Changed by Love
Commentary
The bride-to-be was obviously nervous. It was only the rehearsal, but already the pastor could see that tomorrow’s wedding might be in for problems.
“You’re letting it all get to you,” he told her gently, as he pulled her aside. “Just take it one little step at a time. When you get to the door with your father tomorrow afternoon, look only at the aisle ahead of you. You’ve walked it hundreds of times, every Sunday when you come to church. Think only of that.
“Then, when you get to the front, glance toward the altar. Here’s where you first received Holy Communion. Let it remind you of your Lord Jesus, who brought you to this special moment. Think only of the altar.
“And then, turn your head to your love. He’s your best friend. No one in this world wants to be with you more than he does. Look at him and think of him. And everything will be okay.”
Sure enough. Next day the wedding went off like clockwork. Everyone was in place. All the flowers perfumed the air and the music was festive.
But some who stood close to the aisle as the bride entered. wondered a bit at the things she was muttering under her breath: “Aisle . . . altar . . . him . . . Aisle . . . altar . . . him . . . Aisle . . . altar . . . him . . .”
It is true that marriage alters us. We do not set out to change the other person when we get married. Still, a living, loving, deepening relationship has its effect on each marriage partner. We live to love and we love to live. And in our living and loving, we grow and change and move and adapt, and somehow become new people. One singer calls a good relationship “two hearts beating in just one mind!”
A good marriage is like that. Long ago, A. E. Housman put it this way:
Oh, when I was in love with you,
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well I did behave! (Poem XVIII, A Shropshire Lad)
We don’t say: “I’ll alter him.” But it happens, as Peter found out when Jesus called him to the home of Cornelius, and as the disciples of Jesus were charged on the night of Jesus’ own great loving sacrifice, and as John perceives from the island of Patmos as all creation is reborn into God’s wonderful love.
Acts 11:1-18
The momentum of the stories told in the book of Acts is derived from a single critical incident that took place in Jerusalem during the Jewish religious festival known as Pentecost. Jesus’ instruction for his disciples to stay in Jerusalem and wait for a special gift (Acts 1:4), must have seemed vague at the time, but the arrival of the explosive power of the Holy Spirit during the Pentecost feast made sense. This celebration was both a harvest festival and a time for recalling the gift of the original covenant documents to Moses at Mount Sinai. These two themes intersected marvelously with what was taking place. First, there was the dawning of a new age of revelation and divine mission, paralleling the first covenant declaration in the book of Exodus. Second, during the Pentecost harvest festival, the first sheaves of grain were presented at the Temple, anticipating that God would then bring in the full harvest. This expression of faith served as a clear analogy to the greater missional harvest of the church, which was begun through a miraculous “first fruits” in Jerusalem that day.
Peter capitalized on these themes when he preached a sermon explaining Joel’s prophecy of the “Day of the Lord.” Peter tied together God’s extensive mission, the history of Israel, the coming of Jesus, and the splitting of the Day of the Lord so that the blessings of the messianic age could begin before the final divine judgment fell. The pattern for entering the new community of faith was clearly outlined: repent and be baptized. The former indicated a transforming presence of the Holy Spirit in individual hearts, while the latter became the initiation rite by which the ranks of this missional society were identified (replacing the badge of circumcision in its unique application to the nation of Israel—see Colossians 2:11–12).
Reaction to the rapidly developing Christian fellowship was swift and sharp. Within Jerusalem’s dominant religious community there was consternation about the Apostles’ identification of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah (Acts 4), creating tensions and divisions. Inside the newly organizing church itself, there were ethical issues that needed to be addressed (Acts 5–6). Soon the followers of Jesus needed to expand their leadership team (the deacons of Acts 6), and found themselves the targets of increasingly organized persecutions (Acts 8:1–3). Although this disrupted the close fellowship of the Jerusalem congregation, those who moved elsewhere to find safety brought the message of Jesus’ teachings, death and resurrection with them (Acts 8:4).
