When Christ was being crucified, the soldiers at His feet were bartering over his clothes. Picture the scene: you’re wheezing, you feel your life ebbing out of you, and the words you hear below you are, “Aww, come on now–don’t be such a pig–throw the dice again.”
A prostitute reduces a man to a loaf of bread; your executioners reduce you to a suit of clothes.
One of those articles of clothing always piqued my interest: it was a seamless undergarment. My fascination grew as I learned that the technology to weave such a garment had only lately been discovered. The fact that Jesus owned this helps confirm the date He walked the Earth.
But this garment has other reasons for making me stop and consider.
I see it as a symbol.
You see, the longer I live, the more I realize how seamless Christ’s reality is. We often talk about being “one with nature.” By that we mean embedding ourselves in a haunting forest, losing ourselves in a gorgeous sunset, or restoring our sense of wonder by watching waves crash on a desolate shore.
But all of these experiences point us to a deeper oneness–a oneness with our Creator God. He offers not only salvation, not only purpose, not only peace–He offers Himself. He Himself is the path through which all of these means of grace enter our lives.
If we accept Him, as we accept a suitor, we accept His daily presence. We welcome Him to know us and we long to know Him.
It’s how love begins to make sense. Paul spoke about longing for the Philippians with the affection of Christ Jesus. This verse, like so many I’ve read but never heard explained, took me aback. “The affection of Christ Jesus” what is this?
Then I thought of those times when my heart would inexplicably be filled with a sloshing, overflowing kind of love. I don’t just mean the warm fuzzies when a certain sweetheart’s name is mentioned. I mean when you’re a camp counselor and you’re utterly exhausted, but as you lay on your bunk trying to fall asleep, your heart expands like the Grinch’s just a few degrees because God is pouring so much stinkin’ love into it that your poor, cramped heart has to expand in order to fit it all. Of course, it’s a losing battle. Your heart can’t possibly contain that much love. The love God gives you come spilling out, pouring into the lives of those around you.
It’s so obvious to you that this wasn’t love that you manufactured that you have to laugh. It’s because God gave you the new wineskins of a new heart that there’s any way your heart isn’t bursting within you. He knew what He was doing when He gave you that new heart, that heart of flesh instead of stone.
He’s the source of all love. He enables us not only to reach out in love to those who are inherently lovable–the 4-year-old singing a ditty to herself as she does a jigsaw puzzle or the grandfather who wants to tell you a funny story–He equips us to offer love to those who are inherently unlovable–the sullen, pimply teenager who publicly insults us or the frenemy who’s gotten just close enough to us to betray our secrets.
I used to be afraid to love because I was so afraid of losing what I loved. As a child, I would sometimes wake up in a panic, thinking that my parents may have died in the night. When I was able to surrender them to Christ, I found peace in loving them. I didn’t claw after them, demanding that God let us live the exact same timeframe on earth so that I would never need to live without them. Instead, I gave them to God. I knew He loved them more deeply and more closely than I ever could. It was by His grace that I could love them, and I prayed that He would help me love them as He did.
I used to be afraid of having a crush. After all, if I had even the inkling of romantic love in my heart, wasn’t that taking away my love for my Savior? I saw love as a zero sum game: that any love allotted to one person in my life inherently limited my love for another. I thought I was applying Scripture well to think that because Paul warned that while a single woman could pursue God wholeheartedly, a married woman had to stop to please her husband, I shouldn’t even desire to be in a relationship with a guy.
But what I’ve been learning is that all my love–from my love for a cat to my love for my sister–can draw me closer to God. God does not sit in Heaven peevish because “in addition” to loving Him, I also love my best friend. Godly love–true love–enhances my love of Christ. I see every good thing in my life as a gift from Him. He is the true love sung of in the Twelve Days of Christmas. He is pouring down gifts of love into my life, wooing my heart to His.
It wasn’t until recently that I started understanding how it was possible to grow in your love with Christ. I thought you just loved Him wholeheartedly and that was the end of it. But if my heart expands, I’m able to love Him more. And when I love Him more, I begin to realize how much love He has been showing me all along.
For years, I’ve had the verses, “Daughter of Jerusalem, I charge you by the gazelles and by the does of the field: Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.” (Song of Solomon 2:6). I always thought of it exclusively in reference to the romantic love between a man and a woman. Essentially, I interpreted it to mean that I shouldn’t try to force romantic love to grow; I should wait for God to plant it in the heart of the one I was supposed to love as a husband and in my own heart.
But recently I’ve started to see that this holds true for Christ’s relationship with me, too. One of the most beautiful love stories I’ve ever read is the story of Emma. Here you have this headstrong, impulsive girl who often thoughtlessly insults people or meddles in their affairs. But a close family friend is always helping her see how she should change, gently correcting her and inviting her to show more love to those around her. Her response is often indignant. What right does he have to correct her? Why can’t he just mind his own business?
