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Jesus wrapped up a parable about a scheming and dishonest business manager by saying, “No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” [Luke 16]
This is what we call a “hard saying” of Jesus! It’s not especially hard to understand, of course. It’s just hard to swallow! We all know that money—in its practical application—is just a means for exchanging goods and services. We need it to make life work: to pay the rent or mortgage, to buy groceries, to pay for clothing, furniture—in short, we need it to do almost anything and everything. We earn it and we spend it without ever “serving” or “loving” it . . . right?
Yet listen to the response of those in the audience: “The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all these things and they ridiculed him.”
Before moving on we should at least ask: did the Pharisees have a point in reacting to Jesus? And what of the label, “lovers of money”? I don’t know that I’ve ever met someone who loves money. Who, for instance, ever takes money to bed with them? Or collects sacks of it to pour out and enjoy whenever time allows? The real challenge of life is to learn how to live with too little money! And the Pharisees were a religiously focused group—devoted to Scripture studies, solid doctrine, and strong traditions. How could they, of all people, be lovers of money?
What Jesus said to them next is even more remarkable: “You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God.”
As we reflect on this exchange we’re left with a number of issues to ponder. Among them: why and how did the Pharisees ridicule Jesus? And, on Christ’s side, how broadly did his point about “what is exalted among men” apply? Was it just to that setting, or was it broader? Does God view everything humans value as “an abomination”? Or just the narrow set of issues related to the “love” of money?
No full answer can be offered, but one reality stands out. Just prior to his clash with the Pharisees Jesus spoke of a financial officer who was being investigated for malfeasance. Before being fired the man’s shrewd response was to reduce any outstanding charges owed to his employer in order to curry favor with those who owed the payments—thus setting up a new future for himself. Jesus then made his point by offering a contrast: in life there will always be successful schemers; and, alternatively, there are also those who seek and gain “true riches”. Which sort of person would each of the parable-listeners represent? The Pharisees who ridiculed Jesus had exposed their own standing!
The point Jesus was making was ultimately all about relationships! The shrewd financial officer was strictly utilitarian in his activities—his personal security was at stake! It was a case of self-love, making arrangements with other shrewd managers (those he hoped would later hire him—even when they knew that their benefit from him was illegal). Jesus was merely pointing out the “birds of a feather flock together” reality of life. The ridicule of the Pharisees almost certainly had to do with their own “feathers”.
I can imagine them mocking him: “Having a plan for success is the way the world works, Jesus!” They would have been dismissive, I’m sure: “and if you don’t get it you’re clueless!” Jesus, after all, had never been formally educated, nor had he ever owned a home, nor did he have the right connections he needed to succeed! He certainly had no prospect of being invited to join the Sanhedrin unless he learned a lesson or two about how life really works!
So what are the “true riches”? In the bipolarity of his “two masters” statement, Jesus made it clear: God was the alternate choice. The riches of relationship with God, and with his Son, were presented to the listening Pharisees as an option.
But they had other values. Did they love money? Yes, of course, just as Jesus said they did. Not the “cash” itself, but the trajectory of companionship it represented. Money is, indeed, just a means to exchange goods and services with others who have money as well as goods and services to offer. But those relations represent an idolatrous focus of the heart: representing a collective devotion to personal security, pleasure, and prestige. And not a devotion to God.
But what about the range and weight of what Jesus said about “what is exalted among men” being an “abomination” to God? The answer comes into focus when we realize God’s eternal Triune communion existed before the creation. Before there was an earth, or stars, or sun and moon, and houses, and cars, and money, God was sharing a relationship of mutual love and devotion. The glory of God is found in his love, offered freely: as in the glory of God’s purpose to send his Son—the “Word”—to join humanity and to die so that we can gain access to God’s eternal glory. This is what God loves. But to serve and worship the creation rather than the Creator—that is an absolute abomination, as Paul observed in Romans 1.
So Jesus was representing two trajectories. One leads to a fading glory, as Jesus explained in the parable: “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.” Those dwellings are well away from God, of course.
Or, alternatively, to become fast friends of God—as those who love him and all he represents. So that heaven will hardly be noticed as anything different than what this life is about: our relations of love for God and neighbor. And then, in entering eternity itself, nothing but our setting will change.
“I can speak in the tongues of men and of angels . . . .”
Yes, fine. Do that.
But never think it can be a stand-in for what really matters!
“And I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and I have all faith, so as to remove mountains . . . .”
Oh my, that’s much more spiritual power and cognitive range than most of us have or can ever offer! Those powers and insights place you among the most extraordinary people of faith who have ever lived! Do that! Go for it!
