What can I do with you, Ephraim?
What can I do with you, Judah?
Your love is like the morning mist,
Like the early dew that disappears. (Hosea 6:4 NIV)
Your declarations of love last no longer
Than morning mist and predawn dew. (The Message)
Your love for me disappears
More quickly than mist
Or dew at sunrise (CEV)
Talking and thinking a lot about love on here. My love is like what He describes above: fleeting, like how the sun burns up the morning dew.
His love, on the other hand, is constant, faithful, and pure. One thing I adore about His agape love is it “doesn’t delight in evil but rejoices in the truth.”
Real love doesn’t deceive. It doesn’t manipulate. It hates evil – not the person doing evil.
And it loves, loves truth.
That’s our beautiful God’s love.
What do you think this means for our communities? For me it means to continue exploring all those self-protective strategies with my safe community, remembering growth in Him is a process. I think it means choosing to remember all the ways that safe community has seen me mess up and they have still not withdrawn their love for me.
I think it also means letting down our cultural guard – the one that says we mind our own business and others mind their own. And instead we embrace our need for each other.
I also think delighting in truth and hating evil means if we have something against a brother or sister, we go directly to them. If we don’t we are violating love and our command in Scripture.
Because honestly? It’s like that song Broken by Lifehouse I heard yesterday:
“I am damaged at best
Like you’ve already figured out”
Friends, that’s all of us until heaven. We are going to hurt each other. It’s a guarantee.
But as people who are commanded to love our enemies, how do we get to a place of being able to love each other well?
Let’s start with our Father’s heart:
For I desire mercy, not sacrifice,
And acknowledgement of God
Rather than burnt offerings. (Hose 6:6 NIV)
I’m after love that lasts, not more religion.
I want you to know God, not go to more prayer meetings (The Message)
I’d rather for you to be faithful and to know me
Than to offer sacrifices. (CEV)
I want you to show love,
Not offer sacrifices.
I want you to know me
More than I want burnt offerings. (NLT)
God wants what any lover wants: us. If Dan is only doing things for me but never just knowing me, I am hurt.
So is He.
He desires loyalty to the covenant He made with us in Jesus’ blood more than what we do for Him.
Remember the original covenant? Genesis 15:9-10a, 12, 17-18a says:
“So the LORD said to [Abram],
‘Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.’
Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other…
As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him…
When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram…”
To cut a covenant with someone meant laying one half of an animal carcass across from the other half. The two parties would walk between the sliced animals saying, “May this be done to me if I don’t keep my oath.”
But in His beautiful covenant with Abram, God alone – our Consuming Fire, in the form of a smoking firepot and blazing torch – passes through the pieces. Abram wasn’t even awake! Nothing depended on him. Everything depended on God.
Oh, friends, how much more the New Covenant He made with the death of His Son? Everything depends on the sacrifice made on our behalf. The covenant is still uniquely one-sided.
When we remember that, it humbles us. We can look at each other with the enormity of what He’s forgiven and give that same grace to each other.
He has done all the work. We rest in the Cross and get to know the heart behind the One Who would lay it all down for a sleeping people who will never realize the fullness of what He’s done for us until One Day we see.