The Expansiveness of God’s Love

Good Friday

At the start of the year, I realized that I was overdoing my spiritual practices. I was overdoing them, which is typical for most areas of my life. I had over-prescribed myself, and they had become so formulaic that is squeezed out any relational freedom in Christ.

With the help of a spiritual director, I have been working to establish new rhythms. I have found that less is more, in that I am experiencing more of Christ’s presence, in and out of the practice time, by having fewer practices.

For years I have been reading the book of Psalms each month. I am now just staying in one psalm, the same psalm, for an extended period.

Over the last couple of months, I have been in Psalm 36, and the riches of these twelve verses amaze me. I just realized the significance of it having twelve verses, which was a nice surprise.

Psalm 36 speaks to how sin narrows our perspective on life, but when we encounter the Cross, we get a vast perspective on the expansiveness of God’s love.

The Narrowness of Sin

Transgression speaks to the wicked deep in his heart;
there is no fear of God before his eyes.
For he flatters himself in his own eyes
that his iniquity cannot be found out and hated.
The words of his mouth are trouble and deceit;
he has ceased to act wisely and do good.
He plots trouble while on his bed;
he sets himself in a way that is not good;
he does not reject evil.
Psalm 36:1-4

When we no longer fear God, we fall into sinful patterns. I love Tim Keller’s definition of fear of God:

It is to be so filled with joyful awe before the magnificence of God that we tremble at the privilege of knowing, serving, and pleasing him.
Timothy Keller

There is a link between self-awareness and knowing God. An accurate view of who we are, and what we are not, allowing us to see who God is.

Job #1 is to root out our sin so that it can be hated!

Sin is not just the things we do wrong and a punished for. Sin is the thoughts, feelings, actions we did or didn’t do or lies we believe that separate us from God.

I heard Richard Rohr say somewhere that we are not punished for our sins, but we are punished by our sins. They are perfectly parasitic, sucking the life out of us!

Whether it is our sin-nature or our ego attachments, we all get fixated on things that we think we absolutely need to above all else. Our desires get disordered. We desire unimportant things, more than truly important things.

We allow certain things to become too important and we put all our energy and life to get them at the expense or cost of other things.

This is true of substances that we may become addicted to, but also other things like people pleasing, lust for power, demanding control or co-dependency.

Dr. Andrew Huberman, a Stanford Medicine Neuroscientist, is doing some outstanding work on the brain in regards to fear and anxiety. I wrote down a quote of his on addiction; I am not sure where I heard it:

Addiction is the reduction of the things that please you.
Dr. Andrew Huberman

Addiction is declaring; I have to have this to feel all right or be ok. I must have this to be happy. I need this to survive. It is narrow and confined.

But when we encounter the Cross, we develop a perspective on life that is expansive and vast.

Encountering the Cross

Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens,
your faithfulness to the clouds.
Your righteousness is like the mountains of God;
your judgments are like the great deep;
man and beast you save, O Lord.
Psalm 36:4-5

On the Cross, we see Christ for who he truly is. We see the depth of his love and mercy for us, but we also see a just and holy God. It is a display of great love and great suffering that brings us back to God.

Through Christ, the world and all things were created. On the Cross, God demonstrates his love for us when we see the lengths he would go to save the sin of the world.

On this Good Friday, I pray that the Holy Spirit reveals the truth about how we try to separate ourselves from his love and the grace to overcome it.

May we remember that encountering the Cross in a one-time deal we do when we accept Christ as our savior or just on Good Friday. It is an outpouring of love and grace that we need every day and moment to moment.

The Expansiveness of God’s Love

How precious is your steadfast love, O God!
The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
They feast on the abundance of your house,
and you give them drink from the river of delights.
For with you is the fountain of life,
in your light do we see light.
Psalm 36:7-9

God’s love is so vast and majestic, yet also tender and close and meets us right where we are at.

He is our protector, and just like Jesus longed to gather us under his wing, we are shielded by Him. The image of using a wing as a shield has troubled me as the only way it can protect us is it is broken, and then the bird can’t fly. Maybe this image is of Christ holding us close to him and being willing to be broken so that we can fly.

The image of the feast that we are invited to is not about God meeting our bare minimum needs. It is him lavishly providing, from his abundant resources, joy, and gladness for life. It is a wonderful image!

The first time the Holy Spirit illuminated these verses to me was in March 2017. I had decided (or forcefully convicted!), to give up my goal of trying every Tequila ever made while I was traveling for work.

At first, it was brutal like I was depriving myself and being disciplined. But Psalm 36:7-9 came along, and things turned around.

God was saying to me, “There are a thousand ways I can make you happy.”

He is the source of life, the fountain, and he wants me to jump into his river of delights! He will provide for all our need exceedingly abundantly more than we can imagine!

God’s Goodness Is Never Ending

Oh, continue your steadfast love to those to those who know you,
and your righteousness to the upright of heart!
Let not the foot of arrogance come upon me,
nor the hand of the wicked drive me away.
There the evildoers lie fallen;
they are thrust down, unable to rise.
Pslam 36:10-12

There are so many ways that Jesus consoles those overcome by emotion by revealing to us who he truly is. I will point out a few in a later post.