An amazing turn happened, however, when the leading persecutor, a zealous Pharisee named Saul, suddenly went through a miraculous conversion (Acts 9), and began to preach that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. When Peter’s exploits with the Roman centurion Cornelius at Caesarea nurtured the new Gentile mission of the church (Acts 10–11), Diaspora-born Paul (Saul by his other name) became the perfect candidate to partner with Barnabas in establishing an international congregation in the eastern Roman capital city of Antioch (Acts 12). Soon this congregation served as the launching pad for the great mission journeys of Paul and his companions (Acts 13–19) that would forever relocate the expansion of the Christian church outside of Jerusalem and Palestine.
What had been a centripetal energizing motion during the first phase of God’s recovery mission on planet Earth (that is, drawing all nations toward a re-engagement with their creator through the strategically placed people of Israel), was now shifted into a centrifugal motion of divine sending out these blessings of testimony to the world, in ever-widening circles of witness. The Christian church, born as a Jewish messianic sect, became a global religion.
Revelation 21:1-6
As the book of Revelation unfolds, John draws us into three great eschatological visions. The first takes place in John’s real time (Revelation 1-3), when he communes with the risen Jesus one Sunday during his Patmos exile. Second, Jesus reveals heaven and its vantage point in the struggles between evil and good in God’s creation (Revelation 4-18), with mighty battles and cataclysmic destructions. Then comes John’s third vision of Jesus, who now appears both as conquering king and ravishing bridegroom (Revelation 19:1–10). Before the victory and wedding celebrations can begin, however, a mopping-up operation takes place in which seven aspects of judgment and restoration are sorted out (mostly introduced by John with “then I saw”):
Revelation ends where it began, with a call to faithfulness in the face of mounting opposition. While its details provide endless fodder for teachers, preachers and theological speculators, a consistent core message emerges: during times of crisis, when evil seems to dominate the human scene, don’t lose heart, because God is still in control of all things, and Jesus is returning soon to annihilate evil and transform creation into all that God intended for it to be.
Obviously, this was a necessary message late in the first century, when first Nero’s and then Domitian’s persecutions of the church killed many and caused thousands of others to huddle in fear. Since the language and cosmological perspectives in the book are very similar to those in the Gospel of John and the Letters of John, there is every reason to suppose that they, along with this book, were written by the disciple of Jesus who pastored the congregation in Ephesus late in the first century. This John was exiled to Patmos by Domitian as a way of undermining the courage of the Christian church which he despised. Since Domitian ruled from September of 81 through September of 96 A.D., the Revelation of Jesus to John was probably penned and sent sometime in the mid- to late-80s.
Its message is timeless:
John 13:31-35
Mandarin Chinese has several characters to express the concept of love. Some are simple. Some are complex. But the most profound of all is the symbol that fuses together two characters, the one for ordinary love and the one for pain.
“Pain-love,” it’s called. It is the love of a mother for a child. She disciplines her daughter and feels the ache that cuts her own heart. It is the love of a husband. He stays with a troubled spouse and experiences the trauma of her bitterness. It is the love of God. God empties God’s self of glory and shares the sufferings of God’s people.
“Pain-love.” Deep love. The kind of thing that makes us “disciples” of Jesus. After all, what is really ugly in this world? Sin is ugly, but so are the wounds and scars and pain that it causes. And there is the key to “discipline” and to being “disciples” of Jesus. As Jesus well knew, the discipline he was going through was not the torture of a sadistic ogre in the heavens. It was the “pain-love” of one who cares, who shares, who knows the ugliness of sin, and who will die making things right again.
And so can those who follow in his steps.
Application
Love has a way of writing itself all over us, doesn’t it? We will do things for love that we never thought we would be able to do. Take Edward VIII, for instance. He was King of England in the early decades of last century.
What a position to hold! But he gave it up in order to marry the woman who captured his heart.
True love begs to be told. At least we would like to think that is true. But is not our faith in God really a love relationship too? Yet so often it seems that we want to hide it.
William Barclay tells a story about a time when his father led a Christmas worship service in a hospital. It was a delightful hour, he says. They sang about the baby Jesus. They heard the story of God’s love. The children laughed and laughed at the good news, and at the jolly way his father told it. One little girl was so excited that her face beamed with the thrill of it all.
