Christian Faith in America

By: Angela Baker

Aww, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥Valentine’s Day♥♥♥♥♥♥♥…

That special day of the year when our hearts and minds turn toward chubby angels in diapers with heart shaped arrows, cards with beautiful prose to proclaim our love, heart shaped boxes filled with chocolates, dinners out on the town and gifts, preferably those that come in small, black felt boxes. Granted, there are the skeptics and jaded among us who proclaim that this day was made up by the greeting card industry, just to increase sales. Of course, the stories of the origins of Valentine’s Day are as numerous as the people who were ahead of you in line for dinner on Sunday night. They seem endless. I wouldn’t attempt to declare which of them is the truth, but they do make for an interesting read. Regardless of the actual origins, today, it is what it is. It is the day that we have set aside to declare or re-declare our love for that special someone. Hopefully, you were able to be with the one you love to make this day special for both of you.

As happens, approximately every seven years, give or take a year because of Leap Year, Valentine’s Day was on Sunday. Inevitably, many preachers spoke on love as the topic for their messages this past Sunday. There are countless types of love, the love of a man and woman, the love of a parent and child, the love of lifelong friends, and the love of a Father to His children, just to name a few. John 3:16 tells us that “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” That, of course, is the ultimate love. God loving us enough to make a way for us to be redeemed from our sin so that we may spend eternity with Him. Nothing can compare to that love, ever. There’s another type of love that we need today, however, one that seems to be becoming extinct. One that is a commandment for us yet we seem to think of it as a suggestion, if we feel like or have time to do it, we might.

John 15:13 states “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” I’ve always thought that this verse meant that I literally had to physically die to show love for my friends. As you can guess, I’m a very literal person. I was reading this one day when it finally dawned on me. We are, by our very nature, selfish, self-centered beings. We tend to “look out for number one”. Laying down ones’ life can be as simple as cutting your neighbor’s grass without expectation of a payback. Laying down your life, and mine, means that we put someone else’s needs above our own. Believe me, it sounds much easier than it actually is. Sure, cutting grass is easy enough to think of, but how often do we actually choose to do that? How about letting the mother with two very tired, cranky kids in front of you in line at the grocery store instead of thinking to yourself, “I was here first, let her wait”?

Laying down ones’ life can mean the supreme sacrifice. There are those among us who will die for the cause of Christ. They will be martyrs for the cause but we can all learn to live with that mindset. Oprah coined the phrase, “little acts of kindness” to describe this attitude. The movie, Pay It Forward, called it just that, paying it forward. God called it showing love. When’s the last time that we showed His love? When’s the last time that we stopped in the middle of our busy days to try to make someone else’s day a little nicer? We who are Christians shouldn’t have to have Oprah or Hollywood movies tell us how to act. God has already commanded us to act. He has commanded us to love. After all, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥LOVE♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is a verb. Do it!

(Republished with Permission)

I heard the most amazing statement today. At first, I thought I heard it incorrectly. Maybe, I thought I heard this, but surely not.  It was too profound and yet it stopped me cold with its simplicity. As I was cruising through my friends’ updates on Facebook, I noticed a video post.  The word my friend posted below it merely said, “Speechless.” Needless to say, I was intrigued. I clicked on the link that led to a video called, God’s Chisel.

It was a very simple video, only two guys, one portraying God and one portraying, well, it could have been any one of us. The man cried out to God to make him more like Him. Then he confessed that he was afraid he couldn’t live up to being like God. He was terrified of letting God down. God said plainly, “You never held me up.” Wow! That’s when it hit me: when we cry out to God for forgiveness of our sins, we beg Him to forgive us for letting Him down. We attach human qualities and attributes to the love of God, as if He judges by the same pitiful standards that we do. We believe that by our sin, we’ve caused God to think less of us, feel less for us, or love us less. Impossible! There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can cause God to be ‘let down’ by us.

The notion of being let down comes from the idea of holding someone up. We have never been the ones to hold God up and, therefore, cannot let Him down. We hold Christians, preachers, teachers, police officers, parents, children, friends and even some politicians to a higher standard on earth. We believe that these people are not allowed the luxury of failing and if they do, they cause us to doubt their passions and motives from the very beginning and disappoint us by their godlessness. We conceitedly and callously think they owe us something because they failed us. We forced them to a place that they were not ready or even willing to go and then we berate them for failing us. How completely backwards! Have we ever stopped to think that it is in those very moments of failure that it is our responsibility to look past the sin, the failure, the disappointment and reach out with love and tenderness to help restore our fallen to their proper place? No man, woman or child can survive forever under the scrutiny of living on a pedestal. We assign that position to them out of our own fears of failure. We believe that if we look up to them, they can show us the way. They can guide us better because they are higher above us and can see further down the path. This is a precarious position in which to live. You see, the higher the pedestal, the longer the fall from it. With so much heavy inspection, the pedestal will come crashing down, idol and all. When we assign someone–anyone—a place of such honor, we’ve replaced God with that person. We’ve committed idol worship. We’ve broken the First Commandment.

No one, not our spouses, our children, our jobs, our churches, our ministries, our own bodies or our pursuits of happiness can replace God and there still be true worship for the Almighty God in our hearts, no matter how many songs we sing, hands we raise or Bible studies we attend. God’s love for us is unconditional. There was nothing that we did to earn it and consequently, there is nothing we can do to lose it. He loves me. He loves you. He loves each one of us right now as much as He ever has or ever will. His love has no beginning and no ending. It has no conditions. His love is perfect and complete.

When we fall into the habit of trying to assign human characteristics of love to God, we don’t let Him down, we let ourselves down. We realize how little we know of true love, giving or receiving it. We believe it is a feeling that can change as easily as the direction of the wind. We forget that love is a verb. It is an action. It is a decision. It is a commitment. If we would learn to see the Cross as the definition of love, instead of what Hollywood and Hallmark would have us believe, we would begin to understand how to truly love. God decided to love us, committed to save us from our sin and acted by His death as our substitute so that we wouldn’t have to face death and condemnation. God is love. He is the living, breathing, acting definition of love. He isn’t waiting with a down turned frown and words of reprimand for us to fail, He’s waiting with open arms of love, waiting for us to get over ourselves and come back to where we belong, in His loving embrace, where He holds us up and will not and cannot ever let us down.

Angela Baker

Republished with Permission

Angela’s articles are published by the Pickens Sentinel and also on her blog