Let me ask a question: do we think and learn by collecting and affirming every idea we’ve ever heard, so that all we’ve heard grows into a single collection of “truth”? Or do we try to sort out the things that are true from the things that aren’t true? If for instance, someone tells us, “Buy this food supplement and you’ll become strong and fit without ever having to exercise!” And someone else tells us, “You’ll never be strong and fit unless you exercise!” Can the two claims fit together as parts of a whole? Or is one right and the other wrong?

That sort of “right or wrong” polarity sets up the question for this week’s entry: how is Jesus seen “in faith”? Do we determine to believe certain things about Jesus so that we get our doctrinal foundations well established? Or do we come to Jesus as one who tells us about himself, and then discover that in our meeting him he changes the way we view him and ourselves? In other words, is faith a responsibility to be performed, or a response that we experience? Is the focus of faith on our conduct, or on Christ’s initiative?

Last week I wrote about the division that emerged among the English Puritans when federal theology was imported from Heidelberg by William Perkins—with a few others—and many Puritans soon embraced it. But there were some who resisted it because it portrayed faith as a human activity that God rewards with salvation.

Here’s some context for that resistance. The 4^th-5^th century church leader, Augustine of Hippo, may have done more than any other figure in the Latin-speaking world to portray God as a Triune One who exists in his communion of love. As Augustine read Scriptures and tracked the conversations of the great church councils just before his days, he saw that God’s relational being explains his creation and his conduct. He was appalled by the British moralist, Pelagius, whose theology was formed in the context of duties and contracts: God expects right behaviors and rewards those who make right choices with salvation.

Puritans embraced Luther’s Augustinian insights. Richard Sibbes (1577-1635), as his own career matured, became a leader in this movement. Sibbes called sin “a base slavery” in which our creation design, to love God, is usurped by a love for lesser things. The solution?

“He that cleaveth to the Lord is one spirit,” as the apostle saith [1 Corinthians 6:17]. . . . Indeed, our affections transform us anew. As it is with the fire, it transforms cold and gross bodies to be all fiery; so God and heavenly things work upon our hearts, they transform us to be like themselves [Works, 5.230].

Sibbes was, at times, very clear in citing Augustine—he knew many other Puritans would not agree with him so he anchored his most important points in a rock-like authority. So, like the ancient bishop, Sibbes set out the “chief end” of humans in God’s triune love—the basis for creation. And it is only by entering God’s eternal communion that anyone finds their true end:

As Saint Augustine saith, “Thou hast made us for thee, and our hearts rest not till we come to thee;” as the rivers never rest till they discharge themselves into the ocean. And being not his own end, it is his wisdom and understanding to look principally to that which is his last and best and main end, which is God, and union and communion with God in Christ, who is God in our nature, God-man, the best of all, and therefore it is fit he should be the last [Works, 5:300].

Sibbes, in citing Augustine, addressed God’s purpose in creating humanity. The search for our “hearts rest” is satisfied by union and communion with God in Christ who is our “last and best and main end”. In other words, an affective union with Christ is the basis for an effective spirituality.

Here the question of choice comes into play. Is this union a product of human initiative or a response to God’s initiative? Only the latter answer—a response—fits the full-orbed portrayal of Scripture. Believers are invited to “see” Christ in biblical promises, which is the ground for the formation of a love relationship [Works, 7:423].

We must be wholly moulded anew. . . . “Flesh and blood, as it is, cannot enter into heaven,” 1 Cor 15:50; that is, the nature of man, as it is corrupted; we must have new judgments of things, and new desires, and new esteem, new affections, new joys, new delights, new conversation, new company [Works, 7:257].

At the very beginning of the process of transformation, the question must be raised of how one who is steeped in sin and disaffection toward God can be brought to have “new affections”. Any decisions therefore belong to the person but must be accounted for by God’s grace.

