Reformátusok Lapja, 1970 (70. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1970-08-01 / 8-9. szám

REFORMÁTUSOK LAPJA

11

LOVE IS... TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING

(Continued from June-July issue)

The love which God communicates to us is not temporary, once in a lifetime, limited by our human capacities to feel, to sense. And the love which God communicates alone makes us feel, know, sense that we are accepted, that we are one with the purpose and meaning of the entire universe.

How is this so?

Remember, I said that love must be an experience. Love must be an experience in which we also can participate. And now I would like to add that love must be the experience in which we give of ourselves to someone else. Love is that experience in which we give of ourselves to someone else in order that they may feel wanted, worthwhile, completed, that they may feel like a human being, instead of feeling like some thing or object or tool of our desires and selfish wills.

Let’s go over that again.

Love is the act, the experience of real recognition of the other person. It is the experience at the very heart of our humanity. It is the word which says that you are a human, you are worthwhile, valuable, a child of God.

But we must immediately recognize that all our attempts at this act of total self-giving, total investment in the other, is always doomed by our very nature. Our love is always and only an approximation. We love with reservation. Our love is only a shadow of the real love experience.

That is why we so easily identify the risk involved in love, the heartbreaks and disappointments of love, the elusiveness of love. Our very nature limits us to loving only a few, perhaps only one at a time. The experience is always and only a haphazard thing—we fall in love, we fall out of love. We mix love with our emotions, our infatuations, our desires.

When John says that God is love he wants to remind us that man is not, that man has fallen short of that hallmark of divinity.

But in the same breath he is telling us that we can love because we are loved. We can become lovers because God is a lover. We are accepted, worthwhile, valuable, human, children of God—not because we can love, but because God is love.

You see, the point I want to make and I would like to make it more clearly although I am limited by my own words, is that man must be loved in order to be able to love. That man must know, that you must know that in this often desperate and loveless and cold, cruel world, you are a somebody—you are loved.

So we come at last to the revelation of love which is Jesus Christ. We do not come here last because this is somehow the end of love, but because this is the beginning of the experience of love. And I will contend this week that love must be measured and weighed against the experience we have with Jesus Christ.

For in Jesus Christ God broke through the barriers of words and commandments and our simple lack of love. As John puts it: “For God is love, and his love was disclosed to us in this, that he sent his only Son into the world to bring us life, . . . (and to be) . . . the remedy for the defilement of our sins.”

This then shall be our point of departure this week. Love cannot be defined, it must be experienced. We cannot know love apart from loving. Loving is that experience in which we give of ourselves to another. The pattern for this self-giving, its ground of possibility, its most concrete expression is the giving by God of Himself for us that we may have life. There is no life without that love. One can breathe, and eat, and drink, and walk and talk, but without love there is no life, only a passing of time between two eternities.

Love is that experience in which we give of ourselves so that there may be life in someone else.

Now I have some questions that you may want to discuss in your groups.

1. How do we experience the love of God?

2. Even though love may not be a feeling itself, there is feeling involved in love. What is the relationship of this feeling to love?

3. What is the opposite of love?

4. How does divine love make human love possible?

5. Can a person love without knowing God?

Certainly there are many other questions that you may want to raise. I will be interested in all of them although I cannot promise you that I will say today what I want to say tomorrow or the day after. As preparation for our next session together tomorrow morning, I might tell you that I will talk on the subject of Lesser Loves and Common Confusions. What do you think they may be?

Leslie Borsay---------------------------------------ELDERS

As it is a great honor to bear office in the Lord’s house, so is it also a solemn trust which no one should take upon himself rashly or lightly. For although your election has been by the free choice of your fellow members, you are not to regard yourselves merely as servants of men, but also as servants of Christ. You should therefore magnify your office, and make high account of its duties as a service to be rendered unto God, and not simply to men.

Elders are appointed to assist and support the Ministers of the Word in the general government of the Church. They form, with the Minister, in each particular charge, a council in common for the spiritual supervision of the flock which is committed to their care. They are to be the advisers and counsellors of the Minister in the discharge of his holy office; they are to be to him as hands and eyes, acting with him and for him, and representing his presence throughout the Congregation. It is their province to go before the flock in the way of Christian example, to watch over it in the Lord, to take an active interest in its spiritual welfare, to feel a responsibility for its condition, to be at hand in all circumstances with spiritual aid for its necessities and wants. To them, moreover, in conjunction with the Pastor, belongs the whole discipline of the Church, its power of the keys, as exercised both in the form of censure and in the form of restoration.

From: Book of Worship, E. & R. Church