All about the love

2: looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

I can remember times, even very recently, when I could describe God's love in nearly tangible terms. It was there when I worshiped, there when I prayed, there when I listened to sermons, even there when I just spent time with my friends. It was a love that I thought I could hold in my lap, near and close to me. But right now, that love is anything but the way that I just described it. When I get overridden by anxiety and sudden panic, where is God's love? When I feel that I'm wasting away this entire year, my last year in college that should've been a time to strengthen friendships that will last beyond my time here, where's God's love in that? Am I blind or ignorant? Is God punishing me? Is this discipline?

Not a lot of me wants to say that I want God's love again. What I had experienced about God's love seems like just a disappointment to me now, and I just feel that the hurt and pain would just come back again if I opened myself up again to that love. But last night, 11/22/09, I listened to Tim Keller preach at the 7:15pm Redeemer service on James 1. He spoke on his understanding that perseverance through suffering doesn't come just by smiling at pain or by a simple changing of perspective to make pain into joy. Perseverance comes out of love, the perfect model being Jesus going to the cross.

I guess I really can't imagine how much it hurt for Jesus to feel abandoned by God's love, a love that he had grown and lived by. But even worse, that love was taken from him at a moment that he needed it the most. But still he somehow found something worth enduring for. He knew that in time, he would be raised up, clothed in his father's purple robes of majesty, and sit at his right hand again, closer, more loved, cherished, and honored than before. That made all the suffering in the world worth it for him.

I'm not there yet. I guess no one can really ever be. But maybe that's a good place to start: remembering why Jesus went to the cross for me, and why it was worth it for him.

Created over 2 years ago