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Loving God the Most: Making God Our Emotional Refuge

“Trust in him at all times, you people; pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge.” – Psalm 62:8

Where do you go with your strong emotions? A lof of times, they just run around in our head. They keep us from important duties, people, and fun. They cause problems with our health, our relationships, and our work.

Emotions need an outlet. We often seek an outlet in other people: withdrawing from them, attacking them, or complaining to them. We often seek outlets in busy-ness, trying to getour mind off of these things or solve them. We sometimes seek an outlet in trying to escape our issues, like endless hours of Netflix or alcohol. We often seek outlets in stres-reducers such as eating, exercise, sleep, planning, and so on.

Sometimes these things help. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes things gets worse. Sometimes our attempt to deal with our emotions hurts the people around us.

The Right Refuge for Our Emtions
The Psalms in the Bible give us a different picture of how to deal with our emotions. What the Psalms teach us is that emotions are not intended to remain on the horizontal plane. They are meant to go vertical. We are meant to resolve them in God.

The Psalms have a word for this. God is our refuge. God is an emotional refuge: “pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge” (Psalm 62:8). Continue reading “Loving God the Most: Making God Our Emotional Refuge”

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Loving God the Most: Making Jesus’ Priorities Ours

A classic object lesson of time management involves a jar with sand, pebbles, water, and big rocks. The first part of the lesson is to put in the pebbles, the sand, and the water. Then, you try to put in the big rocks. You can’t. It’s already full. However, if you start with the big rocks, you can then add the pebbles, the sand, and the water. The lesson? Put in your big rocks first.

When it comes to time management, you should always start with your big rocks. For example, if you value your children, you shouldn’t wait to the end of the week to find time for them. You probably won’t. But if you block out time for your kids each week, then you will be more likely to spend time with them. Plus, you’ll find that you get the other stuff done, too. The pebbles, sand, and water will fit in the jar just fine.

Once you understand that principle, you then need to discover what your big rocks are. What are the most important things in your life? Are they on your schedule? That’s how you make sure, as Goethe says, that “[t]hings which matter most” will “never be at the mercy of things which matter least” (cited in Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, 146).

The question I want to pose here is this, what big rocks would Jesus want you to put in first? One big part of loving God is making His priorities ours. What priorities does Jesus have that you do not? What would Jesus want to make sure is on your schedule that may not be there? What would He add to your schedule, if He was making your schedule for the week?

Big Rock #1: Telling People About Jesus
I want to suggest two big rocks that you need to put in your schedule first to align your priorities with Jesus’. The first is evangelism. This means getting to know people who do not know Jesus and then telling them about Jesus. You do not love people simply to tell them about Jesus. You love people, and one part of loving them is telling them about Jesus. It’s loving because it’s good to know Jesus. Continue reading “Loving God the Most: Making Jesus’ Priorities Ours”

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Loving God the Most: Making God the Baseline of Our Lives

There is no question that our greatest obligation as human beings is to love God above everything else. Jesus could not have been clearer: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment” (Mt. 22:37–38). This is what life is all about.

The statement is not controversial. If someone asked us, “What is the most important commandment?” Many of us would know the answer. Love the Lord your God. Yet, how many of us have really put effort into loving God more?

The season of Lent is an invitation to consider whether we are pursuing the love of God as our greatest objective. It is an opportunity to consider what our hearts go after in place of God. It is an occasion for reflection on the idols of our hearts that impede the love of God.

There is not question that humans are often unwilling to pursue God. However, sometimes we don’t love God because we are not sure what that even means. Loving a human being means wanting to be with them, get to know them, and help them thrive. But because God is not physically with us, it can be hard to understand what this looks like.

What does loving God really look like? Let me suggest three ways:

  1. Making God our chief source of comfort, love, security, and meaning.
  2. Spending time with God and learning to walk with Him moment by moment.
  3. Taking an interest in the interests of God.

Here I want to focus on # 2: learning to live in God’s presence. It is there that we learn to rely on Him as our chief source of comfort, love, security, and meaning. It is there that we learn about His interests so they can become our interests. It is there we find pleasures at His right hand forevermore (Psalm 16:11).

But what does this really look like? Obviously, we cannot literally think about God all the time, or we would not be able to do anything else because we can only think of one thing at a time. Continue reading “Loving God the Most: Making God the Baseline of Our Lives”

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Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 4: How God Redeems Relationships

Genesis 16 presents us with a family mess. It starts with anxiety, leads into pride, and ends in injustice. By verse 6, the family seems at the breaking point. Abraham abandons Hagar. Sarah treats Hagar harshly. Hagar runs away with Abraham’s child in her womb. The family now consists of a separted but complicated web of relationships. Can things turn around? If so, how?

