Ever get caught in the “if only” trap? You probably have … probably caught in it even now … and don’t even realize it. The “if only” trap works like this:
“If only they would rise off the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher …”
“If only they wouldn’t leave their dirty socks lying around …”
“If only they wouldn’t hog the remote control …”
“If only they wouldn’t snore …”
“If only … if only …” … and then what? You’d be happy? If they would just listen, you wouldn’t have to keep nagging them and repeating yourself? If they would just do what you tell them to do, the world would be a better and much more happier place, am I right?
How’s that working out for you? Thirty, forty, fifty years later and you’re still “explaining,” they’re still not listening, and they still leave their socks lying around, leave dirty dishes in the sink, and hog the remote control.
Guess what? That person that you’re trying to change? Yeah … they’ve got their own “if you would only …” list too. And so, everyone is waiting on everyone else to change, to get with the program, and nobody is changing and nobody is happy.
Our society is caught in the “if only” trap too. Everybody is pointing fingers at everyone else and crying, “If only they would listen, if only they would see things MY way, if only they would do what WE tell them to do, boy, this world would a whole lot better place.” The result is a divided country, everybody pointing at and accusing each other, everyone stuck in their own little bubble or echo chamber waiting for everyone else to change, and it feels like everybody’s at war and nobody is happy.
But we, my brothers and sisters, we have the solution to the “if only” trap … and that key is “here, let me.” [Read 1st Thessalonians 2:8-12.]
What is our “natural” or automatic reaction in times of crisis? We tend to circle the wagons, don’t we? Our hearts are hardened by a constant barrage of cynicism and despair. It’s time to take of myself … the rest of you are on your own. Me, I’m gonna lock the door and hunker down. See you on the other side of all this … if there is another side of this, amen?
1st Thessalonians is the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the newly formed Christian community in Thessalonica. Paul had shared the gospel with them during an earlier trip, which they accepted and were now being made to suffer for it. Aware of their persecution and struggle to hold on to their faith, Paul is suggesting that they resist their urge to “circle the wagons” and, instead, do just the opposite. He asks the community in Thessalonica to be more loving and compassionate toward one another and to everyone else around them, to resist the urge to isolate or protect themselves by engaging in self-less service … which would sound as counterintuitive to them then as it does to us today, amen?
Paul wasn’t asking them to do anything that he wasn’t willing to do himself. In fact, he is calling upon them to follow his example. Apparently Paul wasn’t initially accepted the first time he visited Thessalonica but we see him praying and giving thanks to God for them and for the chance to come and serve them. “We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers,” he writes at the beginning of his letter, “constantly remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” (1st Thessalonians 1:2).
“So deeply do we care for you,” says Paul, “that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves” (1st Thessalonians 2:8). Think about what he just said. They were not only determined to come to Thessalonica to preach and share the gospel with them but to share of themselves, to put themselves out for them. In fact, as Paul points out, he refused to be a burden upon the community by paying his own way by sewing tents … by hand. Tough work, amen? “You remember our labor and toil, brothers and sisters; we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God” (v. 9; emphasis mine). And though they weren’t warmly received the first time around, Paul says that they “dealt with each one of you like a father with his children, urging and encouraging you and pleading that you lead a life worthy of God, who calls you into His own kingdom and glory” (v. 11-12).
Just as Paul is calling the Thessalonians to follow his example, we are also being called to follow Paul’s example. We are being called to pray for other people. To share the Gospel. To put ourselves out, even if it means we have to suffer or make a sacrifice. We are to be “pure, upright, and blameless in our conduct” (1st Thessalonians 2:10) as Paul was pure and upright and blameless in his conduct when he shared the gospel with the Thessalonians.
Okay … Paul. That’s easy to do when times are good, amen? It’s easy to be kind and gentle with people we like, people who share our point of view. But let’s face it, some people … well … they’re either unlovable or unworthy of that kind of effort and sacrifice and, frankly, I don’t believe that I have the desire or the capacity to do that for … them!
Which brings us back to the “if only” dilemma again. “If only they were nicer to me.” “I could love them if only they would stop acting so selfish.” “If only they would love me, then I would love them.” Again, we run into the same problem. They are hurting too. They are craving for the same thing that you are … love, respect, acceptance. If I’m expecting love, if I’m waiting for people to love me before I can love them … and they are waiting for me to love them before them can love me … well, all you have to do is look around to see how well that’s been working out. We’re all waiting for our cups to run over … only our cups are never full, amen?
