What’s Driving You?

Most have heard the phrase, “He’s so heavenly minded, he’s of no earthly good.” So rare is someone like that, that I’ve not met one. Not in my whole life. In fact, it’s been my experience that the more heavenly minded a person has been, the more crucial they’ve found the needs of earth. Let me give you an example.

On the weekend Wendy and I attended a workshop on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. That’s a long term to describe the brain damage that occurs to the pre born child when the woman drinks alcohol while pregnant. Six of our seven adopted children have been affected by this tragedy. Hundreds of parents and grandparents were at this conference. Most were, like us, people who had adopted children with FASD. Some were mothers who too late realised that they had damaged their children by drinking while pregnant. Virtually all were people who loved the Lord; we were a huge room filled with heavenly minded people. All who spoke at some point during the weekend gave God’s love for them as the reason for sharing their love with disabled children. There were three characteristics of these heavenly minded people that stood out at this conference:
Love;
Joy;
Peace.

This post has to do with Love:
Living immersed in God’s grace cannot help but lead to experiencing and absorbing a sense of love. The kind of love that I’m talking about here is the willed, volitional, desire to do good to someone else regardless of whether or not that love is returned. This is the love of God for us. See 1st Corinthians 13 for a fuller definition of love as understood from a Biblical perspective.

Now of course, the secular world, the pagan world is forever writing about and singing about and producing movies about their vision of love. Love for the pagan is very closely related to desire. If you’re experiencing a constant craving, longing and desire for someone, that is love to the secular world. Other telltale signs of love for the secular person are possessive controlling behaviours which are closely related to the greed / need / lust combination. Love as demonstrated by our secular leaders is jealous and focused on ‘can you make me feel good’. It is exactly this mind-set that causes homosexuals of both genders to think that a “love” relationship with each other is more important than an obedient relationship with their Creator. Of course love in the pagan world is equated with sex where men use “love” to get sex and women use sex to get what feels to them like love. Most of all, true love to the pagan is based on impulse and preferably ignores self-control.

Not so from the Biblical perspective. Love, from a Biblical perspective is not self-seeking.

Desire is self-seeking.
Lust is self-seeking.
Pride is self-seeking.
Personal offense is self-seeking

Not so, love.
God is love.
For God so loved the world that He gave . . .”

Like God, real love is not part of our natural world. What is natural to our world is “the lust of the flesh [craving for sensual gratification] and the lust of the eyes [greedy longings of the mind] and the pride of life [assurance in one's own resources or in the stability of earthly things]--these do not come from the Father but are from the world itself.” 1st John 2:16

“All ya need is love,” was correctly sung by a rock band several decades ago. While they got that part right, they could not pull it off because love is not a natural part of who we are. Oh sure, we can love those who love us but what good is that? Our world needs a populace who can “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who persecute you.”

Without that, not even babies in their mother’s wombs are safe from violence. Without love, FASD occurs. Without love, fetal alcohol afflicted children, literally unable to learn from mistakes, remain rejects who rotate through the criminal justice system until the day they die.

Thank God for the heavenly minded. Thank God for love, for love comes from God. Only His love for us allows us to truly love others. We can give a love to those who, due to brain damage are seldom able to even appreciate, let alone reciprocate that love.

The workshop that we attended had become a community of people who were able to love in the fullest sense of the word. This, not of our own ability or will, but love as a gift of Creator God.