"Before Me"

Before Me

By Alan Johnson

Before I could comprehend my needs

Or know the extent of sinful deeds

Before I’d seen your loving face

Or the condition of the human race

Before I knew what love meant

Or saw it in the Son You sent

Before the fall of the first man

You had already formed a plan

Before I was born into sin

You saw my life and entered in

Before I’d even breathed a breath

Your Son, for me, had tasted death

So now I stand in Your light

Not by merit or by right

But simply by an unfair trade

Without my knowledge You had made

Finding myself an unworthy recipient

Being blessed while completely ignorant

For while still drowning unknowingly

You saw and simply came to me

And before I could even ask You to

You pulled me up to be with You

So this is a poem I wrote a while ago and thought I would share it. I wrote this in response to a testimony I had heard that was full of painful circumstances and incredible brokenness. However, in the midst of the heartache emerged one of the best pictures of grace I have ever seen. At the center of the brokenness was a savior who moved in spite of the individuals. The person explained how despite everything that was happening God was present, He moved in her life before she could even comprehend who He was. It is easy to cast ourselves with leading parts in our stories, but the reality is that the story of grace is one of Christ alone. Salvation comes to us through the grace of God and the Love of a Father who knows the needs of His children before they can comprehend the sinful brokenness they are trapped within. 

Holiness

Growing up in a Christian School environment there are a few themes you pick up very quickly and little answers to question that you learn. Knowing the answers to certain questions would make you a notch better than the first year Christian-schoolers. One of those questions is “What does it mean to be holy?” This was always a trick question. Whoever asked the question is trying to get someone to say something about how being Holy means doing the right things and being perfect, but we all knew better. We knew that being holy didn’t mean being perfect, it meant being set apart.

I have always liked thinking of holy as being “set apart,” but I had never really thought about what being set apart looks like or really means. I think we all agree that as Christians we act differently than other people, but what actually makes us different. Does it mean that I just don’t swear? Honestly I think that is what most people think being holy boils down to. I was talking to a coworker at an old job who wanted to start going to church because he was miserable and just feels that he needs to put God back in his life. It was interesting talking to him about it because he says he didn’t used to live the way he does now. He also told me that he didn’t use to talk like he does now; he didn’t use to swear so much. It is funny how swearing seems to be the line that gets drawn in the sand that separates the holy from the unholy, but I really think the true meaning of holiness is something much deeper than simply the words that come out of our mouths.

When I think of trying to be holy, it always seems to boil down to what I am doing. If I want to be more holy, I need to do more good things. On the other hand, if I am doing a lot bad things I will feel less holy. I guess I realized that my view of holiness has always been about how I view myself and how I think other people view me. However, when I look at the reality of trying to do more good things so that I can look better in my own eyes and the eyes of the people around me, I don’t think that is holiness at all. What I find myself describing is not holiness, but pride.

Let’s get back to that Sunday school answer of what it means to be holy. To be holy means to be set apart. So if we start looking at the life of Jesus who was perfectly holy in every way I start to notice something. Jesus never seemed to care what people thought about Him. He was content to be that weirdo walking around saying things that a lot of people didn’t like. He would heal someone and then tell them not to let anyone know about it. I can’t understand why Jesus would do that. If I healed someone I think I might tell that person to go around saying what I did. One of the most frustrating things in the gospels for me to read is people criticizing Jesus. People were constantly calling him a drunkard and glutton and saying that He was just like all the tax collectors, prostitutes and other “sinners” that He hung around. Whenever those “righteous” people said those things I would wait with great anticipation for Jesus to put them in their place. I desperately wanted Jesus to stand up and tell them all they were wrong and that He was perfect. I wanted Jesus to get into a big fight about who was actually a better person and turn the tables on those stupid Pharisees who were the real sinners, but He never does. So Jesus was holy but He never seemed to focus on his image, or about what He or anyone else thought about Him. So what made Jesus holy? What set Him apart from everyone else?

I started thinking about those questions and realized that holiness has nothing to do with how I view myself, but it has everything to do with how I view the people around me. What set Jesus apart from everyone else was that He cared for and loved everyone around Him. Jesus lived in a society full of people trying to make themselves look better than the person next to them. There were people wearing blindfolds out in public so that they wouldn’t look lustfully at women, people would shout prayers from the street corners so people could hear them pray and do all other kinds of righteous acts to elevate their status in their own minds and in the minds of others, but Jesus never played that game. Jesus could have started listing off all the things that made Him so much better than all those other people, but that wasn’t what being Holy was about, that was pride. What set Jesus apart from those people was not His perfect pride, but His perfect love. It wasn’t how He viewed himself in comparison to the people around Him, it was how He viewed the people around Him with love. 