When the world speaks of love … which it does all the time … TV, movies, music, the internet, books … they are usually speaking about selfish and self-centered love. They are speaking about one-sided, hopeless love. They are speaking about deceit and cruelty masquerading as love. Once in a while, they speak of a mature, other-centered love that stands the test of time. No wonder we take the word “love” for granted. We’re obsessed with it … yet rarely do we witness it or hear about what love truly is in the world around us.
If true love is so unfamiliar, why do people write about it, text about it, and sing about it so much? Because there is a hole in the human heart. We are desperate for the experience of genuine love. We long for it. We hunger for it. But the love that we seek is not the “love” that the world has to offer, amen? The kind of love that our hearts truly crave is “agape” … divine love.
The Bible has a lot to say about “love.” The word appears over 500 times in God’s love letter to us. From the Book of Genesis to the Book of Revelation, the story of the Bible is the story of God “hesed” … God’s steadfast, unconditional, and relentless love for us. The love that appears at the top of almost every list of virtues in the Bible is not just God’s love for us but also our love for each other. Being a Christian means that the very love of God has been poured into your heart.
Agape isn’t just a spiritual or emotional sensation. This love … this agape … wears work gloves and handles the everyday nuts and bolts of life. It is highly practical. It hugs the lonely … feeds the hungry … tends the sick … comforts the sorrowful … and puts up with the insufferable. It is kind and long-suffering, perceptive, positive in outlook because it is not human love which has been made unlovely by our sin.
Agape is the highest form of love … the love that everyone wants to receive but few are ready to give because of the sacrifice involved. You see the problem, don’t you? How can anyone receive agape if no one is willing to share and to give agape?
Dionysius was a second-century bishop in the city of Corinth. He wrote a letter that describes the kind of love and compassion that we have shown to the world as Christians during the time of deadly plague:
“Most of our brethren showed love and loyalty in not sparing themselves while helping one another, tending to the sick with no thought of danger and gladly departing this life with them after becoming infected with their disease. Many who nursed others to health died themselves, thus transferring their death to themselves. … The heathen were the exact opposite. They pushed away those with the first signs of the disease and fled from their dearest. They even threw them half dead into the roads and treated unburied corpses like refuse in hopes of avoiding the plague of death, which, for all their efforts, was difficult to escape” (Maier, P.L. Eusebius: The Church History. Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1999, p. 269).
Priest and author Henri Nouwen expressed it this way:
“Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it” (Nouwen, H.J.M. The Way of the Heart. New York: Harper One, 1991; p. 34).
Here’s the truth of “if only” … if only they were like this … if only they were like that … then I would help them … then I would love them … or at least tolerate them. “What if” is my way of saying that they are not good enough as they are. For me to love them … for me to tolerate them … for me to put any effort into helping them … they have to change. They are unacceptable as they are. They have to come up to my standards before I invest any time and energy into them or into our relationship. “If only,” right?
I used to divide the world into sheep and goats. Sheep were good. They went on my right. Goats were bad. They went on my left. Here’s the problem. Once you disappointed me … once you let me down … once you began making too many demands on me … once I felt that you were asking too much … once I felt that I wasn’t getting back as much as I put into the relationship … you went into the goat pen … and you stayed in the goat pen. Very few people ever crossed from the goat pen to the sheep pen. Not only was my goat pen huge and my sheep pen small with hardly any sheep in it … I was shocked when God pointed out that I belonged in the goat pen because only He has the ability and the right to make the distinction between the sheep and the goats and I was, in fact, playing God. You see, when Jesus said that He would come again in His glory and “separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats” (Matthew 25:32) He used an analogy that everyone could understand. The difference between the righteous and the unrighteous would be as obvious to Him as the difference between a sheep and a goat would be to us. While the difference between the righteous and unrighteous would be obvious to Jesus, it would be nowhere obvious to us. We are not qualified to judge.
We see this kind of thing going on all around us, don’t we? Liberals putting conservatives in goat pens. Republicans putting Democrats in goat pens … the internet dividing us up into little clusters or echo chambers where the only good people, the only people we associate with are the other sheep who share our point of view, who whine and gripe and complain with us about the deplorable condition of a world full of goats. If they would only … fill in the blank, amen?
Here’s the problem. Once we put people in the goat pen, we don’t really see any point in helping them. In fact, they are not worthy of being helped because, well, THEY’RE the PROBLEM. If they would only act right … if they would only see things our way … which is, of course, the right way, amen? The only reason that they’re in the goat pen is that they put themselves there … forgetting, of course, that we put there … but they could get themselves out of the goat pen if they would only, you know, come around to our way of thinking and seeing, our way of understanding the world, and behaved.
