What are your New Year’s Resolutions? The top 3 New Year’s Resolutions for most people are: save more money, exercise more, eat healthier. Those are all great resolutions, but can I offer an even better one? This doesn’t come from me, but from the wisest teacher ever.
Jesus was once asked “what is the greatest thing we can do?” If this question were asked around New Years’ time, I think Jesus could have said this is the greatest New Year’s Resolution we could ever make. This “Resolution” was the central theme of Jesus’ teaching, and you could say it was also the central theme of the Old Testament. When Jesus was asked, “What is the greatest commandment” (i.e., the Greatest New Years’ Resolution ever), he didn’t hesitate for a second, but quickly answered with not one, but two commandments that are intertwined:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart. Love the Lord your God with all your soul. Love the Lord your God with all your mind. Love the Lord your God with all your strength. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as you Love yourself. All the Torah and Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matt. 22:37, 38).
Jesus pulled this straight from the heart of the Old Testament (Deut. 6:5). According to the ancient Jewish people, the highest good, the reason for life itself, is Love! To love God was the “greatest” and first command God gave to the people of Israel. This sounds more like an invitation than a command. Love! Isn’t that what we all really want to do anyway? Love invites relationship; love fills the heart with joy; love provides purpose and meaning; love is creative and not destructive; love builds a flourishing life and society.
The Old Testament scriptures are drenched with love. As Rabbi Yerucham Levovitz says, “Hesed [God’s unconditional love] is not only the important theme of the Torah, it is the theme of everything; all of Torah and of Creation flows from the value of hesed.”[1] The Psalms are filled with praise for the love of God: “I will sing of Yahweh’s hesed forever;” “Yahweh is good, his hesed endures forever;” “Taste and see that Yahweh is good!” (Ps. 89:1-4; 136:1; 34:8). The prophets extol the love of God: “What does the Lord require of you, O man, but to do justice, to love mercy (hesed), and to walk humbly with your God” (Mic. 6:8). The Song of Solomon has historically been seen as an account of the love affair between God and people. In this love ballad, the bride is sick with love for her groom. And should we be surprised at this? Didn’t God invent love? Is not the passionate intimacy between a man and woman a reflection of the passionate heart of God and his love for us? The Bible never tells us to love God first. Rather, it always says that it is God who has loved us first, and the greatest joy in life is in loving him back. Guess what the most repeated phrase in all the Bible is? “His love (hesed) endures forever.”
Love Came Down
If God is love (and He is), then God showed us exactly what love is. God doesn’t just talk a big talk about love; he put his money where his mouth is and went all the way. By becoming human in the man Jesus, God has revealed himself in a new and startling way, but in a way that is just like who he has always been. This revelation began with the shocking presence of the resurrected Jesus, which then made sense of the excruciating suffering Jesus endured purposefully on the cross. The revelation then began to have its full impact in the amazing, fresh outpouring of the Spirit of God that was promised in the Old Testament, not only for the people of Israel but for all people groups. The real, tangible, concrete Love of God had come down, and the Spirit of God’s love was poured into the hearts of a community of people that gathered from all nations and all walks of life.
Jesus showed us the heart of Father God, and it is overflowing with Love. The coming of Jesus has shown the world what love is. “God showed how much he loved us by sending his only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love. It is not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. And God has given us his Spirit as proof that we live in him and he in us. We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in him” (1 John 4:9-10, 13, 16).
RESOLUTION NUMBER ONE: LET YOURSELF BE LOVED BY GOD
In the coming days, let it soak in how much Creator God loves you. Think about this: Imagine God, the great God of the Universe, coming into the room where you are sitting. He bends down and starts taking off your shoes, then your socks, and he starts rubbing your feet. He takes a wash rag and begins washing your feet, getting between the toes, cleaning out lint and dirt, caressing your tired muscles. In shock, you grab his hands and say “Wait! You can’t do this. You created me, and how can I let you do this?” He gazes into your eyes and says, “If you don’t let me, you’ve missed the point of life.” And God continues to rub your feet and clean your toes. Have you ever thought of God like that? (see John 13).
According to Jesus, if we don’t see God as this Servant, washing our feet, we have missed God and missed out on life. Jesus says that if you do not let the God of love come and serve you, you have misunderstood this life. Unless we understand that we need God to wash our dirty feet, to clean forever our dirty laundry, then we cannot move past our past. Everything depends on this type of God. If God is not like this, then we have no hope.
