Wired for Love

I listened to this great message series recently called “Wired for Love.” It’s almost completely explained by the title: it’s about the fact that God has designed, “wired,” us for relationships with others: first with Him, but also one other person in marriage and with other people in our lives such as friends, family and coworkers.

The pastor creatively uses science to explain how God has wired us to form all of these various connections. But he starts with having a relationship with God, from which all other right human relationships flow. He also looks at behaviors – viewing pornography, promiscuity, cheating, manipulating, sexual victimization – that the enemy uses to keep us from experiencing God’s best in all relationships and instead cloud us with guilt, shame, anger, bitterness and fear. He ends with a picture of a romantic relationship that honors God. And during each message he provides solid, biblical relationship advice presented in a very dynamic way! It is very much worth the listen (and so are his other messages)!

As I listened to the series, I could not help but be reminded of a truth about God that blows my mind: the fact that He, the Creator of the big, vast Universe – wants to have a real, personal relationship with me. David sums up how this wonderful knowledge makes me feel in Psalm 8: 3-4:

3 When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
4 what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
5 You have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honor.

The more I grow in my relationship with God, the more that I come to understand how awesome it is that He, the Creator of the Universe, loved us so much that He pursued us all the way to the Cross so that we had a way to reach Him, relate to Him personally, despite our sin. The Bible says in John 1 that he came became flesh and dwelled among us. When Jesus was on earth, He had relationships with ordinary people – especially His disciples, who were mostly uneducated and probably even teenagers. And after resurrecting, He left His promised Spirit, through which those simple disciples received power and did extraordinary things for God. Their accounts in the New Testament are not just stories for old times, but living, powerful words that remind us that He continues to use us through our relationships with Him today.

Yet we often take the out stretched, life-giving arms of the God of the Universe for granted, choosing not to relate to Him on His terms, but instead our own. We think we do Him a favor when we go to church, serve on a ministry team or read our Bible every now and then. We get mad at Him for not doing what we want Him to do. But the truth is, He doesn’t even have to deal with us. He’s God – the one who created mountains, plants, animals, light, night, angels, people – everything! He could always be too busy for us. Yet he never is. And He loves us so much and wants to make our lives full because of our relationships with Him.

There are many verses in the Bible that capture God’s story of relating to us since the beginning, but there is one that I rank at or near the very top, from the mouth of Jesus:

10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. (NIV)
10 The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. (NKJV)

Satan, the thief, tries to thwart God’s perfect plans for our relationships by distorting what right relationships look like. And we buy into his lies far too often – just a couple of the ways in how we approach physicality in dating relationships and in how we choose people to date. Yet Jesus always offers us abundant life that wasn’t meant to stop with just life after death, but, more immediately, to give us a marvelous life at present that includes thriving relationships here on earth with Him and others.

Let’s trade Satan’s cheap, junky substitutes for relationships and grow in our relationships with God daily and, in turn, flourish in our relationships with others.

Please check out “Wired for Love!” It’s available on iTunes: Podcasts> Miles McPherson The Rock Church – Weekend Messages. Note it is video only on iTunes. Or, you can get access to mp3 and video versions of the series, and the full message archives here (2011, September 18-October 23. If you click on individual messages you will be directed to a page where you can also get copies of the sermons notes, which he refers to as lesson plans in each of his messages).

Happy listening!

Freedom from Worry (Peace)

God’s been doing something awesome in my life: helping me overcome worry.

As I’ve shared before, for me worry comes in the form of thinking a million what ifs about a situation, surmising from A to Z without skipping any letters, I’ve put it before. At times I’ll say I’ve committed something to God, but in my mind I'll still wonder about all the possible outcomes, negative and positive, rather than just trust that God will accomplish His purpose - the best outcome.

Yet I recently noticed that for the last few months, I haven’t worried much about anything. Not that I haven’t had cares, but I’ve seen God take them away as I’ve meditated on His precepts more. I realized this a few weeks ago as I read Psalm 131, a short but powerful Psalm of David:

1 My heart is not proud, LORD,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
2 But I have calmed and quieted myself,
I am like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child I am content.
3 Israel, put your hope in the LORD
both now and forevermore.

I was especially struck by the second part of verse 1 to the first part of verse 2: “I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have calmed and quieted myself…” Then I focused on the refrain in verse 3: “Israel put your hope in the LORD, both now and forevermore.” As my devotional book also pointed out, rather than worrying himself with the burdens of life – including the “what ifs,” David recognized that they were beyond his control, “great matters or things too wonderful" (v.1). He let those cares go, putting them into the hands of the Maker. And he could urge Israel to do the same (v.3).

The mention of Israel, one word, is so striking here. The Nation of Israel, as we often hear, is the descendants of Abraham and God’s chosen people, through whom He sent Jesus. Because of Christ we have that same heritage. As I read “Israel” in this context, a verse from the New Testament came to mind about the status of believers in Christ, written by the apostle Paul to the Gentile Christians in Galatia:

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” (Galatians 3:28)

Romans 8:16-18 also says this about the nature of our status as heirs when we receive Christ:

“16 The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. 17 Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.

Present Suffering and Future Glory
18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”

By receiving Jesus, we’ve become “co-heirs” – joint heirs – with Christ, through which, ultimately, we will not just see, but experience, His glory. We have that promise as children of God despite the challenges we may face in this life.

So, again, about this life? As David points out in Psalm 131, we don’t have to dwell on the things we experience or hear about that we can’t explain. Instead, we should put them in the care of The One who can explain them. It is only in heaven that we will have full knowledge when God reveals it to us. We are best off entrusting our worries to Him.

Reading Psalm 131, I was reminded how God has been using increases in my time in His Word, praising Him through song and listening to sermon podcasts to renew my mind and turn my focus to Him. I’ve been so much busier meditating on the things of God that I haven’t had time to worry. That’s the way God works – minute by minute – hour by hour - day by day – until we look back months or years later and are able to marvel on how He's been changing us. What an awesome God we call on!

Psalm 131 also reminded me of ”Unpredicatable,” a song by Francesca Battistelli, a contemporary Christian artist, that puts David’s words in a modern prayer. In the song she talks about how in life we often wonder what God’s doing or what His plans are, but in those moments she prays for God to give her His peace: “So help me to rest in the mystery of what I can’t understand...”

I love those words! As in Psalm 131, she recognizes that worrying about life is beyond her control, and that there’s a supernatural peace – a rest, that comes in the fact that we can entrust life to the Omniscient God. In fact, it can be exciting- a mystery – to see how God writes each page of the narrative of our lives. We might not know each chapter, but we know the ending will be blissful, as promised in 1 Corinthians 2:9 -

“However, as it is written:
“What no eye has seen,
what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived”[a]—
the things God has prepared for those who love him”

That’s the beauty of the abundant life with Jesus. Ah, what freedom!

Here are the lyrics of “Unpredictable,” a Psalm 131 remix.

Let’s find freedom in resting in Him. He’s unpredictable, but He’s also perfect. Perfectly unpredictable.