But if that’s all you have, be careful not to mistake it for a true and fruitful spirituality.
“I give away all I have, and I’m prepared to deliver up my body to be burned . . . .”
What wonderful, utterly selfless expressions of devotion! Which person out of 10,000 will ever be strong enough and bold enough to be so self-sacrificial! By all means, seek to be such a person!
But please remember that it will be utterly empty and bell-clanging self-promotion if done apart from the motivation God himself cultivates in us.
These startling thoughts are what Paul wrote to the Corinthian Christians [1 Corinthians 13]. He faced the challenge of dealing with a young church that was all show and no potency. It was a church that loved eloquent speakers. Indeed, it seems that some of them merely put up with Paul. They saw him as inferior to the brilliant Apollos whose oratory was captivating compared to Paul’s blunt summaries and simple fixation on the cross.
Indeed, the Corinthians had keen theological tastes: they loved to hear the best and brightest thinkers—those alert to the latest insights from nearby Athens. And they were a church with the benefit of a strong Bible heritage—including many former members of the impressive synagogue of Corinth—who were able to offer strong expositions of the Scriptures.
But Paul was not impressed. In fact, his statements must have stunned his readers. He dismissed what they loved most: more power, more knowledge, more ascetic self-control and more impressive activism than others achieved. These were capacities and values admired by all! Yet Paul was not only unimpressed, he confronted them for being “people of the flesh . . . infants in Christ” [1 Cor 3:1].
What, according to Paul, was their problem?
The answer was blunt and basic: they lacked love!
Yet they “loved” of course: they loved position, prestige, presence, placement, power, money, and anyone who loved them! All such comfortable, agreeable loves allowed for self confidence to grow and their personal potential to prosper. But by Paul’s measure of authentic, Christ-like love their growing capacities of intellect and training; their ability to gain a “faith” that could “move mountains”; their ability to achieve dramatic spiritual discipline . . . all these things were useless without a selfless love for others!
So here is the punchline for our own day: have we—the present church—learned what the early Corinthians had missed? Hopefully so! We at least know better by now. Many weddings, for instance, are launched with a nod to Paul’s descriptive summary of love in this chapter:
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
His summary offers a floodlight in a dark world! And we become lights in a dark world, at least to the degree that we embrace what the Spirit offers us through Paul’s words. Our knowledge, our powers of faith, our disciplines, are all a basis for blessing others as we grow in our love for both our Lord and for our neighbors whom Christ brings to us to be loved.
Yet is there not still an immaturity in all of us? A desire to have a spirituality that impresses others? A tendency to treat our faith as a performance meant for friends to see? An ambition for an emerging status that others will appreciate and applaud?
I, for one, still struggle with this “flesh.” So do most others I know. On the other hand I know what it is to be loved well and deeply. Yet in my own experience such love is not very common. Not as common as one would expect, given all the strong Christians to be found in our day: strong and active believers who are doing some impressive mountain-moving projects!
Where did that love go . . . or how did it fail to grow up in us in the first place? Do our efforts to achieve great goals get in the way of caring? I, again, am all too slow to follow the distinct impulses I have to care for others, impulses that come to heart by the Spirit’s moving in me. It takes too much time and emotional energy.
Paul more than almost anyone understood that love is expensive. Yet he loved well and stubbornly. Why? Because authentic love is always expansive; birthed by a deep devotion to others that pours through us from God’s own heart. Such love is the touchstone of our lively relationship with the God who, in his Triune communion, “is love.”
So we will do well to listen to Paul’s ultimate priority with open hearts as he concluded his invitation to the Corinthians . . . and to us: “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
The LORD is my shepherd, so I don’t lack anything.
I learned that from David ben Jesse—the biblical King David—who was called a man after God’s own heart.
He was called that by God himself!
But “after God’s own heart“? That is intriguing because I most often hear about God’s will, or of his knowledge, or his holiness, his power, his wisdom, and so on, and not his heart. This came from my teachers at Bible college, and later at seminary, as they unveiled an inscrutable and emotionally detached—“impassible”—God to us, a God committed solely to enhancing his own glory. So, given such insights into a demanding and disaffected God, what does it mean to speak of his “heart”? Such language seems too soft, too tender, too vulnerable—certainly not befitting an awesome God.
So maybe “heart”—at least as the Bible applies it to God—speaks of an all-wise, holy, sovereign, omniscient, predestinating will? Ummm . . . maybe.
But what if it actually does speak of his love? What if it means exactly what we think of when we talk about “opening my heart” to someone? What if God’s heart is his own affective center—the dynamic movement of his collective, inherent, mutual-triune love—poured out into our own hearts by his Spirit? That his being and doing is moved by love? What if that is actually true?