After the service, a nurse took her back to the ward. This nurse was known for her sharp and critical personality. The little girl looked up at her and asked, “Did you ever hear that story about Jesus before?”
“Sure,” said the nurse. “Many times.”
“Well,” replied the child innocently, “you certainly don’t look like it!”
Do you know that nurse? Have you ever seen her face in your bathroom mirror? Was she hiding her love relationship with God?
Alternative Application (John 13:31-35)
C. S. Lewis included a little chapter called “A Word about Praising” in his Reflections on the Psalms. He had some trouble with Christianity when he first encountered it, he said, because it seemed that God was so self-centered, and Christians were so self-important. God wants praise, he thought. In fact, God demands praise. And if that’s what God is all about, why should anybody want to worship him? Isn’t it a little like falling at the feet of some current rock star or sports hero?
And Christians too: all this business of asking God to bless them! Rather self-important, isn’t it? Do I really want to mix with this crowd? Lewis wondered.
But then, says Lewis, he remembered what it was like to be in love.
Love demands praise, not because it makes love grow, but because love itself must be spoken in that language. To love is to praise. To care for someone is to seek that person’s blessing. Praise is the language of love.
But the praise and blessings of love are never merely self-serving. They are, in fact, self-giving. They reach beyond themselves and seek to touch the lives of others with their fun and fellowship. They seek to broaden and expand the extent of their joy like the rippling waves on a pond. The relationship that results in cries of praise and pleas for blessing spreads be- yond itself. It calls to others: “See what we have. Feel what we experience. Share the delights we know!”
Love can never be self-important. So it is that when Jesus’ “new command” of John 13 bubbles out of lovers’ lips, it is a wonderful song, and others notice. They also want to hear more, and get in on that action.
“You’re letting it all get to you,” he told her gently, as he pulled her aside. “Just take it one little step at a time. When you get to the door with your father tomorrow afternoon, look only at the aisle ahead of you. You’ve walked it hundreds of times, every Sunday when you come to church. Think only of that.
“Then, when you get to the front, glance toward the altar. Here’s where you first received Holy Communion. Let it remind you of your Lord Jesus, who brought you to this special moment. Think only of the altar.
“And then, turn your head to your love. He’s your best friend. No one in this world wants to be with you more than he does. Look at him and think of him. And everything will be okay.”
Sure enough. Next day the wedding went off like clockwork. Everyone was in place. All the flowers perfumed the air and the music was festive.
But some who stood close to the aisle as the bride entered. wondered a bit at the things she was muttering under her breath: “Aisle . . . altar . . . him . . . Aisle . . . altar . . . him . . . Aisle . . . altar . . . him . . .”
It is true that marriage alters us. We do not set out to change the other person when we get married. Still, a living, loving, deepening relationship has its effect on each marriage partner. We live to love and we love to live. And in our living and loving, we grow and change and move and adapt, and somehow become new people. One singer calls a good relationship “two hearts beating in just one mind!”
A good marriage is like that. Long ago, A. E. Housman put it this way:
Oh, when I was in love with you,
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well I did behave! (Poem XVIII, A Shropshire Lad)
We don’t say: “I’ll alter him.” But it happens, as Peter found out when Jesus called him to the home of Cornelius, and as the disciples of Jesus were charged on the night of Jesus’ own great loving sacrifice, and as John perceives from the island of Patmos as all creation is reborn into God’s wonderful love.
Acts 11:1-18
The momentum of the stories told in the book of Acts is derived from a single critical incident that took place in Jerusalem during the Jewish religious festival known as Pentecost. Jesus’ instruction for his disciples to stay in Jerusalem and wait for a special gift (Acts 1:4), must have seemed vague at the time, but the arrival of the explosive power of the Holy Spirit during the Pentecost feast made sense. This celebration was both a harvest festival and a time for recalling the gift of the original covenant documents to Moses at Mount Sinai. These two themes intersected marvelously with what was taking place. First, there was the dawning of a new age of revelation and divine mission, paralleling the first covenant declaration in the book of Exodus. Second, during the Pentecost harvest festival, the first sheaves of grain were presented at the Temple, anticipating that God would then bring in the full harvest. This expression of faith served as a clear analogy to the greater missional harvest of the church, which was begun through a miraculous “first fruits” in Jerusalem that day.
