His Love Is A Hurricane, I Am A Tree

The Psalms blogs are written, just not posted yet. Need to be edited. But I just felt the need to write, after a little bit of reflection...

I have spent the last year trying to unlearn the untruths of my faith. This has been a thorough and actually quite deeply personal thing - growing up in a good Christian home makes it not only hard to distinguish between what is true and what is additional (not necessarily wrong, just maybe not necessary) or religious (which is necessarily wrong, as all religion is Satanic), but also my faith, my identity in God has constituted a massive part of my own identity. Not just in a taking on the role of "token Christian" at Uni or defining my hobbies or whatever. I am finding the way I think about Christ changes the way I think about myself.

Theologically, this makes sense. I know I am made in His image, both pre-fall, in the created order, and post-Cross, where I am being made more and more like Jesus. My identity, therefore, if it is in Christ, rests on my understanding of Christ. My Christology is not just an abstract theological debate, it is intensely about, in a strange way, me. Primarily, yes, it's about Christ, but as Christ is the source of my primary identity - I am who I am before God - it is, in a very weird way, about me. (If I wanted to totally geek out, I would argue existential doubt and anguish, the likes of which destroyed Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus, are fundamentally rooted in a faulty Christology, but this is merely a passing point.)

This week is Together On A Mission, the international Newfrontiers conference. Stef Liston slayed it this afternoon, talking about coming like children. This is something I don't do well. At all. If there's one thing I daily battle to believe is that He loves me.

This, I understand, is ridiculous, given how much exposure, by God's grace, I've had to the cross this year. I know that this is love: not that we loved Him but He loved us; that this is love: that he sent forward His own Son to be my propitiation; that He became not just my legal scapegoat but my effective expiation, the cleansing of my guilt; that He now is creating me in His likeness, sanctifying me. He is my revelation, my conviction, my salvation, and my object of adoration.

But do I believe He loves me? In the process of deconstructing and rebuilding, I have studied the great reformers. I am pretty much convinced that Calvinism is totally Biblical. I get that I am, by nature, evil, offensive to God, deserve His total burning wrath but instead, by the amazing work of Jesus, that wrath was poured out in full on the one man in history who did not deserve it. I do not struggle to believe in my need for a saviour. Every tear is a reminder that I need Jesus more every day I wake up.

Part of the deconstruction has been against overly fluffy puff worship. Jesus is my boyfriend, He likes the way I style my hair, etc., and instead focusing on Jesus went through PAIN and DIED for my SIN taking my WRATH and PUNISHMENT so that I am no longer GUILTY because I was pretty EVIL and DEAD before. This is the stuff I can handle.

But Jesus is for me? Jesus is jealous for me? Jesus wants me? Yes, corporately as the Church, sure. But as an individual? Jesus will sing for me the way I have sung for others? Jesus burns with passion for me? Jesus is emotionally driven for my well-being? Jesus is destroyed when I am, rejoices when I rejoice, Jesus is intimately involved in every heartbreak and every new hope, Jesus takes pleasure in knowing me? That the cross was for propitiation, for my expiation, for the satisfaction, yes, but all of which ultimately takes back seat to the grand, ultimate, over-arching design and desire: the restoration of relationship??? The re-institution of intimate relationship? Fellowship? With me? LOVE?

I sing it so much but believe it so little. I find it impossible: how can you ever, ever be for me? Why do you even take notice of a repulsive little rebel like this one? Why take something so disgusting, so tainted and so impossibly far, and declare "in your sin, I will pursue you, I will chase you, I will run for you until your heart is won for me like mine is for you. I will die for you, not just for theological fact but for personal intimacy. For love"? The answer is the cross. The cross war done for love. The answer is love. And I hate how wooly that sounds, but I endlessly adore how true it is.

Still a way to go...