Love Changes Everything
"The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith." (1 Timothy 1:5, ESV).
Almost comfortable, sitting on a homebound train winding its way through the Yorkshire Dales, a lone traveler watched and thought, "That young lad has to be the best archer in the land!" For, up and down the long edge of a barn, not fifty yards from his vantage point, there must have been 20 arrows, each firmly planted, dead-center in its own, mini, painted bullseye target. These aim points looked a bit accidental in their arrangement. Whoever drew them certainly didn't care for straight lines and rows.
Once more, the lad aimed and fired, landing another shaft with authority deep into the barn wood. This arrow, however, was different, landing all by itself in clean wood, some feet away from any obvious target. Anxious to see his reaction, the man glanced back at the lad. To his surprise, he saw neither regret nor frustration. Instead, paintbrush and pot in hand, he watched the boy walk up to the lonely arrow and draw a target around the errant bolt. And so the game was up: it's hard to miss when every result becomes the target.
This illustration came to mind today as I read Paul's words to Timothy on the aim of Christian ministry. What are we trying to achieve through discipleship? It doesn't matter if this ministry is ordained or lay, at church or in the home; the aim of our instruction should be the same. We are trying to promote love. We want to teach our charges to deny themselves for the sake of others, laying their lives down, pouring their lives out, and giving their lives up for others.
While such love flows to us from God through the cross and by the Spirit, it bubbles up into the life of a Christian like a river forming from three converging springs. The first is a pure heart. This stands to reason, does it not? If our heart is impure, if our motivation is evil, filthy, or just plain wrong, love can never form in a person's life.
Second, love will not grow in the soil of an offended conscience. The conscience is the voice of God in the human heart. It represents the verdict of heaven on the rightness or wrongness of something we have thought, said, or done and the motivations behind it. How does an offended conscience get in the way of love? Well, let's say we have sinned against our spouse by the kind of grave sin we should confess to them. How grave must such a sin be to warrant such a confession? Your conscience will let you know, and remember Luther's advice-- it is neither safe nor sound to ignore your conscience. Until we confess this sin and bring it out into the open, our love for our spouse (and their love for us) can never be genuine. Our relationship will, in effect, be built upon a lie; they deserve to know the truth; we must tell them.
Third, the river of love can only flow from sincere faith. That is to say: our relationship with God must be in good order. Absent such faith, our life will always rest on an insecure foundation, one that will let us down eventually. This insecurity makes it very difficult to make the kind of sacrifices love requires. Like walking across a highwire tightrope, self-sacrificing love is a terrifying business. However, holding the promise, goodness, and providence of God in the hands of a sincere faith provides a balance bar and a safety net for the worried soul. Trusting Him, we can take the risk to love, knowing the One who holds it all in His nail-pierced hands. How does this thought for the day challenge you? Where has the polluting effects of sin deaded your heart's ability to love? Is there something you need to confess to your husband, wife, brother, sister, or friend? Are you close enough to God to see His fingerprints all over your life, to hear His sweet promises whisper in your ears, and to feel his providence as the unseen guardian angel overruling all things for good and guarding you against all that's wrong? Is my ministry helping you to love? And what about your efforts in the lives of others? Is love your goal? Have you lost sight of the target? Like the little boy in our story, have you resorted to painting targets around the ministry efforts, which, if you are honest, were aimed at nothing in particular? Of course, the thing about aiming at nothing is that we tend to hit it every time. Let's listen to Paul's ministry MO this morning. Love is a much better target, don't you agree?