Peter capitalized on these themes when he preached a sermon explaining Joel’s prophecy of the “Day of the Lord.” Peter tied together God’s extensive mission, the history of Israel, the coming of Jesus, and the splitting of the Day of the Lord so that the blessings of the messianic age could begin before the final divine judgment fell. The pattern for entering the new community of faith was clearly outlined: repent and be baptized. The former indicated a transforming presence of the Holy Spirit in individual hearts, while the latter became the initiation rite by which the ranks of this missional society were identified (replacing the badge of circumcision in its unique application to the nation of Israel—see Colossians 2:11–12).
Reaction to the rapidly developing Christian fellowship was swift and sharp. Within Jerusalem’s dominant religious community there was consternation about the Apostles’ identification of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah (Acts 4), creating tensions and divisions. Inside the newly organizing church itself, there were ethical issues that needed to be addressed (Acts 5–6). Soon the followers of Jesus needed to expand their leadership team (the deacons of Acts 6), and found themselves the targets of increasingly organized persecutions (Acts 8:1–3). Although this disrupted the close fellowship of the Jerusalem congregation, those who moved elsewhere to find safety brought the message of Jesus’ teachings, death and resurrection with them (Acts 8:4).
An amazing turn happened, however, when the leading persecutor, a zealous Pharisee named Saul, suddenly went through a miraculous conversion (Acts 9), and began to preach that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. When Peter’s exploits with the Roman centurion Cornelius at Caesarea nurtured the new Gentile mission of the church (Acts 10–11), Diaspora-born Paul (Saul by his other name) became the perfect candidate to partner with Barnabas in establishing an international congregation in the eastern Roman capital city of Antioch (Acts 12). Soon this congregation served as the launching pad for the great mission journeys of Paul and his companions (Acts 13–19) that would forever relocate the expansion of the Christian church outside of Jerusalem and Palestine.
What had been a centripetal energizing motion during the first phase of God’s recovery mission on planet Earth (that is, drawing all nations toward a re-engagement with their creator through the strategically placed people of Israel), was now shifted into a centrifugal motion of divine sending out these blessings of testimony to the world, in ever-widening circles of witness. The Christian church, born as a Jewish messianic sect, became a global religion.
Revelation 21:1-6
As the book of Revelation unfolds, John draws us into three great eschatological visions. The first takes place in John’s real time (Revelation 1-3), when he communes with the risen Jesus one Sunday during his Patmos exile. Second, Jesus reveals heaven and its vantage point in the struggles between evil and good in God’s creation (Revelation 4-18), with mighty battles and cataclysmic destructions. Then comes John’s third vision of Jesus, who now appears both as conquering king and ravishing bridegroom (Revelation 19:1–10). Before the victory and wedding celebrations can begin, however, a mopping-up operation takes place in which seven aspects of judgment and restoration are sorted out (mostly introduced by John with “then I saw”):
- The King appears to fulfill his destiny (Revelation 19:11–16).
- The last battle is fought, in which all the evil in the human arena is focused and repelled (Revelation 19:17–21).
- Satan is bound for a certain period of time (Revelation 20:1–3).
- The dead are raised to life for good or for ill (Revelation 20:4–6).
- Evil is destroyed (Revelation 20:7–10).
- The final judgment, determining the eternal destiny of all humankind (Revelation 10:11–15).
- Earth is re-created and restored in its relationship with the creator (Revelation 21:1–22:5).
Revelation ends where it began, with a call to faithfulness in the face of mounting opposition. While its details provide endless fodder for teachers, preachers and theological speculators, a consistent core message emerges: during times of crisis, when evil seems to dominate the human scene, don’t lose heart, because God is still in control of all things, and Jesus is returning soon to annihilate evil and transform creation into all that God intended for it to be.
Obviously, this was a necessary message late in the first century, when first Nero’s and then Domitian’s persecutions of the church killed many and caused thousands of others to huddle in fear. Since the language and cosmological perspectives in the book are very similar to those in the Gospel of John and the Letters of John, there is every reason to suppose that they, along with this book, were written by the disciple of Jesus who pastored the congregation in Ephesus late in the first century. This John was exiled to Patmos by Domitian as a way of undermining the courage of the Christian church which he despised. Since Domitian ruled from September of 81 through September of 96 A.D., the Revelation of Jesus to John was probably penned and sent sometime in the mid- to late-80s.