Christ is the focus of spiritual vision, displacing the viewers self-awareness: “By looking to the glory of God in Christ we see Christ as our husband, and that breeds a disposition in us to have the affections of a spouse. We see Christ as our head, and that breeds a disposition in us to be members like him” [Works, 4:271].

So, according to Sibbes, the cause of change is always in the one perceived rather than in the will of the perceiver. This comes, in turn, through a new capacity to see: “God created a new eye in the soul, a new sight which they had not by nature; for even as the natural eye cannot see things that are invisible, so the natural man cannot see the things of God, which are seen not by a natural, but by a supernatural eye” [Works, 7:424].

We agree with Sibbes. Spiritual sight—given the challenges of transformation—calls for the Spirit’s work in overcoming Satan’s distortion of God’s character. One of the primary issues of pastoral ministry, Sibbes believed, is to face “the wicked, poisonful disposition that the devil stirs up” against Christ and his elect [Works, 3:488].

Thus, as lost trust through rebellious unbelief caused Adam and Eve to fall, so a restored vision of Christ’s trustworthiness discloses a person’s conversion and initial sanctification:

They trusted not in God, they began to stagger at the promises, to stagger at the word of God. Satan robbed them of the word. He observes, and continues the same art still, to take the word from us, and to cause us to stagger and doubt whether it be true or no. . . . So Adam fell. Now we must be restored by the contrary to that we fell. We fell by unbelief and distrust, by calling God’s truth in question; we must learn to stand again by the contrary grace, by faith [Works, 3:519].

With the supernaturally restored “eye of faith”, the gradual process of restoration begins through the soul’s encounter with the truth about God as he really is.

The affective (heart-based) must be set against the Stoic (mind-and-will-based) view of the soul. The matter is crucial. If readers affirm the response-based Trinitarian theology, on the one hand, yet still insist that the real task of knowing and engaging God is something we can also accomplish by our willpower, the resulting spirituality will be confused and blind—like driving into a dense fog! The two approaches are incompatible.

As an added note, the marketing industry uses the heart-based understanding of how the soul operates as their basis for doing business: marketing shapes behaviors, not through precise reasoning and firm choosing, but by capturing emotions and stirring responses. Some major figures in modern and even in contemporary philosophy have begun to unpack a response-based approach to life. One of America’s greatest thinkers, Jonathan Edwards, simply cannot be understood apart from a heart-based, affective anthropology. And even some significant research in current neurobiology has shown that we do all our “thinking by feeling.”

As we have said here before, we were made to be lovers because God himself is a lover. We were made as relational beings because God himself is relational. And we were made as responders because God is our great pursuer and he made us as suitable partners for an eternal life of shared love, joy, life, and good works in companionship with God: not because we have to but because we want to. And we want to because we find God—as Father, Son, and Spirit—to be more attractive than any other alternative in life.

This entry is more technical, more historical, and longer than usual: be warned and be patient, please. I also think it’s important. As my elementary teacher used to say, “Put on your thinking caps!”

After recently stepping away from my years as a theology educator I’m starting to see some academic blind spots we tend to miss from close up. One of these is critical: we don’t get God’s motives right. It’s a problem of the Christian educational community at large. We tend to speak of God as if he is mainly defined by using and defending his power—as if his omnipotence is what drives him. And, biblically, that’s just not right.

I say this even though I know scholars who promote other motives, especially a divine ambition for glory. In some settings his love is also exalted; and sometimes his holiness; and maybe one or two other qualities. But after some time to ponder I’ve concluded that it’s really his power that academics see as God’s main motor.

I should say right away that I don’t doubt God’s omnipotence: all power ultimately resides in him; and all his purposes are being played out in the creation. The Scriptures affirm this. And he would be less than God almighty if it were not the case.

What I deny is that his power tells us anything about his motives. Proclamations of his power only tell us that as God he has no true competitors and that he has every capacity he needs to maintain that status. He is wholly secure.

