A Crazy Mad Rentless Love Part 2

 

Just think about what the words Crazy Love brings to mind. I’m sure everyone has a picture in their mind right now as to what this love would look like. This love is intensely enthusiastic, inordinately excited, preoccupied, foolish, impractical, fantastic, strange, and ridiculous. It makes those around it do a double take and ask “Just what are they thinking?”. It makes no sense to those that have never felt or experienced this kind of love.

This is the kind of love that sent God’s only Son, Jesus to the cross for. 1 John 3:16 says “This is how we’ve come to understand and experience love: Jesus sacrificed His life for us.” To me this sounds like Crazy Love because to give up your life for someone else is kinda crazy right… I’m not sure that Jesus was jumping for joy to hang on the cross, but I’m sure He was intense about what He was doing for you and me. This Crazy Love is what made it possible for you and me to embrace freedom of the spirit, heart, soul, and mind. To live our lives to the fullest!

 

Now a lot of you are thinkin "Mad why would you put a word like Mad with the word Love". A lot of you are thinking of the Angry type of Mad. I’m thinking of a Mad that is lacking restraint or reason, feels strong enthusiasm, hilarious, senseless, excited, and completely bonkers. When was that last time you saw Mad Love. A love that made no sense. There is a book in the Bible called Hosea. You may be thinking “Where in the Bible is that?” It’s in there. Hosea was a prophet of God. One day God spoke to him and said “Find a whore and marry her. Make her the mother of you Children.” Hosea 1:2 So he marries a woman by the name of Gomer. She has three kids for him and then runs away to party and sleep around again. The she ends up in jail. Then again, God tells Hosea to “Start all over; Love your wife again, your wife who is with her latest boyfriend, your cheating wife.” Hosea 3:1 Then God has the audacity to say “Love her the way I, God, love.” Wow, I’m not sure I could do that.

Yes, that story is right out of the Bible. In the book of Hosea, God is having Hosea show the Israelite people how He loves them. Even though they have left Him to party and sleep around with other god’s, nations, and each other. Israel is doing there own thing and they are a in a prison of there own making.  God wanted Hosea to show by example the Mad Love, that to us humans makes no sense, to the Israelites. To me what God asked Hosea to do was a little crazy, but unless you understand the Mad Love of God it would be Crazy

 

This kind of love is amazing to me. It is never ceasing, unyielding, persistent, and unstoppable. Have you ever had anything in you life that was relentless? The only Relentless Love that I know of is the Love that comes from God. God’s love does not depend on us. If it did, this world would be a terrible place. God is the source for Love. Relentless Love has nothing to do with us and everything to do with God. God’s love is truest and purest. 

Think about the sun again. What is the nature of the sun? Can it do anything other than shine? Just like the sun, it’s God nature to Love! You and I can’t keep the sun from shining. We cannot keep God from Loving us. That is why God’s Relentless Love is beyond what we can humanly comprehend. We can reject God’s love, but He just keeps right on loving us. No matter what you do, where you go, how far you fall… God will be there with His Relentless Love!

If you’re thinking to yourself “How can I get that Love? How can I be caught by God’s Relentless Love?” I’ve got to tell ya, it’s just a choice away. I know that seems so simple and easy. Sometimes we as humans think that we’ve got to pay for or earn the right to get God’s Relentless Love. Nothing is further from the truth. The truth is that God in His Crazy Mad Relentless Love sent His Son, Jesus to rescue us from our life of sin which leads to death. Romans 8:2,3 “The Spirit of Life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.” With that said all you have to do is choose to ask Jesus to save you. So this Crazy Mad Relentless Love is a simple choice. All you gotta do is walk in to the arms of Jesus that have been wide open waiting for you to reach for His love. Just remember God will never let go of you!

"Jesus, come take my heart. I give it to You. Envelope me in your Crazy Mad Relentless Love. Make me new. Clean my life of sin. Give me beauty for ashes because that's what my life is. Ashes. Be my everything." Amen

Athena 

P.S. Watch this video and hear about this Relentless love. Open your heart... because God won't Relent until He's got all of you. 

All the Bible quotes are out of The Message.

A Crazy Mad Rentless Love Part 1

   Looking at this combination of words maybe your thinkin "These words don’t go together at all." Maybe they seem like a contradiction to each other. Maybe your thinkin I’m crazy for how I put all those together. Well if you just look at the surface of these words and that’s all you see then you are right. If you look deeper into the different meanings and emotions of the words, then you will see what I see when looking at this combination of words. What I see takes my breath away.

