I was reminded recently by a couple I know, that I had given her away (in proxy for her father, who was on the other side of the World). “Oh”, I joked “Its all my fault!” Well this is what Adam said to God when he was confronted with his sin. Adam's opening response was “the woman You gave me … ” - in other words its the woman's fault, and its Your fault too God, for giving her to me!
I told last day of one who told me “I did not realize how selfish I am until I got married”. And I know this couple well enough to know that it really is two sided. This couple is moving in the right direction for life long fulfillment in their relationship (James 5:16).
I read somewhere that there is no place other than marriage which is guaranteed to produce more anger. We are all aware of the phrase “the honeymoon is over” and we do not need to be told what it means. When a relationship is new and exciting we have such high hopes for it, or to put it anther way, we have such high expectations. We may not say this to ourselves in words, but our hope/expectation many times is that 'this one is going to meet all my needs'. And for a while they do, until “the honeymoon is over”. Then what will we do, will we throw this relationship away too?
In the process of discovering who we are, we may need to go through the school of hard knocks in our relationship choices, in particular when they fail. Perhaps the most important thing is that we learn from these experiences. I have said elsewhere that those who go through broken relationships tend to fall into two categories, those who learn a great deal from the break up, and those who learn nothing, remaining stuck in blame and bitterness and anger!
The second group may think they have learned something (i.e. Women are %$#%%..., or men are %%#$#….). What I am talking about is learning how much we ourselves have contributed to the problem and becoming willing to do something about it. Except when one of the parties is God, there are always faults on both sides. In particular no matter who started it, we all have wrong responses to wrong responses. When there are problems, we both need to take responsibility for what has gone wrong, and to play our part in doing what needs to be done to make it work.
There is lots of advice out there about what to do. Let's look at one particular secular insight. The one I am thinking of is the idea that surrounds the buzz phrase “love deficit,” where we talk about having “empty love tanks”. If we are both demanding more that the other one is willing/able to give because of our love deficits (wounds, hurts etc.), how are we ever going to make things work? And the longer these things go the more wounding it becomes!
The solution advocated by the behavioural model, is to work at performing loving acts for each other. And who would say that this is wrong? After all we are commanded to love one another in word and deed. On the other hand, if you have been there, you will know that many times this is an uphill battle, especially when the wounds and the hurt and the sense of betrayal goes deep. What do you do when love has died, what can anyone do? Well, we need to turn to the God of resurrection.
What we need to do in this and in many other situations is to tap into the resources of heaven. In the case we are discussing, we need God to fill up our love deficits, and to resurrect love. God is after all the origin of all love, for “we love because He first loved us” (1 John4:19 NIV). What this is saying is that our ability to love at all comes from God as a response to His love for us. So the ability to have love rekindled is found in His embrace. With some situations this is the only thing that will save the relationship, in particular when it has gone on for too long, and/or there is too much hurt, too much damage and no more energy, or even desire.
We do have a part to play (our help is three pronged – Bible help, self help and God's help), but in the end when we are in relationship with God, it does not all depend on us. In Christ there is always hope. When with man it is impossible then “with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). We can of course both be Christians and fail to tap into God's resources. It has to do with being filled with the fullness of God (which we are in fact commanded to be). There is an illustration that I find helpful.
Imagine this triangle with God at the top (you would have to know that I am a mathematician), and you and your partner at the other two corners. The sides represent our relationships. The bottom side represents your relationship with your partner the other two sides your individual relationships with God. This is not a fixed triangle, the corners can (and do) move. As we draw closer to God, moving up the “arms” of the triangle, we automatically move closer to each other. As as we draw apart from each other, we usually also move further away from God. We also move apart from each if one of the parties moves closer to God, but the other one does not. This is one of the reason we are told not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers (2 Corinthians 6:14).
The point though, is that God is Love, and as we move closer to Him, He moves closer to us and pours His love into our hearts (James 4:8, Romans 5:5). Ideally we are to let His love flow through us into each other, and into this wicked and hurting World. When we are full of His strength and love and Grace and mercy and hope and peace, we have something the World does not have, and we are enabled to live the life He calls us to live.
Sounds good, it even sounds easy right? Not! It is the solution, but its not easy. You see we cannot be full of God (or love or peace or joy or hope or anything else) and at the same time be full of self, or hate or bitterness or revenge or pride, or self righteousness or be demanding our rights at the expense of the other. The Scripture describes these things as the “flesh” or as the NIV translates that word the “sinful nature”. What I am saying is that “self” pushes all these things out. But even coming to the place where we can acknowledge that we are full of self is difficult.