Here’s why the question of motive matters. If power is what moves God, then he is an unapologetically and appallingly disaffected divinity. Appalling to us relational beings in that it suggests that the creation is actually relationally barren, only set up to display divine might. We would be the participants and the audience for a grand performance of power. God would be a grand utilitarian ruler; with us as his objects to be ruled.

I call this a blind spot because no one sees this summary as applicable to their own theology even when they teach it in some fashion. And in teaching it we are kept from coming to grips with the true God and with his real motives.

Let me offer the English Puritan, William Perkins (1558-1602), as both a source and an example of the problem. In his day he presented a power-concerned God to England, and his portrayal continues to influence theology until today. Yet he is never viewed as promoting a disaffected God. He was, in fact, famous for his piety and spoke often about God’s love—rather ironically, given what he actually believed and taught his students.

Perkins’ key work, the Golden Chaine, was first published in Latin as the Armilla Auria in 1590. It introduced young theology students at Cambridge University and elsewhere to the structure and import of “federal theology” as formulated in Heidelberg, Germany, in the mid-1500’s. This federalism was a mitigated contractual model of salvation—I’ll say more about it below. The scheme drew directly from a version of how salvation works that was first synthesized by Thomas Aquinas in the 13^th century.

That may sound innocent enough, but what Thomas offered in his day was what made Luther furious in 1517: it violated the Scriptural portrayal of God, faith, and salvation. Thomas had drawn heavily from axioms he found in Aristotle’s self-concerned, and unmoved-mover version of God. Yet even with this dubious heritage Perkins’ book sold like hotcakes!

Opposition to his view was very firm and sustained by some—including my doctoral subject, the irenic Richard Sibbes—and a group of ministers known as the “dissenting brethren” at the Westminster Assembly in the 1640s, who followed his lead. But the new federal model soon became an assertive and self-proclaimed orthodoxy that most Puritans accepted. All who rejected the contractual nature of the system were castigated as “antinomians” even as they accurately cited Luther again and again in their own favor.

What was Luther’s view? He complained that Thomas made God’s grace into a something: an infused disposition or habit that God gives only to the elect. This habitus gratiae equips them with a supernatural disposition to begin making righteous decisions. Thomas and the later federalists thus saw faith as a human “act of the will”. The mitigation is that God himself makes it happen. How? By the magic of the habitus—or “enabling grace”—that ensures an act of faith. By this newly embedded grace the elect then conceive the adequate act of faith God requires of them, and he then rewards them with salvation. To Luther this was just a bunch of human-centered nonsense. In fact he, Zwingli, and Calvin all dismissed grace portrayed as habitus.

They all held, instead, that grace is relational—the activity of someone—namely God’s love in Christ disclosed by the Spirit. This captures some, but not all, in personal, Heart-to-heart meetings. The apostle Paul’s conversion displayed all of this. Thus for Luther faith is our response to God himself. A new entrustment overcomes a prior willful distrust and the believer becomes united to God by faith. In all of this the heart still has freedom to move, but where it once always moved away from God, once God’s beauty is revealed in Christ, he effectively draws people to himself. Most people, however, remain disaffected and hostile to God, and are finally given over to their stubborn desires despite God’s love for them and his free offer of eternal life.

The Golden Chaine was an effort to stamp out Luther’s version of salvation. In his foreword Perkins said just that: he was offering a supralapsarian version of God’s plan-for-the-ages in place of the “Lutheran” infralapsarian version. If we translate this jargon, what Perkins rejected was Luther’s conviction that the human heart is free either to respond or not to respond to God. Perkins, by contrast, treated the human will as the place where habitus operates and where faith is birthed with this divine assistance.

For Luther, however, the heart has real freedom—but not the will. As Luther had explained in The Bondage of the Will all of humanity is ruled by sin unless and until God’s love captures the heart. The will is simply an instrument of the heart—enslaved by the heart’s desires, either for good or for ill.

