Christianity for People Who Aren't Christians, Part 1预览

You Are Intended for Love 

God made us in order to love us. We are tenderly crafted and designed, each as an individual, for the purpose of being related to, known, and deeply cherished. Yet this means we are also given the freedom to make choices with our life, to live as fully conscious, self-determining beings, even to the point of whether we choose to respond to the Creator’s love. God did not choose to seduce us against our will. Instead, he determined to woo us, knowing that in so doing, we might very well spurn his love. Freedom is the only way that love works.

This is the dynamic at the heart of human existence. God could have made me love him, but if he had, his relationship with me—and mine with him—would be meaningless. God wants my relationship with him and with others to be real. So when he created me, he took the risk of setting me free. The great leader of Israel, Joshua, voiced some of the most famous words in Scripture when speaking of this amazing liberty in relation to his own life: “If serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve. . . .But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15 NIV).

You may be tempted to say, “Well, if he knew how it was going to turn out, he should have never created us!”, because everything from cancer to concentration camps doesn’t seem worth it. Yet when we blithely say such things, we betray how little we know of love’s purity. Yes, God took a risk. Yes, the choice he gave each of us has resulted in pain and heartache and even tragedy. But where there is freedom, there will always be the possibility of both suffering and love. 

As C. S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain, “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involves, and you will find that you have excluded life itself.” God’s great longing is to commune with us for eternity. Remember, we haven’t seen the end of the story. With God, the story is always redemptive. What if suffering, on the other side of redemption, looks triumphant?

If God is love, then He creates all things from a place of perfect love. God must allow his creation to reciprocate in love and love cannot force. Is this difficult for you to accept? What does that tell you about your understanding of what love is?