But this is exactly what God is like. God is the one who is constantly accused but accuses no one. God is the one who would rather suffer the pain of love than take away our freedom to choose his love. God is the one who prepares the food and cleans the dishes, changes the diapers and takes out the trash, who serves the sentence for crimes he did not commit. God is the one who holds his children close after they destroy themselves. God is the one who pronounces the judgment knowing full well he will suffer the punishment for the crime. God is a Servant—that is his very nature.
At the core of all the Christian doctrines and teachings and Bible and books is one simple thought: Jesus loves me! The proclamation is that God is not a faraway God, but a God who sweats and bleeds and cries. And God does not just love us as a nation, group, or family, but as individuals. You are unique. The DNA structure that holds your body together is unlike any other human who has ever lived or ever will. And the hands that encoded you are the nail-scared hands of a loving Father: “Behold, I have called you by name, and I have engraved you on the palms of my hands” (Isa. 49:16). It has been said that if you were the only person God ever created, he still would have gone to all the trouble just to save you alone. “What other event in history, what other concept that has ever been conceived, has ever told us what love is as radically as the Cross?”[2]
Jesus’ enemies ridiculed him by saying, “He is a friend of sinners,” but they called it perfectly. Where did Jesus die? Between two criminals. And how did he die? As a common criminal. What does this say about God? That he comes to your corner of shame and regret and says, “I love you.” In the cross, God shouts as loudly as he can “I LOVE YOU!!”
Jesus has convinced me that the way to the heart of God is not through knowledge. I can know all things about God and be able to explain them convincingly and clearly, and I would not know God. The way to the heart of God is not through willpower and discipline. I can strive for moral excellence and be perfect in every form of behavior and be as far away from God as Simon. The way to the heart of God is wholly and completely by love. His love, not ours. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Bernard of Clairvaux put it this way: “Neither fear nor love of self can convert the soul. They change the appearance of one’s deeds from time to time, but never one’s character…. Love truly converts souls because it makes them willing…. the faithful wonder and reach out to that supreme love of his which surpasses all knowledge…The more surely you know yourself loved, the easier you will find it to love in return.”[3] Mechthild of Magdeburg cried out “O Lord, love me intensely, love me often and long! For the more often you love me, the purer I become. The more intensely you love me, the more beautiful I become. The longer you love me, the holier I become.”[4]
Resolution Number One this year: Let yourself be loved by God every day. Drench yourself with Scripture and spend time talking with and listening to this God who loves you!
RESOLUTION NUMBER TWO: LET HIS LOVE FLOW OUT FROM YOU
Love is a mystery—once we accept being loved unconditionally, love changes us to love in return, and we begin to realize we don’t really know love until we also start loving. Jesus teaches us how to love; in fact, “this whole world is a school set up by Love Himself to teach us to love.”[5] As we begin to start loving others, we realize what we receive from loving others is part of love’s great gift. Learning to love is like exercising. When you exercise, all the toxins drain from your body. It’s the same with love. As we stretch our capacity to love, we feel the toxins of selfishness and self-pity being drained and we are free, free from our selfish ways but also free from fear. “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). The more we love, the less fear we have. It turns out the best thing we can do for ourselves is to love others. “When Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves, it was not just for our neighbors’ sakes that he commanded it, but for our own sakes as well. Not to give of ourselves to the human beings we know who may be starving not for food but for what we have in our hearts to nourish them with is to be, ourselves, diminished and crippled as human beings.”[6] Jesus let us in on a secret of life: “It is better to give than it is to receive” (Acts 20:35).
Since we have seen what real love looks like, and since we are being filled with God’s Spirit of love daily, we in turn become what God always intended us to be—like his Son Jesus, lovers: “Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love has been brought to full expression through us. As we live in God, our love grows more perfect. We love each other as a result of his loving us first” (1 John 4:11-12, 19).
One of Jesus’ disciples, the apostle John, lived into his later years. As he grew older, his teaching seemed to crystallize into this one theme—the love of God. According to tradition, someone asked him why he only talked about the love of God. His answer: “Because there isn’t anything else.”
You can read more about the passionate love God has for you in my book Meet God (Before You Die), available on Amazon and at https://store.bookbaby.com/book/meet-god-before-you-die.
[1] Yerucham Levovitz, in Daniel Z. Feldman, Divine Footsteps: Chesed and the Jewish Soul (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2008), 2.
[2] Kreeft, The God Who Loves You (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 130.
[3] Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God, XII. 34, cited in G.R. Evans, Bernard of Clairvaux: Selected Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 200-201.
[4] Mechthild of Magdeburg, “Love Me Deeply.”
[5] Kreeft, 120.
[6] Frederick Buechner, Longing for Home: Recollections and Reflections (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1996), 139.