Why did Perkins want to dismiss Luther’s version of faith? Because, he believed, it violated God’s rule over the universe—his omnipotence. According to Perkins all that ever occurs—even sin—is under God’s absolute control. And God has just one goal in mind, a goal Perkins posted at the very bottom of a full-page fold-out diagram he included in the Golden Chaine: “Gods Glorie”.

Perkins’ diagram—as inspired by an earlier and less overt diagram by Theodore Beza—set out two tracks in God’s program for creation: a single divine decree of predestination that was subdivided into two subsequent decrees of “Election” and “Reprobation.” And after those decrees God then created the heavens and the earth. The order here explains the title of Perkins’ position—”supra” means God determines all things before the “lapse” or fall of Adam—so that it is only by God’s inexplicable determinations that some go to heaven and others go to hell. The people involved are simply objects to be ruled.

Luther, on the other hand, had insisted that God created Adam even though he knew that Adam’s sin would soon follow. And, given the certainty of the coming fall (hence the term infra or subsequent to the lapse) God created humans and declared that some would be drawn out of death—a death of humanity’s own choosing—by his wonderful mercy. These elect ones would be drawn to God not on the basis of their own goodness, but by his mercy—a mercy most often embraced by the weak, the poor, and the despised. All people, however, are invited to come. Only when the arrogant persist in denying the offer of God’s grace are they finally given over to their sinful disaffection. God knew, of course, beforehand, those he would draw in and those he would finally give over, but he is never the author of their sin.

The differences between Luther and Perkins were not chronological differences over how God works in time, but represented two competing versions of God’s character and his operations as he determined the course of the creation.

For Luther God is understood to love and to be loveable, and allows the human heart a freedom either to love or not to love him, with faith expressing a trust birthed by God’s wonderful benevolence. This version of faith was also embraced by John Calvin.

Perkins, on the other hand, held that God’s sovereign rule is ultimate, even if God implicitly creates sin and sinners: “God created all things for himself, and the wicked man for the evill day. Prov. 16:4. Hath not the potter power over the clay to make of the same lumpe one vessel to honour, and another to dishonour. Rom. 9.21.” [at the head of Perkins' diagram, emphasis added]

Perkins was so deeply committed to his portrayal of God’s omnipotence and absolute rule that he made two other determinations about God that allowed him to be consistent. First, he located God’s love as a function of his will in the Golden Chaine. This, in effect, allowed him to maintain a Stoic version of divine conduct: that God’s mind and will are absolute; and no divine affections are involved.

But what is love like when it is defined by divine will? Does it involve any affection or compassion? Perkins answered this in the Golden Chaine [Works, 1.25]: God’s underlying essence is “void and free from all passion”.

So, too, in Perkins’ Treatise of God’s Free Grace and Man’s Free Will, “I answer [whether God has any human-like affectionate love] that affections of the creature are not properly incident unto God, because they make many changes, and God is without change. And therefore all affections, and the love that is in man and beast is ascribed to God by figure [of speech]” [1.723]. In the jargon of high theology this is called an anthropopathism. His axiom about the dangerous instability of the affections could be found in the glossary of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (s.v. affectus) but not in the Bible.

In other words, it was a question about how God is to be viewed that was at stake. Luther would, for instance, pin much significance on the human ability to reject God, even if he also knew that no one would ever choose God because of their sin. He looked to texts that affirmed God’s ambition to save and human heart-based culpability: “But the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected the purpose of God for themselves . . .” [Luke 7:30, emphasis added].

Let me return now to the blind spot commentary we began with. It was not that I hadn’t seen the differences between Luther and Perkins after my doctoral days. The blind spot was in my failure to see how much the theme of God’s omnipotence still shapes much of our current theological training. The academy, by a wide margin, prefers Perkins’ version of God over Luther’s version. Luther certainly had the Bible and the Augustinian tradition on his side, but the power politics of faith seem to be in the majority.

