would do nothing to violate His will, even when it meant dying on a Roman cross to fulfill His Father's will that sinful people be redeemed. He rebuked the tempter in the wilderness when that father of lies tried to coax Him into the imitation love that he embraced. Augustine hit the mark when he declared, "You have made us for Yourself, oh God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You."

The Bible says, "God is love", and truly He is. But in order for God to be love, He must be in a relationship because He cannot be one Being loving Himself. No, God is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, one God in a perfect love relationship within three distinct Persons. It is to this divine relationship we are invited to partake. It is nothing less than this. After His resurrection Jesus said to Mary Magdalene, "Go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'" That is the proof, the rock-solid word of the Man who demonstrated perfectly what we were created to be like and made it possible for us to enter that reality. That is the Gospel.

A Sister Act

In this month's edition of U.S. Catholic magazine, Father Bryan Massingale of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee related the story of his sister's defection from the Catholic Church to become a Baptist. To his credit, he attended her second baptism and celebrated with her over her new church home. Of course, there is some personal collateral damage. Father Bryan and his sister and their other siblings come from a devout Catholic family. And his sister was no Catholic-in-name-only. She was devout all through her youth and into adulthood. The reason she gave for leaving Roman Catholicism was that her spiritual needs were not being met. Naturally, this disturbed her brother, the father, not just because this is his sister saying these things, but because many others are as well. In fact, Father Bryan pointed out that former Catholics are the fastest growing and second largest Christian group in America, a denomination all its own. He ended his article with a plea for his own church to take the necessary steps to stop the hemorrhaging.

It should be pointed out that any church sect or denomination can fail to meet a person's spiritual needs. By the way, it's not just the Catholic churches that are losing members. Many of the mainline Protestant denominations are as well. People are opting for no church affiliation. Then there are the unsaved in churches everywhere. There are Protestants-in-name-only just like there are Catholics-in-name-only who like to control things in the church and dull the environment for the spiritually hungry with their idols. While the idols are many, one of the biggest ones, next to the god of "self", is religiosity. Religion can obscure the important matters of the Faith such as one's relationship with Christ. The answer to this problem is simple enough. Read the Gospels and accept the teachings of Jesus at face value. Deny your selfish desires and take up your cross and follow Him every day. Pray for wisdom and discernment from God and understand that only God is righteous and righteousness comes only from Him. If you have any righteousness in you, it's God's, not yours. And it's only God's righteousness, namely Jesus, in you that can save you.

As a one-time Catholic, I know about both sides. My wife and I raised our kids in an evangelical church and sent them to a Catholic high school. Why? To teach them Reformed theology but also to teach them what I call "the Catholic Ethic", i.e. compassion and acts of service. Catholics have a tremendous capacity for these. Sure, many Protestants do as well but Catholics do it very well. It's in their DNA; there's an intelligent and articulate bearing to their compassion. They empathize easily and communicate that empathy with great finesse. What Protestants do better is teaching their theology. They care about the quality of their preaching and love to learn. They want their sermons longer and "meatier" than a Roman Catholic homily. They aren't afraid to explore the great truths of Christianity and see very clearly the primacy and centrality of Jesus Christ in all of life. There are problems with both sets of gifts, however. What good is it to plumb the great depths of knowledge if you overlook your brother and sister in need? By the same token, it's just as silly to be nice to everyone while minimizing central teachings of the Faith and losing track by getting caught up in extra-biblical religiosity.

Pride is the greatest of all sins we are told and it has many faces. Both sides need to recognize their own pride and turn from it. If we aren't childlike, says Jesus, i.e. possessing a childlike faith in His Father, we will never enter His Kingdom and it won't matter if we're Catholic or Protestant.