You want to know what’s funny … and sad? The goats think that they’re the sheep and you’re the goats and if only you would come around to their way of thinking and seeing, their way of understanding the world, and behave in the manner and ways that they think you should act … well, the world would be a much, much better place.
Guess what, my brothers and sister? We hold the one key that bridges what seems like an impossible divide. The cross! “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that” … who? … “so that EVERYONE who believes in Him may not perish but have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be save through him” (John 3:16-17; emphasis mine).
In Paul’s letter to the community in Thessalonica, he prays that the Lord will make them “increase and abound in love to one another and to all” (1st Thessalonians 3:12; emphasis mine). All. Paul is asking them to love ALL … everyone … not just the members of their Christian community that they like but everyone in their community … not just their friends and neighbors that they like but even the ones who are abusing and persecuting them. “You have heard it said,” said Jesus, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” … you know, the sheep AND the goats … “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:43-48).
How can we be perfect as our heaven Father is perfect? How can we love our enemies? To the way the world thinks, this seems to be taking love a step too far. How can you love the people who are undermining the values that you held dear? How can you love the person who lied about you to make themselves look good? How can we love the person who claimed our idea as their own and got a promotion for it? Or the person who stole our identity … molested our daughter … or murdered our son? As one author points out: “Loving our loved ones is a good start. If we can’t do that, we definitely have a problem. The higher standard, on the other hand, sends a strong, clear message that we, the people of Christ, are not your average, everyday human beings” (Jeremiah, D. Living with Confidence in a Chaotic World. Nashville: W Publishing Group; 2009; p. 33). If we are called to love the world, not as the world understands love but as God calls us to love, then we need the perfect love of God and that comes from the Holy Spirit.
This is where we must truly pray, be kind to ourselves, and be very clear about what Jesus is asking us to do. We are not being asked to abandon our feelings. What we are being asked to do is ask that God will do His work in the lives of our enemies. We are not being asked to expose ourselves to further harm … to let our enemies walk all over us … or keep hurting us. We are being asked to pray to God to bless them and do good for them … which reminds us that they, like us, are children of God as deserving of His love and forgiveness and mercy as we are.
This is an enormous task … one that may seem impossible. But thank God the Bible is full of such great and powerful examples. Jesus, for example, gave us the ultimate example by giving up His life on the cross for the very people who were demanding and carrying out His execution … praying on the cross that His Father forgive them (Luke 23:24).
And His followers took His example to heart. When Stephen was being stoned to death for preaching the Gospel, he also prayed that God would forgive his executioners: “Lord, do not charge them with this sin,” he prayed (Acts 7:60). The Apostle Paul spent his adult life as a servant of the Gospel and was beaten, whipped, rebuked, jailed, and despised for it. And yet, his response was to love his enemies: “Being reviled, we blessed … being persecuted, we endure … being defamed, we entreat,” he wrote in 1st Corinthians 4:12-13. Hear the “action” again … we bless … we endure … we entreat.
In his letter to the Christians in Rome, Paul said: “If your enemy is hungry,” you are to do what? That’s right … you feed him. If your enemy is thirsty, you do what? Give him something to drink. Why? “… for in doing so you will heap coals of fire on his head.” This doesn’t mean what it seems to say on the surface but really suggests heaping blessings on a person head … but that’s another sermon for another Sunday. “Do not be overcome by evil,” says Paul, “but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:20-21).
Now we can go from “if only” to “acting as if.” You see, to the world, love is a feeling. The world constantly tells us to follow our hearts. What they really mean is to follow our feeling and all you have to do is open your eyes and ears, turn on the TV or radio, or go on the internet or any other social media to see how that’s working, amen? But God’s kind of love … agape … doesn’t follow, it leads by example. It’s a verb. It acts. It leads our hearts. And it changes lives. It changes the life of the person acting in love and it changes the life of the person receiving the love. Remember … how can anyone experience agape if someone isn’t out there living agape, sharing agape, giving agape away, amen?
C.S. Lewis explained this beautifully. An unbeliever makes his choice as to whom he will show kindness, but, as Christians, we act and think differently. “We shouldn’t waste our time about whether we love our neighbors,” he writes, “just act as if we did. The difference between worldly people and Christians is that the worldly treat people kindly when they like them; Christians,” Lewis explains, “try treating everyone kindly and thus find themselves liking more people – including some they’d never have expected to like” (Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. In “The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics.” New York: HarperOne, 2002; pp. 110-111). Have you ever experienced it? If you haven’t it’s because you haven’t tried it … so I recommend that you try it.