This brings us full circle back to what we were talking about earlier that is to come to the knife edge between debilitating guilt and indifference (or blindness, or presumption) to our sin. In this place we know we need help and become humble enough to ask for, and hence receive, it. In this place we are positioned to receive His enabling grace to help in such times of need (Hebrews 4:16). The theological word for this is repentance. It is about coming to the end of ourselves, acknowledging and turning from our sin and receive His forgiveness and Grace and mercy, His hope and joy and peace etc. In this place, there is the awareness that in many things we all fail, and this allows us to deal more gently and empathetical with each other, knowing we are both the same, that there is no real difference between us (Romans 3:23).
And our salvation, our rescue has to do with learning to live in this place. This is the secret to walking in the Spirit, in fact to living the Christian life. It starts with our agreement with God of our predicament, and our acceptance of His solution (the good news or Gospel).
There is a lot of resistance to doing this, both in the world and in our own selves. There is a sort of catch 22 here, because we can't receive the good news if we don't know the bad news, and we can't receive the bad news because we don't know the good news that we can be rescued. So the default is to continue jus with what we have “me and only me,” and none of the resources of God.
Lets unpack this a little. It seems to work like this: we resist the good news because we don't see the need, or we may not even know about it, or it may not have not been presented it in a way we were able to hear. Or it may seem just too good to be true. It may not even make any sense to us, and we may have been hardened against it by guilt trips that have been laid on us, or by the hypocrisy of some who call themselves Christian. On the other hand many times we are in denial about the bad news, which is that without Him we are totally lost. We may be in denial about the bad news because we want all our own way, or on the other hand, because it is Pandora's box. We know at least subconsciously that the problems are so deep they are unfixable. If you doubt this ask yourself if you like yourself, and if not why not? One of the good things about walking with God is that you do get to get to like yourself.
And the bad new is indeed bad. There are a lot of inconvenient truths out there and in here (in our “self life”). And they are indeed unfixable by us, but not by God. To say it again “With God all things are possible”. Life's difficulties are crossroads, in each of them we are invited to draw close to Him and in cooperation with Him bring in the Kingdom which always brings His solution. But He will not do it without our cooperation.
The second part of the title of today's post is “Positioning for restoration. So what and where it this place. To give an analogy, it is like to come to the place where like a child in a fully functional family, we can receive correction without being crushed. Part of the problem here, is that most of us are too wounded, or too proud or too self centered to admit or even see that in many things we all need to be corrected (James 3:2). Or we are too insecure, have had too much rejection in our lives to be able to hear about our faults. And part of this is because we cannot distinguish between the other persons rejection of our behaviour and rejection of our very selves. And part of this is more often than not, the person criticizing us does not make that distinction themselves. Then there is the way it it done. We spoke earlier about speaking the truth in love. But when things get bad the truth may well have been spoken, but not in love, but rather in anger and frustration or even hate.
Nevertheless, God has given us to each other warts (besetting faults) and all. Without exception, we come to each other as raw unpolished diamonds with (often) very rough edges. There is a war going on for our souls. The Evil one, wants to use these raw edges to destroy us. The Lord wants to use them to polish us into the beautiful individual diamonds He purposed before the foundations of the World that we should be (Proverbs 27:17).
To describe this place of being positioned for restoration in Biblical terms, is to say that we need to to meet Him and each other at the foot of the cross. It is in the shadow and the perspective of the cross where we see and understand all that He has done for us. It is here where we see that there is indeed no difference between us, for indeed all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). It is here, in the light of His sacrifice, and of all the pain He was willing to suffer for you and I, that our own relationship pain is put into perspective; where we stop demanding our rights, and start to follow His example of respectful loving giving. It is here where we start to become willing to see, and take responsibility for, our own part in it all. Indeed it is probably only here, under His tender love and care and unconditional acceptance, that we receive enough from Him that we become secure enough to start to see where we have failed, where we have been selfish and self centered; where we take our eyes off “me” and where with the hymn writer we sing of being “ransomed, healed, restored forgiven” and we declare “who like me His praise should sing”.
At the foot of the cross, we start to see just how much we have needed to be forgiven, and to return over and over to Him for restoration and healing and love and joy and forgiveness and acceptance. When we come to this place and stay there, it becomes unthinkable that we should not in return forgive our partners and be willing to be fully restored to each other. It is here that we see that He has indeed “broken down the dividing walls between us” (Ephesians 2:4), and it is here where we start to cooperate with Him in His primary purpose that in the fullness of time He would unite all things in Him (Ephesians 1:10).
Jesus told us “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me” (Luke 9:23). When we do this we are indeed being positioned for restoration. Are you willing to follow Him in this way, am I? It is the only way to fly! We need His help. More to come.
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