I find the thought both attractive and disconcerting! It brings me back to a question raised when my teachers reshaped “love” for the sake of good theology. I learned, for instance, that the biblical term agape speaks of a divine—will-based—love. Which can lead to a painful sigh: “Okay, I know God loves me . . . but could he ever like me?”
So, once again, just how was David’s heart like God’s heart?
We need to consider David and his heart. If ever there was a powerful figure in the Bible— surpassed by Jesus alone—it was David. Yet David was passionate. He wore his heart on his sleeve. Sometimes too much so! David danced his heart out before God and the nation. So boldly and wildly that it offended his wife. He wrote Psalms that still vibrate with urgent devotion and delight. He loved God with a rare courage and persistence. He loved Jonathan as the only other man in Israel bold enough to defend God’s reputation against overwhelming odds. He loved his mighty men, refusing to even sip some water that represented their life-risking devotion to him. He loved Bathsheba. And he killed her husband. So David—as a test case—was a lover, but his overall track record—the Uriah principle—warns us away from equating his profound capacity to love with his “heart after God’s own heart.” Correct?
Again, maybe. So, again, what should we make of the Heart-to-heart linkage?
The answer certainly rests in the common ground David shared with God: both David and God are shepherds.
David called God his own shepherd. God called David to be the shepherd of Israel. And it wasn’t just David. God always loves good shepherds—remember that it was a group of humble shepherds who received the great angelic serenade celebrating the birth of the ultimate shepherd, Jesus. David’s brothers left their youngest brother with what they saw as a demeaning job—the family sheep-chaser. Yet the role was, for David, an entryway to the wealth of God’s spreading goodness. He tasted God’s love as he found delight in caring for God’s creatures.
So David came to be captured with a vision of God’s deepest values as he sat among his family’s sheep night after cold night. As he fought off wild animals—the lions and bears—he looked for the best pastures and the safest watering holes. He loved his sheep and was ready to die protecting them. A sling against a lion? Casting pebbles against a bear? No problem, as long as God was his companion and the sheep were his concern.
It would have been during the long nights that God whispered new insights to his young companion-in-care, so that in the morning David could write what he learned: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?”
And care for David, God did! As we read in the prophetic books, God measured leaders by how well they served as shepherds to the people God gave them to lead. Over time the report was grim. Ezekiel, speaking on God’s behalf (in chapter 34), summarized the reason for Judah’s Babylonian captivity: “My sheep were scattered [by their false shepherds]; they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. My sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with none to search or seek for them.” What was God’s promised solution? “I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord GOD.”
And so he fulfilled his promise by coming—in the Son—as “the good shepherd” of John 10. Just as David once stood between the lion and the sheep, Jesus came as the one who “lays down his life for the sheep.” Why? Because he cares for the flock! And how profound is this care? Jesus measured it by the quality of the care he found in his Father’s bond with him: “I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.”
It was this bond of love between the Father and the Son, by the Spirit, that God shares with his flock—stated yet again in the prayer of Jesus in John 17:22-23 as he asked the Father, “that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.”
So David was a pioneer and exemplar of that bond of love, both with God and his people, Israel. He had the heart of a shepherd—of a bold lover of others, even at the expense of his own welfare!
But what about David’s murder of Uriah after stealing the man’s wife? David had violated his own shepherd’s heart. He had “eaten” from the flock that was meant to be under his care. Yet we must never forget that God used a “proper” passion to confront David’s ungodly passion. Nathan, by God’s direction, confronted David: “the poor man,” God said through Nathan, “had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought.” This beloved lamb was then stolen by a despotic rich man.
David’s response—the response of a good shepherd—was instant: “the man who has done this deserves to die” he commanded. Nathan then turned the table: “You are the man!”
God knew, even though David’s heart had turned away from him for a time, that a shepherd’s passion was still alive. It was one shepherd—God—speaking to another—David. They still shared a common heart. A heart all of us are invited to share with the LORD, our shepherd.
What makes God attractive?
Is it his aesthetics—his ability to form grand galaxies, only now seen by us, with a dramatic range of variegated shades, shapes, and brilliance of light? Or his intimate gift of sending small spiders to spin intricate webs that first catch the morning dew and then capture the first rays of morning bright to sparkle against the deep green of the rose leaves, often punctuated by the luster of the roses themselves?
Yes, he is certainly attractive for such handiwork! Yet his beauty is much deeper than what we see in the palette of his unending creative craft.
