How do you love God? This is the question my nine-year-old son asked me as we entered into the deep conversations that always seem to happen when they are supposed to be winding down for sleep. His question was actually, “can you really love God?” I didn’t really know what he meant. “Uh, yeah, I mean, I love God,” I said. So I tried to ask clarifying questions, and I think what he was getting at was, “I believe in God, but I’m not sure if I love Him.” Sometimes profundity comes from odd places, but I’ve thought about that question ever since.
Many people sit in church because they believe in God, but they struggle to enjoy Him, to love Him. And that struggle is made even more difficult by two things: 1. We have joys and pleasures around us that seem to be much easier to achieve, regardless of how short that joy may last. 2. We have circumstances and pains that we allow to grab way too much attention from our thought life. Sometimes we just don’t feel like we even have time to stop and smell the roses, let alone to rest and enjoy God. Enter Christmas – the entire holiday is meant to invite us into enjoying the story of God, but we get caught up in material or relational pleasures, or the pain of material and relational absence. So how can we enjoy God? How can we help others discover the joy of loving God?
Admittedly, if I had a perfect answer for those questions the whole world would be healed. So, I simply want to make an attempt here to guide your search. The first thing each person must do is realize that there really is something wrong that needs to be fixed. One of the biggest mistakes made in evangelism of others, and of our own souls, is assuming that what we need is air-tight logic that demonstrates that God exists. But as James says, “Even the demons believe that, and shudder!” (2:19). Acknowledging God’s existence is one necessary ingredient for enjoying Him, but it can never be the only ingredient. Before you acknowledge that God is real, you must truly desire for Him to be real. And the only way you can do that is to long for a solution to all brokenness. The brokenness of the world, of the body, of the soul. What my son revealed in his question was that He knew there was a God, but he had not yet come to know his need for Him. Do you long for restoration? For beauty? For meaning? For justice? These are the soil where the Gospel can bloom and its beauty can astound you, but more is needed.
You must not just long for the good, true and beautiful, but become aware that the wrong, false, and ugly have taken hold of you. We must come to see that it is not just the world that needs rescue, but our own souls. The resistance to this truth goes by a simple name – Pride. And pride is the great barrier of enjoying God. Pride is what makes us reach for shallow joy when true depth is offered to us. Pride is what keeps us blinded by our pain when true hope can make us see. Pride is ultimately what separates us from God and makes us contributors to the very things that need fixed. Pride makes unbelievers enemies of God, but can make Christians numb to Him. When we face our mortality, our weakness, our shame, our need, we have begun the ascent into the joy of the Lord. This is ironic of course, because when you face these despairing realities it makes it so you cannot take a step at all, let alone up the mountain to God’s presence. But here we find the final key to enjoying God, and the very purpose of Christmas.
The King has stepped down the mountain. He takes on human flesh, born of the same sort of weak mortality we own. He meets us in the mud and picks us up. He takes on our weakness, our shame, our need, on the cross, and carries us into His presence. The great healing of the world has come. Not because we loved God, but because He loved us. Here is the true secret ingredient for loving God – when we were unlovable enemies, God loved us and made us friends. Christians should remember that the secret ingredient to loving and enjoying God is the same thing that made them confess Him as Lord and Savior to begin with – The Gospel. You never graduate from the Gospel, you simply sink deeper into it. So, return to the story that enlivened your soul; it’s what Christmas is all about.
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