Love and the Casket of Control

Transcript:

Fear is a controlling principle. Its tactical maneuver is to intimidate and then dominate. And the greater the fear, the greater the ability to dominate.

It does this by promising us safety and security. It tells us that if we can control our lives tightly enough, then we can be assured we will be safe and sound. We will finally have the life we “need” and “deserve”, with “nothing to fear”. “Control is the path to blessing!”

Now, the problem with such thinking from a Christian perspective is that God commands us to love, and love requires us to relinquish control and become vulnerable to God and others. Love demands risk. Love requires us to lose our lives for God and others.

C.S. Lewis exposes the fallacy of such fearful thinking in his classic work The Four Loves. Listen to what he writes:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

Now, Jesus put it this way: If you want to save your life, you must lose it. But if you lose your life—if you risk it and lay it down for God and others—you will find it.

Something to think about from The Kingdom Perspective.

“I will not leave you as orphans; I am coming to you. After a little while, the world no longer is going to see Me, but you are going to see Me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you are in Me, and I in you. The one who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and the one who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will reveal Myself to him.” Judas (not Iscariot) said to Him, “Lord, what has happened that You are going to reveal Yourself to us and not to the world?” Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will follow My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our dwelling with him. The one who does not love Me does not follow My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine, but the Father’s who sent Me.’”
~ John 14:18-24 (NASB)