©2001 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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6/10/01 |
More On The Papa Love Of God |
Romans 8:15 |
6/10/01 More On The Papa Love Of God
We are studying the last half of the 8th chapter of the Paul’s letter to the Romans.
It is a passage filled with tremendous hope and encouragement,
a passage in which Paul takes the truths he has been presenting to us
in the preceding seven and a half chapters
and applies them to our lives right where we live.
This is where Paul moves from truth
to application.
For seven chapters we have listened to Paul
as he told us about the way in which
through faith in Jesus Christ
God has already accomplished tremendous changes in our lives.
Now, in these remaining verses of chapter 8
he helps us to understand
how we can expect those changes
to impact our daily lives.
In this section Paul makes 3 major statements:
1. He begins by offering us 5 evidences of the true believer,
5 assurances of the presence of Christ within us.
This is the section we almost finished last week...
almost because I have just another comment or two to add today
before we move on to section 2.
2. Then Paul offers the Christian
5 powerful words of encouragement.
3. And finally he ends the chapter
with five things every Christian needs to know about the nature of God’s relationship with the Christian.
And just to get our minds back into our study,
let me remind us of those 5 evidences of true faith we looked at the past two weeks.
In Romans 8:12-17 Paul tells us that:
1. The true child of God lives with a continual tension between our new, holy heart,
and our ongoing impulses of the flesh.
2. The true child of God is indwelt by the Spirit of God.
3. The true child of God
has received a spirit of adoption,
a spirit-awareness within us
that prompts us to reach out to God,
not just as the almighty Creator of the universe,
but as our Papa,
our Father.
4. The Holy Spirit has given the Christian the ability to make today’s choices
in the light of our eternal union with our God.
and 5. The true child of God will find
that his union with Christ
brings into his life a measure of suffering
that would not have existed
had Christ not been present within him.
Now, we need to do a lot more with that 5th evidence of true faith,
and that’s where we’ll head next,
but first I want to make just one additional observation
about that Papa relationship God has established between Himself and the Christian.
We spent a great deal of our time last week
talking about the way in which,
through Christ’s removal of our sins,
God has now created for us
an eternal Papa/child relationship
between Himself and the Christian.
It is a relationship
unlike anything any of us have ever experienced
or even imagined prior to our union with God through Christ,
a relationship filled with His intimate involvement in our lives,
built upon a foundation of absolute trust and security.
The word “Abba” used by Paul to describe this relationship
is one carefully selected
to create for us the mental and emotional image of a small child
cradled in the arms of his or her Papa.
It is intended by God
to present us with a powerful image that can help recreate our understanding
both of our God
and of our relationship with Him.
The problem we run into with this image, though,
is that, with all of us,
our concept of “Papa” begins with our human fathers.
And the truth is, every human father who has ever lived
has fathered imperfectly
because every father who has ever lived
has been an imperfect being.
Obviously there are a few fathers in our society
who have been hideous in the way they have related to their children -
some who have abandoned their sons or daughters,
or who have physically,
or sexually,
or emotionally abused them.
But even with the many
who have longed to parent with love and wisdom,
there are times when our fathering
falls far short of what is right.
Which means, of course,
that every one of us begins our Papa relationship with God
with a flawed Papa image in our minds.
I mention this not because I can teach us into an instant solution,
but simply because it is healthy for us to know that one of the things God’s Spirit does within us
is to help us reshape our Papa image of God
in those areas where it is flawed.
There will be points in our lives,
sometimes when we least expect it,
when our God will pick us up
and hug us in a way that allows us to see into His heart and gain a glimpse
of the depth of His love for us.
A big part of the problem we run into with this whole thing
is that our ability to accurately hear the voice of our God communicating His love to us
is so deeply damaged.
The truth is,
most of the things we think would communicate His love to us
simply would not do what we think they would do.
We may find ourselves thinking,
“If God wants to tell me He loves me in a way I can hear
all he has to do is to let me win the lottery,
or pour some huge chunk of money onto me so that I can pay all my bills.
Or He could give me a relationship with that person I know I just have to have in my life right now,
but who doesn’t even know or even care that I exist.
Or He could instantly heal this illness,
or this weakness,
or this deformity in my life.”
In other words,
we begin our thinking
by believing what God does for us
will communicate His love to us.
And what we want Him to do for us
nearly always involves
our success,
or comfort,
or status,
or our emotional security within the immediate context of the society in which we live.
Last year I began a very enjoyable correspondence
with a young man In Ghana, West Africa
who purchased a copy of The Grace Exchange
from some floating Christian book store
that put into port where he lived.
He wrote me
and we have been exchanging letters ever since.
But somehow my name and address
was taken by the postmaster in that village in Ghana
and made available to dozens of other church people in the area.
And now every few weeks I receive another letter from some young Christian
greeting me in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,
wishing blessings upon me,
and then asking me for money,
or for footballs,
or for books,
or for school supplies,
or for any other gifts I would be willing to send.
I have finally gotten to the point where I have written up a little form letter I send back
telling the young Christian
that the only thing I really have to offer them
is a better understanding of who their God is,
and that, if they contact my friend, Joseph Gyebi,
he will loan them a copy of a book
that will help them discover the truth.
I then encourage them to write back
if they find things in the book they don’t understand,
or things they want more help with.
And guess what?
When they find out I won’t send them money or gifts
they never write back.
At first, as this flood of letters began to arrive,
I found myself getting irritated with those who wrote,
until I realized these baby Christians were simply relating to me
the same way we all relate to our Heavenly Papa
as we try to understand His love for us.
They all brought with them
the belief that true Christian love
would motivate me to give them
the things they believed they really needed in order to be happy.