So when I start thinking about what set Jesus apart and God’s call for us to “be holy,” I start thinking about what that means; what that looks like. I think it looks a lot like how Jesus lived. It means we stop looking at ourselves and start looking at the people around us. It involves letting go of those things we do to make ourselves look better and starting to love the people God puts around us. We stop caring about our image and start caring about the people Christ died to save.

“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
 John 13:35

I Love M&Ms?

All my friends are getting married. I am not getting married. I have been in denial about being a grown up for a long time now, and these recent engagements are shaking the fabric of my boyish existence. I have even been asked to perform one of the ceremonies, which is putting a unique spin on the situation. What do I, a single dude in his twenties, know about marriage? To put it simply: I know nothing. Ok, well I guess I know next to nothing. I have seen enough Disney movies to know how love and marriage works, but I did miss the royal wedding so I am certainly not an expert.

 I know that there is supposed to be love involved, but love is such a broad term. Sometimes I’ll be eating peanuts covered in chocolate and a thin candy shell and be compelled to remark, “I love peanut M&Ms” and my brother wittily suggests, “Why don’t you marry them.” I am well aware that joke died years ago, and I know that marring a bag of Peanut M&Ms is absurd, but it does say something about how we view love. It is confusing when we describe the person we want to spend the rest of our life with using the same word I use to proclaim my favorite snack.

Is my feeling about M&M’s really the same feeling that my friend has about his future wife? I hope not. My love lasts until I run out or eat too many and I hope my friend doesn’t get sick of or eat his fiancé.

A while ago I was thinking about how society views love and I decided we often treat it as a commodity. We view it as something we spend on people. There seems to be two general reasons we show people love: to pay someone back or to get something in return. We love people as a response to how they treat us. If someone is nice to me, I will show them some love in return, or if I want something from someone I might try giving them a little love, but rarely do we love someone just for being a person.

When we view love as a commodity, it affects the way we use it. We treat is as if we have a limited supply and are trying not to spend it all.  Rarely do people go into an interaction just giving love freely. People have to earn love. When we view love as a commodity, it selfishly demands that we get something in return. If I love someone else they need to like me or treat me in a certain way, as if I just paid for some service. I think this is where we really see how messed up this version of love is.  I was in a relationship where I thought I really loved the person, but the whole time I was showing her love I was expecting her to love me in a certain way. When she didn’t return that love the way I was expecting it was extremely frustrating. I felt like I was paying for something I wasn’t getting.

I believe this is why the divorce rate is so high in America. We have taken the capitalistic society we live in and translated love into it. We have reduced love to a commodity and the church is all but immune. So I started thinking: how does God view love? How does He look at it and want us to use it?

While I was meditating on how God views love I came to the simple revelation that: “God is love.”

For God, love is not a commodity, but His identity.

This makes much more sense when we look at the life of Jesus. When Jesus travelled around people were drawn to him because He loved them regardless of who they were. It seemed the less deserving the people were of love; the more He gave it to them. He took our system of commodity love and turned it upside down. He loved people just because they were people, even the smelly ones. I say even the smelly ones because I have a hard time loving smelly people. I worked in downtown Seattle at the courthouse and right next to the building was park where hundreds of homeless people lived during the summer. In that park there was a single Honey Bucket. I don’t think there has ever been a smellier port-a-potty in the history of the world. Whenever it was emptied the smell would travel blocks and sometimes there was no escaping it. The smell of the park and the potty kept me away from the homeless people there. I can’t help but think what Jesus would have done in my shoes. I don’t think he would have kept walking away from the stink day after day. He would have walked into the stink and loved the stinky people who lived in the stinky park.   

The reason Jesus was able to love everyone was because love was not something He used as a commodity but rather it was who He was. God taking on flesh in Jesus Christ was love incarnate.  He was, and is, love. That set Him apart from everyone else. He went places and changed lives through love because it was His identity.

The exciting part is that this is not something God had planned just for Jesus. This is God’s plan for us. The church is not called to love certain people, we are called to be love to everyone. We are called to take on love as an identity. If God is light, and God is love, we see that light is love. This is what it means to be the light of the world. The way we illuminate the darkness and bring light to the world is through loving people like Jesus.

Jesus changed the lives of so many people he met. He never did that by winning an argument or telling people how wrong they were. It is freeing to know that I don’t have to try and work at being the perfect person. I don’t have to have all the answers or right things to say. All we need to do is allow God show us His love and allow that to change our identity. To allow God to fill us with His light and watch it shine through our brokenness.

I know I have sort of rambled down a rabbit hole from where I started and I have come nowhere close to exhausting the subject or my thoughts on it. There is so much more that goes into a relationship and particularly a marriage, but for all my friends getting married and anyone else who knows a real person, make love an identity. Don’t love expecting something in return or to pay someone back. Love like God loves us. In spite of our brokenness He sacrificially pours Himself into our lives and changes us. That kind of love is the kind that changes lives; that is the love you can build a life upon.