   For a while now God seems to have been quiet in my life. It’s not the He’s not there or not alive to me, but just not really speaking anything new or maybe it’s that I haven’t been listening. I think we’ve all been in this place. Then one day these exact words dropped into my spirit and here’s the story behind them.

   Relating these word to myself I have this to say. There was a time in my life when I didn’t understand love in the least little bit. In fact this crazy love that loves with abandon, started in oblivion to itself in my life. As weird as that sounds, it is none the less true. One day I sat down beside this love and never even noticed it was there. I even thought it was kinda stuck up and looking down it’s nose at me. I called it “the preacher man”. It would tell me I was wrong in my sin and to come to Jesus, but I felt no love, only the “better than you” attitude coming from it. Enter a sunrise…

   Like when you watch a sunrise, it’s all just pretty colors one minute and the next there sits the sun in all it’s glory. You never really saw it fully appear, it was just there. Love snuck in past my own “I’m better than you, when I’m really dying inside to be noticed and loved” attitude. One minute I had no idea about this love and the next it was just there. Without my knowing it parked in my heart and began to grow with abandon. 

   In case your wondering this story so far is about James and I. We were together 9 months before we got married. I can’t tell you the exact moment when I realized I loved him. It was like I always did and that was the right and natural thing. Neither of us were looking, we were just doing our own thing. His was being a preacher man telling people they needed Jesus. Mine was living my life on the fence between right and wrong. I didn’t do anything really “bad”, just followed my own way. Then like the sun, our loved happened! We always say love is a choice and it is, but it’s so much more. The emotion of love is another thing all together when in an upstanding follow God's design relationship. It’s the stuff of a crazy mad relentless love, an ardent fervor for each other. Put the "choice of love" together with the "emotion of love" and you have this thing that leaves you feeling and knowing that your gonna explode. It makes you want to scream, laugh, cry, shout, dance, smile, throw your arms to the heaven's…You get the picture. To this day our love has grown each day. I look forward to where it’s taking us for as many days as we have together.  

Next I'm gonna turn this toward the Spirit inside us and God! Stay tuned...

Athena 

 

Negative Voices

There is a significant amount of negativity these days. You can't turn on the tv, radio or internet without people telling you everything that is wrong with the world. It seems to me that we should be different than this. We should be bringing hope to a world without hope rather than adding our two cents worth. Often we simply tell people what is wrong from our "Christian" perspective. All this does is makes us another useless voice in the sea of negativity. We get tuned out just like the rest of the noise. The bible says we should not speak unwholesome words but just words that give grace to the people who need to hear them at that moment. The challenge for us is to separate from the hopelessness around us so that when we speak it doesn't remind people where they are but shows them where they want to be.

James

The church is dying?

I would like to state for the record that the church is still very much alive and well! If you cannot kill God what makes you think the church is dying? I have heard it said many times that the church is in decline. This may be true of many churches but it is not true of all churches. I have noticed that churches that are not culturally relevant are very much in decline. I have also noticed that we often accuse thriving churches of preaching some type of watered down gospel. I agree that there are churches that do this but it is not true of the majority. It is foolish of us to try and discredit what is happening in other churches when there is nothing of true value happening in ours. If the church we are in is in decline the greatest thing we can do is ask why and realize that we might be the problem. It also would do us well to ask why others are successful rather than assuming it's due to some form of compromise. I often feel as though we have lost the heart of God for reaching the lost. We have failed to realize that there is a world full of hurting and broken people looking for answers. If you have legit answers for the real problems they have you won't be able to build a building big enough to hold them. We can no longer blame our impotence in the church on "the great falling away". The truth is that we have fallen away and are holding a form of Godliness that has no power to set people free. If we are to reach the generations that are missing from the church we must engage the culture that they are living in and bring the truth of God's redemption into their messed up lives. We can no longer make excuses, that time is past...we must square our shoulders like men and be the change that needs to happen.

James

Easter Bunny?

So I have held a theory for a few years on the Easter Bunny. So hear goes my thought...I have only shared this with one person before today. I can't prove any of this but hear me out and then give me your feedback.

The rabbit represents fertility in different religions and mythologies. The Easter Bunny lays eggs. Eggs to me carry a very close symbolism to the empty tomb of Christ. So my thought of the Easter Bunny is that it carries an implication that some twisted form of fertility caused the resurrection rather than the power of God. So there you go I just attacked the Easter Bunny. Not really...but seriously what do you think about this thought.

James