And when I didn’t send them what they wanted,
they stopped writing.
And what most of them will never know
is that I was more than willing
to give them
not what they were asking for -
a few American dollars that would have made them feel good for a day or two
and never changed their lives,
but what their spirits really long for,
a better understanding
of what it means for a human being
to live in the presence of the love of God through Jesus Christ
every second of their lives.
My point in all of this
is simply that
just as some of my African brothers and sisters approached me
with a rigidly defined concept
of what they thought I should give them
in order to communicate love to them,
so we often find it difficult
to hear God’s voice of love for us
because we bring to Him a rigidly defined but deeply flawed concept of what “love” means,
and how He must communicate that love.
You see, we nearly always begin our thinking from the wrong direction.
We believe happiness and joy enter our lives from the outside.
We believe they are the result
of what happens to us,
the result of what God has given to us or withheld from us.
I mentioned a few minutes ago
that we might find ourselves thinking,
“If God wanted to show me His Papa love
all He would have to do
is to plop a bunch of money into my life
so that I could pay all my bills.”
But the truth is
many of us have those bills
because we have been spending money compulsively
because we feel desperately empty,
and insignificant,
and unimportant,
and lonely inside,
and we are trying to bolster our self-concept
with more and more things.
We look to the externals,
hoping there is something from the outside
that we can cram into our lives
that will quiet the agony within.
But when God begins speaking His Papa love to us,
He begins with the knowledge
that our discontentment
does not come from what is happening to us,
it comes from what is taking place within us.
He starts by speaking to our spirit
about who we really are.
He tells us we are His holy ones
whom He loves with an everlasting love.
He talks with us about the true source of our value -
not the value our society places upon us
on the basis of our personality,
or our IQ,
or our possessions,
or our appearance,
but the true, eternal value we have to Him,
personally,
individually,
a value so immense
that He was willing to remove our sins from us
through His own death in our place
just so that we could live with Him in His presence forever.
We think true happiness can be found through what we possess,
but our God knows us perfectly,
and He knows that true happiness
can only be found in our understanding who we are in the light of His love.
That does not mean He will necessarily
have to take our “things” away from us
before He can give us eyes to see the truth.
But it does mean we are never truly free to enjoy the things we possess
until He has shown us
we do not need to possess them in order to be happy.
If my spirit is not at peace when I possess nothing, or little,
it will certainly not be at peace when I possess much.
The same thing applies to our relationships with others.
God has designed us in such a way
that we need healthy love relationships with other people,
both male and female.
But our ability to love others
and to receive love from them
begins first with our having heard and accepted God’s love for us.
If we have not yet entered into a personal love exchange between us and our God,
we will be driven to use others to validate ourselves,
or attempt to use their love
to fill our vacuum for God’s love within us.
No human relationship can fill that God vacuum within us,
and if we try to make it do so
we will end up clinging to those around us
in a desperate attempt to draw from them
what their love can never deliver,
or we will eventually turn against them
when they fail to meet our deepest needs
and move on to someone else
in a never-ending search for some other human being who can fill the void.
Only when we have first heard the voice of our God
telling us He loves us,
and in that love confirming our eternal worth,
and significance to Him,
only then are we able to love others
without clinging to them for our own validation,
or crushing them under the load of our unmet love needs.
I certainly do not want to suggest
that we do not need strong, deep human love relationships in our lives.
God Himself is the one who said to Adam,
before any sin had ever touched this world in any way,
GEN 2:18 “It is not good for the man to be alone...”
And Christ Himself told us
that the two greatest needs in our lives
are the need for a love relationship with God,
and the need for love relationships with those around us. (Matt. 22:37-39)
But what we so often fail to realize
is that it is our entrance into the Father love of God
that provides us with the entrance into all healthy human relationships as well.
Only when I know who I am in the light of His love for me
can I reach out in love to you
without destroying the relationship under the weight of my own needs.
And only when I have first begun to trust
the Papa love of God
can I then trust Him to show me how to love others.
No human being is born
knowing how to love.
We are born needing love,
but we must learn how to love.
And God alone can give us
both the guidance
and the courage to break out of our isolation
and risk touching another human being at the spirit level
and allowing them to do the same to us.
But we will only follow His lead,
letting go when He says we must let go,
and moving ahead when He says we should move ahead,
when we trust His love for us.
Now, obviously we are not going to get back into our list of encouragements in Romans 8 today.
But I don’t want to leave this whole business of the Papa relationship with God
without doing my best to pull it together for us.
Throughout these first 8 chapters of Romans
Paul has been preparing us for this truth -
that the work of Jesus Christ for us on the Cross
has profoundly altered our relationship with God.
And nowhere does the depth of that change
come through more clearly
than in his description of God as our Abba Father.
And where our human fathers modeled well
our Heavenly Father’s relationship with us
it can serve us well.
But if you find yourself reacting to the thought of God as your Abba Father
it may be because you are attributing to God
some flawed parenting approach that you saw in your dad.
Several weeks ago I offered you
my most recent attempt at communicating
what I believe to be the central calling of life for every human being,
the thing for which all of us have been placed upon this world -
the discovery that our God is absolutely,
eternally,
and intimately GOOD.
It is that same truth that forms the heart
of what we have been looking at here.
To understand the Abba Father love of our God for us
is to understand that relationship with Him
within the context of His absolute and total GOODNESS.
MAT 7:11 "If
you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much
more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!
And we will know we have finally gained a tiny glimpse of the way He really is
when we find within our spirit
a cry welling up that says,
“You, oh Lord my God, Abba Father,
You are what I have been longing for from the very beginning.
You, and what You choose to give me,
are all I will ever need.”