Is God winsome because he stirs our minds with puzzles so deep and intriguing that we can never exhaust what he offers us? As we discover layer after layer of mystery in the fabric of life and being. Of light as both particles and waves. Of atoms, once the smallest of features, now known to be made of still smaller elements. Of unseen dark matter. Of quantum mysteries and the possibility of parallel realities. Of how Joseph’s brothers intended evil against him, while God intended those same events for good. Of how the death of Christ on the cross is both horrific and wonderful.
Once again, the only true answer is, “yes!” But his attractions are much deeper than what we see in the unsearchable depths of his multifaceted and brilliant wisdom.
Is God attractive in his unending energy that always stirs and stimulates us? In his power to shape and rule a universe so vast that we fail either to see or conceive its boundaries. In his capacity to know every thought of every person in every land and place in every stage of time. In his power to form new life within a womb and then to unfold that life as a human bloom of unique views, gifts, and aspirations—as people who have true freedom to love and not to love, yet always within the realm of his own wonderful plans and purposes. And, in all this, to work it together in a tapestry that stuns us whenever we pause long enough to see his hand at work.
The answer, of course, is “yes!” He is wonderfully attractive when we even begin to glimpse the spectrum of his sustaining power at work in the universe. Yet there is more to his beauty.
But why this question?
I ask it because many of my Christian friends are slow to see that our real joy in God comes from who he is—and not merely from what he does! If we reverse this order of priorities by focusing on what he does for us—including his works of creation and redemption on the cross—we slip into a utilitarian relationship.
It sets up a false vision of faith as our own “doing”—to match what we see in God. Call it a reciprocity of works. And in those works we find only quick surges of enjoyment in God. Why? Because the joy is based on our circumstances. And it keeps the focus of faith on us, with all the instability our own doing brings to the table.
In a “doing” version of faith we are called on to draw upon the benefits God offers us, and to work on being good and godly. And such a focus on God’s activities then sets up a mirror response in our own lives: to focus on our own activities. On our own devotion to do the right thing. To be disciplined to read our Bibles. To journal our religious qualms and doubts. To give at least a tithe. To challenge all others who don’t buy a responsibility-based version of faith.
So whenever I challenge and dismiss any spirituality based on our “disciplines” I get puzzled looks: “So what do you suggest?”
The answer comes from Psalm 34:8, and a host of other similar biblical invitations: “Taste and see, the LORD is good!” And I often go on to apply the answer this way, with a counterpoint question:
So, if a man is on a trip and exchanging emails with his wife, should he gather a group of men to hold him accountable to read her letters? Should he discipline himself to call her every now and then just because he knows that’s the duty of a good husband?
If those are his strategies I’d invite him to go for marriage counseling . . . and also to spend some caring time with her in a setting that might reopen his eyes to a beauty that once captured his heart. Her attractiveness is almost certainly alive and well . . . he’s just been distracted.
So, in suggesting that God’s goodness is available to anyone who ‘tastes and sees’ him, let’s label anything that distracts us from God’s beauty as ‘sin’—as something ‘not good’ which God never intended for us to experience. As something that only occurs because Adam and Eve became self-focused rather than God focused (illustrated by their new awareness of nakedness only after they turned from God). And we are Adam’s children.
Now it’s time to return to our question of God’s deepest attractiveness. Here’s the answer: He captures us by his love! God is a lover and he invites us into his love. His love is also a relational love—a love of God the Father for God the Son; and of God the Son for God the Father; all this by the ministry of the Spirit who is one with both the Father and the Son, communicating that mutual love within the Godhead.
Augustine of Hippo said it this way: God is the lover; the Son is the beloved, and the Spirit is the love they share. Each—Father, Son, and Spirit—is fully personal, distinct in role, and freely active; yet also “mutually within” the others. Collectively the bond of this eternal relationship is called “love”—hence, “God is love” as John affirms in 1John 4:8 & 16.
The basis for distinguishing our first set of statements of God’s winsomeness from this final statement is this: the gifts we enjoy from God are shared with us out of a relational motive: his love. To love the gifts without loving the giver is simply to worship the creation rather than the Creator.
If this leaves any reader wondering: “So why don’t I—if I’m really honest—find God attractive?”
I answer from my own conversion. It went something like this: “Well . . . he’s lovely . . . he loves us . . . and he invites us into his love: all I have to ‘do’ is enjoy that love!” So, for others, maybe it’s just a matter of telling the Spirit—the one who communicates God’s love to us (see Romans 5:5 and 1 Corinthians 2:9-12)—that you would love to have a taste of that love. Be humble: i.e. don’t add any conditions. Just come to him to enjoy him as he is “in himself”. Then read through the Bible in 5 or 6 weeks with an open heart and see what happens. I promise: you’ll be captured!