In the Bible, love is not just a feeling. It’s not just an option among many. It is a command. “A new commandment I give you,” says Jesus, “that you love one another” (John 13:34). Later on He repeats the command for us to love one another again: “This is my commandment, that you love one another” (John 15:12). It’s been my experience that when Jesus repeats a command and does it so consistently, we ought to pay attention, amen? And when God commands us to do something, He always gives us the means to do it. If He commands us to love one another then He will pour that love into our hearts. When we receive God’s love into our hearts, it creates a reservoir of love that we can draw from when we need to love someone. Some people are harder to love than others, no doubt about it. Remember … you don’t have to like someone but you do have to love them as Christ tells you to. Loving anyone … especially those whom you don’t particularly like … is a decision … not a feeling. Once you make that decision, you pray to God to help you do good things to them and for them because that’s how we imitate and express God’s love for that person.
“To put it simply,” says Dr. David Jeremiah, “we followers of Christ are realists. We understand that, naturally speaking, we’re never going to like certain people. We know we’re not prone to doing the right thing when left to our own devices. But for the sake of Christ, we’re going to walk in the Spirit and treat others well because it’s the very nature of who Jesus is” (Jeremiah, Ibid., p. 34).
I do want to offer one caution here. The “flesh,” the “ego,” the “self” is a master at twisting the good that we do around and making it about us. Remember, we are called to give, to sacrifice. “All that we do in this world should be an echo of what Christ has done on the cross. We love. We are compassionate. We identify with others and their problems, and we take up their crosses for them” (Jeremiah, Ibid., p. 30). I do believe that doing good for others does good for us. Various studies have found that helping others “contributes to the maintenance of good health, even diminishing the effect of diseases” and serious and minor psychological and physical disorders (Jeremiah, Ibid., p. 40) … but it cannot be our motivation for doing good … that we’ll get some kind of psychological and spiritual reward for doing it. Jesus had everything before He stepped into our world and died on the cross and He gained nothing for Himself but everything for us. What if you and I are called to sacrifice, like Jesus, with no upside, no expectation of a reward, eh? Do you still do it? I think you know the answer and I think you know the reason why, amen?
There may or may not be a reward for acting “as if,” but there is certainly consequences if we don’t. Again, C.S. Lewis lays it out for us in graphic terms. “To love at all is to be vulnerable,” he observes. “Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one … not even an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries. Avoid all entanglement. 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 broke. It will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love,” Lewis concludes, “is hell” (Lewis, Ibid.).
I want to close with a powerful example of what we’ve talking about. When Shannon Ethridge was a junior in high school, she was putting on lipstick while she was driving on a bumpy country road. She struck Marjorie Jarstfer who was out riding her bike and killed her. Shannon was devasted. She was stunned when she found out that Marjorie’s husband, Gary Jarstfer, was concerned about the effect that the accident had on her. “How is the girl?” he asked. “Was she hurt?” His wife was dead, there was nothing more that could be done for her but his concern and compassion for Shannon, who was still living, was beyond her comprehension. How could anyone take such a devastating blow and have immediate concern for the author of the tragedy? The night before the funeral, she forced herself to visit Gary. “As I entered the house,” she writes, “I looked down the entry corridor to see a big, burly middle-aged man coming toward me, not with animosity in his eyes, but with his arms opened wide.” As he held her, she couldn’t stop sobbing and saying “I’m sorry” over and over and over again. Gary invited her to come in and sit down and then he began telling her about his beloved wife … her strong faith and her love for Jesus. “God wants to strengthen you through this,” Shannon remembers Gary saying. “He wants to use you. As a matter of fact, I am passing Marjorie’s legacy of being a godly woman on to you. I want you to love Jesus without limits, just like Marjorie did.”
Gary insisted that all the charges against Shannon be dropped and then he looked out for her and encouraged her in faith. Ethridge wrote: “Gary’s merciful actions – along with his challenging words to me that night before Marjorie’s funeral – would be my source of strength and comfort for years to come” (Ethridge, S. “Why Didn’t He Hate Me?” Campus Life, February 2008; www.christianity today.com).
I want to close with the same simple prayer that Paul prayed for the Thessalonians:
“May the Lord make you increase and abound in love to one another and to all.” Amen.
Now, go and “act as if” and don’t caught up in the trap of “if only,” amen?