Or, to be more to the point: the scholastic programs love to portray a God who rules us but doesn’t actually like us. The biblical alternative is a God who loves us with a love that has real passion but who never forces us to love him in return. The choice is one of coercive power versus the power of love. Luther got God right. I pray we all will too.

I enjoy life. I enjoy it a lot!

But I know that not everyone can say the same. In many cases that’s because of hard circumstances. Who, for instance, can enjoy a life out of balance because of a tragedy, or a life deprived of some basic needs, or a life broken by the abusive behaviors or attitudes of others? So my comments here are not meant as a comparative gloat. I’m not speaking of any self-satisfaction. I realize, in fact, that I have a whole bag full of limitations, flaws, moral faults, unfulfilled dreams, and more—and I would be discouraged if these limits defined my capacity for enjoyment. Thankfully my enjoyment is based on something much bigger than my own character or my set of circumstances.

By starting with this topic—enjoyment—I want to note a related topic that I’ve raised before: we are to give thanks in everything. Here is the connection: thanksgiving charts a relatively straight and even road to enjoyment.

Let me add, by the way, that I’m careful to say we should give thanks “in” everything” rather than “for” everything. The first of these two prepositions is on the pathway to reaching the second, but it often comes much earlier in the process. For example, as a young man I suffered a serious knee injury. After surgery the doctor gave me the bad news: no more vigorous athletics were in my future. Only swimming, walking, and cycling. I first gave thanks “in” that event; and I’ve come to give thanks “for” it as I realized how much the injury turned me into more of a student than ever before. Thanksgiving let me see that benefit even if it only dawned on me after a time.

At one level the call to thanksgiving and its affiliation with enjoyment is self-evident—a truism affirmed in daily experience. I can think, for instance, of my days as an educator. By this measure I always had two types of students: those who were thankful for the course they took with me and for me as a teacher; and those who were happy to see me in their rearview mirror. I deeply enjoyed the former, and I could only wave goodbye to the latter with some grief mixed with relief.

That’s the main point: we enjoy those who enjoy us. And thanksgiving is the main motor of that enjoyment. I’ve seen that connection all around me. A marriage rich with mutual thanksgiving between the spouses is always a healthy marriage even if there are plenty of pressures to address outside the marriage. A work environment where a boss is rich with honest expressions of care and encouragement—regularly extending thanks for his or her employees—is a place where motivation and productivity will be high, even when wages are not as high as other jobs might offer.

A second, and connected, truism is that thanksgiving is transitive: a function between people. That is, we can’t say we have a “disposition” of thanksgiving if we never tell someone that we’re thankful. And the act of thanksgiving is fully authentic only when it reaches beyond mere appreciation for a benefit to the deeper appreciation for the heart that extended that benefit. This is the fabric of a strong relationship—one that builds the strongest bonds through honest, heart-to-heart exchanges. The theological context for this is that we need each other! God designed us to be mutually interdependent beings—to be those who live together in love.

That means that we are not talking about empty flattery here; but about our having eyes to see what others are giving us. All human contacts are events in which people offer something of themselves to others—even if the offer is part of a job requirement or is done as an ongoing family chore. The fact is that every form of giving expresses a constructive moment with each other: we are building up one another. So we can and should be thankful for that relationship. The alternative is to treat others mechanically, as objects to serve us and to fulfill their utilitarian duty: revealing our lack of love and authentic relationship.

Now let me turn back to the breadth of our topic: my enjoyment of life as a whole. Even if we are ready to agree with the points made up to now—that relationships rich with mutual appreciation are enjoyable—it seems like a stretch to say that all of life can then be enjoyed.

But think about that for a moment. A family where spouses are mutually thankful will create an environment that guests will sense right away: it offers a sphere of trust and appreciation. It creates an environment that children need in order to prosper. And, as we mentioned, the work setting where a boss is regularly grateful achieves the same. The question of how broad the milieu of shared enjoyment might extend has everything to do with those whose initiative defines that environment—and the response of those who live in that sphere. Both go together: one who thanks another; and the other who returns the benefit by being thankful for the appreciation.

