Why Am I Obsessed With One Topic - God's Love?

“I understand the love of God and thank Him for it, but that topic seems to be the only thing you talk about these days” someone recently wrote. “ There are other important things to know than just that. Why are you obsessed with this topic?”

It’s a fair question. If you’ll indulge me, I want to give a short background of my ministry in answering that question. Maybe by explaining where I’ve come from, it will be easier to understand where I am at this point in my life and ministry.

I began preaching when I was 16 years old. My first sermon was on “Youth Sunday” in my church. Shortly after that, I started preaching anywhere I could – at other churches, standing on the trunk of my car in the parking lot of the bowling alley, standing on the sidewalk outside the theater where people were waiting to go in, wherever I could find a spot where people were standing still, I’d preach. I became a senior pastor at 19 and no young pastor could have been more zealous.

I’m 56 now. That’s forty years. For those first twenty years, I was very sincere and our Father blessed the ministry he had given me through His grace. My heart was always in the right place. However, little by little my head began to move in the wrong direction. In other words, I began to think wrongly about ministry and about life in general.

I gradually became more and more convinced that my role was to teach people how they should live. So that’s what I did. Every week, my sermons would be filled with instruction, admonition and encouragement about what the listeners needed to do to be more pleasing to God. One week, I may talk about the importance of Bible study. The next week it might be prayer. Evangelism was a topic I repeated often. The topics varied but the common denominator in every sermon was the call to “rededicate yourself to Jesus Christ today” and try to do better.

If you’ve read my first book, Grace Walk, you know how what I preached didn’t even work for me. My secret thoughts were that I simply needed to do a better job of practicing what I preached.

Then in 1990, my world came crashing down. The feelings of success I had felt were snatched out from under me when I became senior pastor of a dying church. I thought it would turn around under my leadership, but it didn’t. It kept dwindling right out from under me. It was through that experience that our Gracious God brought me to a place of brokenness and to the place where I learned my identity in Christ.

I became consumed with the truth of who we are in Christ and for the past twenty years have been proclaiming that message. To this very day, nothing excites me more than to see the light of revelation come on in people’s lives as they come to realize their union with God. I will forever preach this message.

So, the first twenty years of ministry were spent telling people who they ought to be and could be if they would do the right things. The last twenty years have been spent telling people who they are in Christ and what it means to walk in grace.

Now, at 56 I embark upon the next twenty-year leg of the journey. While I have no intention of backing down on telling people who they are, I have experienced in my own
life a growing awareness that our God is moving me deeper into the desire to tell people who He is.

For years, I understood God the Father to be different from the Son in some ways. I know it sounds crazy, but I thought the Father was the “just” member of the Trinity who needed to have the books balanced when it comes to sin. In my mind, there was a debt that put mankind “in the red” on his books and in order to balance the record, somebody had to make a deposit – a big deposit, because the wages of sin is death.

In my thinking, Jesus was the “good guy” who wanted to make it right between God and us so He agreed to die in our place. God would punish Him so that His justice would be satisfied. Jesus willingly died, taking God’s anger over my sin upon Himself. I gave lip service to the idea that God loved me enough to pour out His anger on Jesus so that He wouldn’t have to pour it out on me, but for a long time I couldn’t help but think that it didn’t make sense that the anger He didn’t want to pour on me, He didn’t seem to mind pouring out on His son.

About six years ago, I began to be exposed to the idea that the “penal substitution theory” of the cross, which is the idea I’ve just described – Jesus being punished (penal) in my place (substitution) wasn’t the only way to understand what happened at the cross. I began to realize that the cross wasn’t a penal substitution, but rather a precious solution that was brought about by the Father, Son and Spirit, who all equally love humanity.

As I began to understand the communal relationship of love between the Father, Son and Spirit, I started to see that the idea that “God is love” isn’t incidental to any discussion of God. It is monumental. In fact, it is fundamental to having a clear view of who He is.

As I’ve grown in my understanding of this God of Love and His eternal intent to wrap His arms around all of humanity, it has transformed me in almost every way possible. It has changed how I see Him. It has changed how I see others. It has changed how I see the purpose of ministry.

To explain why I am obsessed with the love of God today would be like trying to describe why fish in the ocean are obsessed with water. It’s because I’ve come to see that the love of God is the environment in which we all live, because God is love and “in Him we live and move and have our being.” (Remember that Paul wasn’t talking to believers when he made that statement on Mars Hill.)

By the finished work of the cross, our God was reconciling the world to Himself. We are all included in what He did there. The “REALITY” of the cross is, “It is finished.” However, the “reality” of many in the church is that “it’s not really finished until I say so by my profession of faith.” What Jesus did doesn’t become real when we believe it. We believe it because it is real. Jesus did what He did and that’s true whether we believe it or not.

Does this mean everybody is a Christian? No, it does not. A Christian is a person who through faith has personally experienced the reality of what He accomplished on the cross. He is one who lives in the reality of resurrection life. An unbeliever is one who is not personally experiencing the benefits of the cross even though the reality is equally as true for him. Instead, he is living under a lie – the same lie that befell Adam in the Garden of Eden.

Hebrews 4:2 explains it this way: “For indeed we have had good news preached to us, just as they also; but the word they heard did not profit them, because it was not united by faith in the those who heard.”

The “good news” is the same good news for everybody. But, until a person believes it, he will not personally benefit from it. The gospel we declare is the finished work of Jesus Christ. We aren’t to tell unbelievers what Jesus will do for them. The good news is in telling them what He already has done for them. We gladly tell them “God was in Christ reconciling (you) to Himself, not counting (your) trespasses against (you)!” Then we appeal to them, “Be reconciled to God!” In other words, “Believe it! God fully accepts you so accept Him and start living out of REALITY instead of from the delusion you’re stumbling around in right now!” (See 2 Corinthians 5:19-20)

This is the message of the love of God. It’s not a potential gospel of what He will do for the unbeliever if that person will first cast their vote for Him. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8) It is the pure gospel of what our God has already done for us before we could offer so much as a grunt in return. It is the announcement of “good news of great joy which will be for all the people.”

Our God has demonstrated His love for humanity by absorbing the sins of the world into His (the Son’s) body on the cross. He offered Himself by the power of the eternal Spirit (see Hebrews 9:14) and has shouted in victory “It IS FINISHED!”

This Triune rescue mission was a success! He came to “put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself” (Heb 9:26) and He succeeded. Ask Him to take away your sins and He will say, “I already did!”

I plan to spend the rest of my life telling people about the love of the Father, expressed through the Son in the power of the Spirit. If I get to heaven and have to apologize for overstating His love, I’ll readily do so. I’d rather make that mistake than have to apologize for understating His love. (The fact is that I don’t foresee any necessary apologizing in this area.)

Will you join me in this exciting ministry? I don’t have all the answers to objections and questions, but I encourage you to not to wait until you have all the answers to people’s objections and questions about the love of God before you join this grace revolution. We know The Answer and He will guide us as we move forward in expanding His kingdom on the earth.

Love is our motivation. Love is our methodology. Love is our message. Let’s just love. How is it possible to “miss it” if that is how we live our lives???