We're all bastards, but God loves us anyway. --Baptist minister and social activist Will Campbell's summation of the gospel in less than ten words. Taken from David Dark's book The Gospel According To America.
Yes and God loves us before we even knew Him or cared. In "The Problem of Pain", C.S. Lewis writes of how great God's love is for us. He says it is not some disinterested or indifferent concern for our well-being (as we often have for our fellow man) but it is the love of "the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as the love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes."
This is the Love that pursues us, bastards though we are.
Thanks Steve. A great Lewis quote. It's hard to go wrong with Lewis.
This passage really does help bring necessary clarity to the meaning of God's love in an age when the word love has become so watered down and distorted as to be all but useless, and God is often thought of as nothing more than a vaguely benevolent figure who simply rubber stamps our personal agendas.
Will Campbell's personal story, as related in David Dark's book, also illustrates pretty strongly the radical nature of God's love and our failure to understand it.
It is indeed affecting to think that God loves us even when we are indifferent, or even hostile to Him.
2 comments:
Yes and God loves us before we even knew Him or cared. In "The Problem of Pain", C.S. Lewis writes of how great God's love is for us. He says it is not some disinterested or indifferent concern for our well-being (as we often have for our fellow man) but it is the love of "the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as the love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes."
This is the Love that pursues us, bastards though we are.
Thanks Steve. A great Lewis quote. It's hard to go wrong with Lewis.
This passage really does help bring necessary clarity to the meaning of God's love in an age when the word love has become so watered down and distorted as to be all but useless, and God is often thought of as nothing more than a vaguely benevolent figure who simply rubber stamps our personal agendas.
Will Campbell's personal story, as related in David Dark's book, also illustrates pretty strongly the radical nature of God's love and our failure to understand it.
It is indeed affecting to think that God loves us even when we are indifferent, or even hostile to Him.
Peace.
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