Why, then, my bold statement about enjoying life, no matter my circumstances? It has everything to do with my sense that God is pleased—call it thankful—that I’m thankful for his care for me. And he offers the broadest environment—all of creation—in which his positive disposition forms the milieu of shared enjoyment. He made us (me included) to respond to his care; he sent us his Son to share that love; and I’ve responded to him. It’s not that I’ve done anything for him; but I’m delighted with him. That’s my response: it’s called faith. And it began years ago with my discovery of his love as I read the Sermon on the Mount.

I know, however, that there’s some damage done to my relationship with God whenever I’m not thankful. I think, for instance, of Romans 1:21 where the root issue of our broken relation with God is summarized around the matter of thanksgiving: “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks . . .” [my emphasis]. That verse, along with others such as Habakkuk 3:18, 1 Thessalonians 5:18, and Philippians 4:4-7, all tell the tale of how life is meant to be lived: as a dramatic adventure amid broken people and circumstances in which God’s love for us calls us to “hold on tight!” I do that by being very bold and very free with my thanksgiving! I stumble from time to time but he holds on to my spiritual hand.

So I know—no matter how small and insignificant I am in the greater scheme of things—that God enjoys having me around. And I certainly enjoy him in response. This is, thankfully, a life available to all. I invite others who are looking for real enjoyment in life to come and enjoy God with me!

I was in trouble with my high school English teacher. It was in my sophomore year—not long before I met Christ at summer camp—that she called me aside.

“Where did this writing come from? You’ve plagiarized this project, haven’t you!”

I was stunned. The project was a simple composition that I had taken very seriously, and now I had an upset teacher glaring at me.

“It’s my own work,” I stuttered. “You told us to write it on our own and that’s what I did.”

The assignment was to describe, in one page, what was most important to us in life. I had written my honest response and it was wholly my own work.

“No one your age ever writes that Time is My Greatest Treasure. This is the voice of an older adult,” she said, “so you need to be honest with me: where did this content come from?”

I stood my ground with her and the small crisis soon passed, but I came away feeling like an oddball. Even if my teacher thought I was too new to life to have this insight, it seemed obvious to me that time is to be treasured.

And now, as an older adult, I still feel that way. So if you have a moment to spare, let’s think about the importance of time.

My high school project made this point: time expresses the context—the milieu—for every element of life. So that among all the possibilities before us only a few activities actually find a place in our lives. The secret to success in life, then, is to give our time to the most significant priorities.

It was actually a practical observation. Even a high school sophomore thinks about who does—and who doesn’t—get to share his or her time. Students might not take much time to think about the actual process of prioritizing time, but that’s how they all operate.

I knew, for instance, that my high school devotion to sports—football, wrestling, and track—were time consuming and took away time from my studies. I knew, too, that there were any number of students to talk with, eat with, play with, but that I would only spend time with some of them—and that only a few would become good friends. Time is the stuff of priorities so that our lack of endless time forces us to make hard choices.

More recently and on separate occasions I’ve had two friends who read Spreading Goodness entries tell me that they only drop by the site from time to time because my posts are too long. It’s honest feedback and much appreciated. And by treasuring time myself I was able to translate what each was really saying: “Given my priorities, your posts take too much time to get through—I have other stronger interests.”

At some level we all know how this sort of thing works. It isn’t necessarily a statement about whether someone likes us or not. Mainly it’s a simple critique of the content and quality of a given post. If a topic grabs us, the question of time evaporates. If the writing itself is clear and clean enough so that’s not the issue, the reader is actually offering a glimpse of his or her priorities. Any reading, or any selection of other activities, is measured by whether that activity deserves our treasured time.

This, by the way, is also the key insight of Affective Theology. We are all made in God’s triune image as lovers, and our time—that is, what we do with our time—displays what we love most. Time, as the fabric of our lives, shows off what we treasure: our “values”, or our “priorities”, or our “interests”, or “what is really important”—or, biblically, “the desires of our heart”. Whatever we give our time to, especially our discretionary time, is what first makes, and then expresses, who we are.