As the story unfolds, we realize why he can’t just leave her alone. While he is a family friend who has the entire family’s best interest at heart, Emma–foolish, impulsive Emma–has captured his heart. He does not force his love on her; even though for years he’s known that he loved her. He does not speak of it, until she is ready. Until she invites her love and is mature enough to begin to understand it.
I see this in Christ’s love for me. When I was a child, the main way He expressed His love for me was by correcting me. And oh brother, there were plenty of things to correct! At times I grew indignant over His treatment of me: why couldn’t He just let me be who I was? Why must He always be trying to change me?
But the reason was the same as why Mr. Knightley couldn’t simply turn away from Emma and leave her to her own devices: He loved me.
Jesus could see through the gangliness of my growing soul to see who I could be.
His expressed His love for me mainly as correction until that day when I turned to Him and said, “I think I love you.”
Those words were enough for Him to show me how, from the earliest moment when my name had appeared in His mind, He had loved me.
Frankly, His passion for me unnerved me. How could a man so good, so pure, so holy love a creature like me? I was more comfortable with him being on a plane above me, correcting my stupidity from a distance. If I kept my distance, I might not ruin or contaminate Him.
But He desired a close relationship with me–the chance to share our deepest thoughts with one another.
Those verses from the Song of Solomon were for us: He did not offer this love to me until I was ready to understand it.
This love of His for me has changed who I am. I had been surrendering to fears right and left–fears about career, about family, about relationships. Adulthood seemed to usher me into isolation: as a child, I was told what to do. As a young adult, I could often ask others for advice and follow it. But here, as an adult, I was expected to be self directed, confident, sure. But I was anything of those things. I longed to have someone I could talk things over with–someone who was not on the outside of my life, but who I was living it with side-by-side.
I wanted to know and to be known.
At the same time, I realized that this desire went so much deeper than the desire for a boyfriend or even an earthly husband. I knew myself well enough to know that my analytical brain could pick any person to pieces and find that the absolute love I wanted to offer would shrink from them at some point or another. I also knew that my flaws, my sin patterns, my selfishness would at some point alienate me from even the most loving of men.
I needed a relationship so solid, so unflinching that every other relationship in my life could be based upon it.
So many apologetics talks are based on scientific or historical evidence. But the deepest evidence I found for Christ was my desire to love someone who was perfect, someone who was all powerful, someone I could worship unflinchingly and talk to incessantly.
Once I discovered the One my soul loves, there is no going back.
The verse that more than any other revealed to me that this Man existed and He longed to love me as I longed to love Him was: “Perfect love casts out all fear.”
I didn’t know what it meant, but it kept drawing me to it like a techie to an Apple demo. What did it mean? Why did I feel this inner thrill just trying to understand it?
I started seeing that my fear often hinged on being known. A favorite song I’d once heard on the radio asked, essentially, “Would you love me if you really knew me?” It was dishonest to not reveal to someone who you really were, but the fear was that if you actually showed him your inner soul, he would reject you because of what he found.
But here was a river of hope: God might actually love me–in spite of knowing me.
I thought I had to hide all the junk in my life before someone could ever look at me. But I shrank from this approach because I loved honesty. I longed to be completely honest with someone: to not feel as if they were only accepting me because they saw the parlor of my life instead of the storage unit overflowing with useless junk. I knew I needed help, I longed to be in a close relationship, but I also instinctively shrank from being in a closer relationship if that meant I would hurt the other person.
Glimmers of hope started appearing in my life. I started seeing that those who truly loved me often loved me in spite of myself–in spite of my inherent unloveliness. When I fell, hit my head, and developed a terrific shiner, my family and friends didn’t shy away from me because I looked like an inverse panda bear. They loved me anyway.
When I struck out in angry words against my mother, saying things I meant only in the heat of selfishness and arrogance, she forgave me.
If these precious people could love me in spite of myself, perhaps God could, too. If these people could truly know me–know my weirdness, my past, my insecurities–and yet love me, perhaps the One who knew all could also love me.
I started seeing that the only thing keeping me from walking more closely with Christ was my own dwarfed soul–dwarfed by my love for sin.
If I could surrender my mess to Him, if I could trust that He would accept me, if I could turn my focus from my own shortcomings to His abundance–I could love Him.
In the most bizarre set of circumstances I’ve ever experienced, Jesus gives me the love to love Him.
I can’t love Him on my own, even though I desire to. My stupid soul can’t comprehend Him. But my desire to be in a relationship with Him is enough. He supplies every lack in me. Just as in Michelangelo’s painting, His strong and loving hand stretches toward my limp and languid one. But the sign of life in me–my ability to turn my eyes toward Him–He can see the welcome that is here and rushes to greet it.
Every love story I’ve ever heard has become the story of Christ’s love for me.
Most gloriously of all, I am not the only one who can experience this love.
In the most fantastically ironic truth of all time, Christ offers Himself in this pure and selfless way to each person who has ever lived and ever will live.
He offers to know you–and to love you. To see through the cloud of doubt, pain, and regret to who you really are. That is the person He loves: not just the person you wish you were, not just the person you thought you could be–but the person He is helping you to be.
This is love.
This is Christ.