God Meets Hagar
The answer? God shows up. But He showed up in an unlikely way. If we were to ask at the beginning of the story, “to whom would God appear to get them to turn things around?”, who would it be? Probably Abraham. Maybe Sarah. But here’s the surprise of the story. God showed up for the first time in the story, and He talked to . . . Hagar.

God asked Hagar, “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” Let’s not miss the importance of this. As we noted in my past articles on this past (read part 1 on anxiety here, part 2 on pride here, and part 3 on injustice here), the anxiety of a slave is over the fact that they are unseen. Hagar seemed to be seen by Abraham, but then Abraham abandoned her to unjust abuse by Sarah. It seemed like she was unseen again. The Angel of the Lord, whom I believe is Jesus in a pre-incarnate form, the 2nd person of the Trinity, met her by the well and took an interest in her like He would in an unlikely woman at a wall a thousand plus years later (see John 4).

Hagar was honest with the angel. She said that she was running from her mistress Sarah.

Then, the angel of the Lord gave her a command, “Return to your mistress and submit to her” (Gen. 16:9).

By the end of the story, Hagar was encouraged and willing to go back.

What Motivates Hagar to Return
Why encouraged Hagar to go back to a tough situation? Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 4: How God Redeems Relationships”

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Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 3: Anxiety & Injustice

[This is the 3rd of a 4 part series. You can read the 1st part focusing on anxiety here and the 2nd part focusing on pride here]

Pride, Anxiety, and Injustice in Relationships
Why is it so hard to dislodge injustice? Why is it that families and communities can allow the worst sort of situations to go on and on? You see this happen all the time. They won’t make even the slightest change to make a bad situation better. Why do they stay in these bad relationships and make little effort to change them?

Why? Because it is scary. Injustice is rooted in an attempt to solve the basic problems of life: loneliness, insecurity, provision, and meaning. When you fight against injustice, you are battling with people’s anxiety over these basic issues. This makes these problems much more intractable.

This does not mean that we should not fight against injustice. It just means that we will fight against it better if we understand that it is rooted in anxiety over the basic problems of life.

A great example of this tragic interplay of injustice can be seen in American race relations. The treatment of African-Americans by whites in this nation has been reprehensible. However, the system of slavery was designed to solve the basic problems of labor, and it was the basis of the position of the wealthy elites of Southern society. Over this position, they had much anxiety. If they let slavery go, where would that leave them? Understand. I am not excusing it. I am just saying that there was a fear in letting that go that made it harder to apply the basic principles of Western and Christian teaching to this issue. As Booker T. Washington noted, “Having once got its tentacles fastened on to the economic and social life of the Republic, it was no easy matter for the country to relieve itself of the institution.” This is the way injustice becomes a fixture in human life.

That’s why it was so necessary for Martin Luther King, Jr. and others to work to force whites to give up their privileges in the South and elsewhere. He recognized that because of the anxiety of giving up privileges, the white community would not give up their privileges without being compelled to.

On a smaller scale, why do people stay in such bad relationships? Why do they not confront such bad behavior? Because the alternative is often being alone, and that is quite scary. The current relationship solves to some degree our anxieties over loneliness and security, and it is hard to face those issues more directly without the anxiety reducer of even a bad relationship.

In our third installment of our study on the relationship of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, I want us to consider what injustices their anxiety and pride led them to. I will show how each of their behaviors was unjust but also try to show how that injustice was rooted in their own significant challenges. The injustice calls for condemnation, and the anxiety calls for sympathy. It is a complex response to a complex problem.

The goal is to enable us to better confront injustice in ourselves and others. When we can confront our own unjust behavior by confronting our underlying anxieties. That’s what God does when He confronts this issue, as we shall see in the next article.

Hagar
We noted in the last article that Hagar’s anxiety was that of a slave: she is unseen. However, what every human longs for is to be seen and to be seen as significant. A slave is not seen that way. A slave is just part of the scenery. That’s the misery that every slave would experience every day of their lives.

Then, something happened. Hagar was chosen to bear the child of Master Abraham. She conceived, and she became a major player in the house. She let this go to her head. The result was that she looked down on her Mistress, Sarah. “And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress” (Gen. 16:4). This wasn’t something she kept to herself. Sarah noticed and brought it up to Abraham.

What was the injustice here? It was a lack of respect. Ironically, she did not see Sarah as valuable. Maybe Hagar was just doing to Sarah what Sarah had done to her, but this would not justify this behavior. Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 3: Anxiety & Injustice”

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