We may be blind to this connection, of course. I recall, for instance, a high school student in a youth group I once led. He volunteered to do a Bible read-through, but his reading progress turned out to be very slow. His reading partner, an avid college student, asked about it.

“I’m just too busy with everything,” he answered. “I don’t have the time to do all this reading, but I’ll keep trying.”

A few days later, during their Sunday read-through meeting, the same student commented to his reading partner that he had to get home right away.

“What’s happening?”

“I need to get to the TV schedule for the week that comes in the Sunday newspaper so I can schedule my week.”

It turned out that the student was committed to watching certain television programs each week and was ready to add some new slots if anything in the schedule caught his attention. His reading partner asked him about how many hours his viewings involved.

“Oh, I average 22 hours a week,” he gushed.

I should add that he never completed his Bible read-through.

I had another conversation last week. A friend commented, rhetorically, “God takes a lot of time, doesn’t he.”

He wasn’t complaining, but was commenting on how his own growth as a Christian always came when he took good stretches of his discretionary time to read the Bible, to pray, and to be quiet while reflecting on God’s ways and words. He saw a clear linkage between his sense of spiritual well-being and the time he devoted to Christ.

It soon dawned on me that all these conversations were linked to the point of my old high school project. What’s more, my conversion—an event that came after my sophomore year—echoed that project. My faith came alive once I gave God the full treasure of my time, without holding back.

Here’s how it happened. Through a number of circumstances that I’ve explained elsewhere I sat on a Montana hillside waiting for God to speak to me—actually, for him to introduce himself to me. The event took about two hours on a beautiful summer afternoon. It was time I might have been spending with some very attractive Christian friends. But I wasn’t sure that I was a Christian myself. Thus my waiting after I had asked, aloud, “God, are you really there?”

I then met God, in Christ, by two stages. First I simply sat there, stubbornly waiting with this thought: “God, I need to hear from you. If you choose to speak, I’m here listening.” Then, after about an hour of absolute silence, a distinct thought came to mind: try reading your Bible, dummy.

That brought me to my second stage: of taking time in the Bible, starting with an hour of reading from Matthew’s gospel. It was there that he indirectly touched on my insight from the English course and gave me its spiritual application: time is a treasure, and it’s the great treasure God requires of us. He wants all of it—in order to become our time-Lord. Specifically, in Matthew 6:33, he called on me to seek first his kingdom and his righteousness.

I responded: “It’s all yours.” Then, once I gave him my time, he began to give me his values through even more time in the Word—including my present enjoyment of Bible-reading—which offers the basis for investing that time most effectively.

Time, then, is our front porch for entering into a timeless eternity. We have the opportunity now to reorder our priorities in light of God’s grace and in view of our long-term future. It makes all the difference, both for today and for the ages to come!

Thanks, then, for sharing your time—it was an honor to enjoy this treasure together.

This weekend was full: I was asked to be the Sunday speaker at a church missions conference. My assigned text? Matthew 22:37-39,

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: Your shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

The decision by church leaders to focus here surprised me. I would have expected to develop the standard text for missions conferences—28:18-29—that begins, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations . . .” Yet I was delighted by their selection because the text gives church missions a proper motivational basis: love.

An MA student, Jonathan M, whose research thesis I supervised about a decade ago made the same connection. He examined the proper motivation for missions: Is it driven by duty? Or birthed out of love? His answer was that Christian mission begins in God’s heart, in the love that pours out of the Triune communion.

I didn’t have Jonathan’s thesis with me but the central premise was strong and easy to recall: much of modern missions is defined by duty, but the truly biblical basis for missions is in the divine love: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

And we must not to stop there. In the very next verse we find Christ’s elaboration of his Father’s purpose for humanity: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

God’s plan, then, was formed upon these foundations: 1. His love. 2. His willingness, in that love, to give up his Son. 3. His ambition in this love to save people from the throes of spiritual and, eventually, physical death. And, 4. To bring into the Triune life all who respond to this love, since his life, alone, is eternal.