Its message is timeless:
- To be a Christian is to be in conflict in this world.
- If one tries to opt out of this conflict, one automatically joins the other side, and has been trapped by the powers of evil.
- Faithfulness to Jesus almost invariably leads to martyrdom, because this conflict is all or nothing.
- But those who trust in God will find the strength to remain faithful through suffering, die in hope, and have their confidence rewarded by Jesus’ ultimate victory and the renewal of creation which includes the resurrection and glorification of all God’s people.
John 13:31-35
Mandarin Chinese has several characters to express the concept of love. Some are simple. Some are complex. But the most profound of all is the symbol that fuses together two characters, the one for ordinary love and the one for pain.
“Pain-love,” it’s called. It is the love of a mother for a child. She disciplines her daughter and feels the ache that cuts her own heart. It is the love of a husband. He stays with a troubled spouse and experiences the trauma of her bitterness. It is the love of God. God empties God’s self of glory and shares the sufferings of God’s people.
“Pain-love.” Deep love. The kind of thing that makes us “disciples” of Jesus. After all, what is really ugly in this world? Sin is ugly, but so are the wounds and scars and pain that it causes. And there is the key to “discipline” and to being “disciples” of Jesus. As Jesus well knew, the discipline he was going through was not the torture of a sadistic ogre in the heavens. It was the “pain-love” of one who cares, who shares, who knows the ugliness of sin, and who will die making things right again.
And so can those who follow in his steps.
Application
Love has a way of writing itself all over us, doesn’t it? We will do things for love that we never thought we would be able to do. Take Edward VIII, for instance. He was King of England in the early decades of last century.
What a position to hold! But he gave it up in order to marry the woman who captured his heart.
True love begs to be told. At least we would like to think that is true. But is not our faith in God really a love relationship too? Yet so often it seems that we want to hide it.
William Barclay tells a story about a time when his father led a Christmas worship service in a hospital. It was a delightful hour, he says. They sang about the baby Jesus. They heard the story of God’s love. The children laughed and laughed at the good news, and at the jolly way his father told it. One little girl was so excited that her face beamed with the thrill of it all.
After the service, a nurse took her back to the ward. This nurse was known for her sharp and critical personality. The little girl looked up at her and asked, “Did you ever hear that story about Jesus before?”
“Sure,” said the nurse. “Many times.”
“Well,” replied the child innocently, “you certainly don’t look like it!”
Do you know that nurse? Have you ever seen her face in your bathroom mirror? Was she hiding her love relationship with God?
Alternative Application (John 13:31-35)
C. S. Lewis included a little chapter called “A Word about Praising” in his Reflections on the Psalms. He had some trouble with Christianity when he first encountered it, he said, because it seemed that God was so self-centered, and Christians were so self-important. God wants praise, he thought. In fact, God demands praise. And if that’s what God is all about, why should anybody want to worship him? Isn’t it a little like falling at the feet of some current rock star or sports hero?
And Christians too: all this business of asking God to bless them! Rather self-important, isn’t it? Do I really want to mix with this crowd? Lewis wondered.
But then, says Lewis, he remembered what it was like to be in love.
Love demands praise, not because it makes love grow, but because love itself must be spoken in that language. To love is to praise. To care for someone is to seek that person’s blessing. Praise is the language of love.
But the praise and blessings of love are never merely self-serving. They are, in fact, self-giving. They reach beyond themselves and seek to touch the lives of others with their fun and fellowship. They seek to broaden and expand the extent of their joy like the rippling waves on a pond. The relationship that results in cries of praise and pleas for blessing spreads be- yond itself. It calls to others: “See what we have. Feel what we experience. Share the delights we know!”
Love can never be self-important. So it is that when Jesus’ “new command” of John 13 bubbles out of lovers’ lips, it is a wonderful song, and others notice. They also want to hear more, and get in on that action.
