I managed to crash my car the other day ☹️. Going (slowly – honest!) round a corner in the snow, the back end slipped uncontrollably and the car slid slowly and remorselessly into a parked car. The rear passenger side door on my car took the full impact and was severely dented. The parked car escaped with less damage. Because of its age and mileage, my insurance company decided it was not economical to repair my car.
The result of all that is that I had to buy a new car. Now, ‘every cloud has a silver lining’ so I have ended up with a newer car which is better and will last a good few years.
So now I have two cars parked outside the house. The old one waiting to be taken away, and the new one. When you look out from the house, you see what looks like two perfectly good cars. When you go out into the street and look at the other side you see one perfect car and one that is damaged. If you inspect the damaged one you soon realise that the rear door won’t open and the front door is prevented from opening because of the distortion of the rear door.
So, two cars. Both, from one point of view, look the same. Both are drive-able. Both start, and run quite nicely. It’s only as you look closer that you see the limitations of one of them.
There are two kinds of Christianity, a bit like the two kinds of car. It’s only when you look closely that you realise that one version is deficient.
The deficient version can look like the perfect unmarked version. From one perspective it looks to be very good and it comes fitted with all the extras that some people expect. Sadly these are extras that don’t belong in Christianity. They are things like ‘oughts’, ‘musts’ and ‘have to’s’.
Just like the dented car, this version of Christianity may look good, it may sound good to the untrained ear, but really it turns out to be no good at all. Let’s start with the biggest “ought to”; we ought to love Jesus. After all, the question is asked, “don’t we know what He suffered for us and because of our sin?”
A famous Scottish Minister called P.T Forsyth once wrote this: “Do not tell people how they ought to feel towards Christ. That is useless. It is just what they cannot do. Preach a Christ that will make them feel as they ought.”
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
1 John 4v10
Until we let Him love us, until we know His love for us – actually know it, we will find it very hard to love Him. Yes we may have a mental understanding of His love, a bit like you might understand a set of accounts….in this column is all my sin and in the opposite column is His sacrifice – and yes I see, one balances out the other. (But that is a very poor picture of salvation anyway).
How do we know we are loved by Him? Holy Spirit is the One who makes it real to us. He reveals to us how much we are forgiven – read the prostitutes story at the end of Luke Chapter 7. But it goes much further than that. As we let Him love us, go on showing His love to us, we become what Ephesians calls “rooted and established in His love” (Ephesians 3 v 17). The more we have to do with Him, the more we talk to Him, the more we allow Him to look after us, the more we engage with Him, the more we see in the gospels how His love is like no other, then the more we find love for Him springing up in our own hearts.
Then it’s not a question of “I ought to love Him”. It’s a reality of “I cannot help but love Him”.
If we choose the wrong vehicle, the one with the “oughts” we soon find that one ‘ought’ leads very quickly to another. I ought to love Him, I ought to behave better, I ought to attend church, I ought to read the Bible, and so on and so on. It soon ends up with “I ought not mess up” – and you ought not mess up either! Knowing that that is impossible, we end up covering up if we mess up. Which is better; to love Him and mess up or to not mess up and not know what it is to love Him either?
When we find ourselves heading for the vehicle full of oughts, it’s time to stop, to turn to Him, to engage with Him, to talk to Him, to depend on Him a little and just let Him love us.
You may have no idea just how much He wants to do that.
Church is out there 