What holds people back from receiving this overflow of God’s love is another love: [T]he light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their works were evil” (3:19). God’s mission is to bring us to the Son yet most people prefer to love their independence from God. This independence is also a separation from his eternal life. It is to live in “darkness.” This desire for darkness, then, serves as their own exercise of self-judgment.

All that seems to be clear enough. Once it’s boiled down the problem Jesus raises here is that people don’t really like God! That’s not to say they don’t like what God offers—all his good gifts that come with the creation—but God, himself, leaves them cold. His moral light is too bright for those whose deeds are cheap and shabby; or, as in the case of men like Nicodemus (his immediate audience), whose deeds are meant for human glory but are not aligned with God’s glory [see both John 5 and 12 on this].

So the moral barrier for the disaffected non-believer is immense and only the Father is able to draw anyone out of stubborn disaffection and into a love for the Son. Yet today he is pleased to use us who already love the Son as his agents. I’m afraid, though, that the church, herself, has also built a needless barrier by sometimes turning this mission of love into a grinding duty.

How so? I believe that the language of “commandment” in Matthew 22, and elsewhere, causes many people to miss that this calling is birthed in the love we have just seen. This because we tend to link commandments to our willpower. So that the “greatest command” is read as “our greatest task.” And with that we can slip into sending out moralists to warn the world of their duty to obey God. In the moralist framework it’s not that obedience saves the missionary’s target audience, but—given the focus on our own willpower—obedience signifies that they are probably saved.

But are they truly saved if they fail to reciprocate God’s self-sacrificing, affective love? How many of the Pharisees were, in fact, outstanding commandment-specialists, yet without love? Isn’t the call to an affective love the point of 1 John 4—that God’s love for us first captures us and then spills out as a love for others? And that our love for God and for neighbor signals our genuine participation on his life of love—a life overflowing from the Triune, relational one, of whom John says, “God is love”?

How, then, does “command” undermine the meaning of love for some? By a widespread Stoic bias that treats commands as ultimately located in our will; with our will then seen as the overseer of our unreliable affections. When this tradition is in play, the command-keeping Stoics will take a text like John 14:21—”Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me”—to turn Christ into a moralist, and love into a task. And with such a defective version of Christ comes a sense that spirituality is formed in duties rather than in desires; from our self-moved will and not our Christ-moved affections.

The portrayal of God’s mission in John 3 helps us to get it right. And in Matthew’s gospel—where we started—we find that the Triune initiative is also located in God’s love. In Christ’s baptism, the Spirit descends on the Son and the Father proclaims, “this is my beloved Son”. So, too, on the Mount of Transfiguration: “This is my beloved Son; listen to him!” (chapters 3 & 17). The Father offers his love by sending us his Son whom he loves and whom he calls us to love, with him. So it is that in Matthew 28, the so-called great commission is expressed in the context of the Trinity—”in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

The word “command”, then, must be read as a feature of God’s love. The command is no different from a marriage counselor’s call to a husband whose heart has gone cold: “Love your wife!” The call is to revive that which has been buried in the debris of false loves. In Matthew 22 Christ is calling us to respond to the Spirit’s work as he breathes new life into the spiritual corpse left by Adam’s fall. The Lover calls out to us to love in return.

Implicit in all this is that our freedom is located not in our “free will” but in our “free hearts”—hearts that abandoned God as we, in Adam, became lovers of self rather than lovers of God. It was displayed in Adam’s newfound self-awareness as a man “naked” before God—when he had once, in love, been unselfconscious before God.

God will never force us to love him. But he calls us to the love we were first made for. For those of us who have heard God’s heart, our deepest desire is to share that love with others: this is a proper basis for Christian mission, something God’s heart supports.