Introduction
I’ve taken several long road trips in the last year. I’ve discovered that the best way for me to maintain my alertness and my sanity is to listen to audio books. I’ve become a fan of Tom Bodett, the guy who does the Motel 6 ads, whose most famous line was “We’ll leave the light on for ya’”
Bodett is also a great storyteller, and I have several of his audio books. One of his stories revolves around Lloyd and Evelyn Decker, a couple in their early 70’s who have seen very little of the world outside their hometown of Avalon, Ohio. One day Lloyd comes home with a picture of an enormous motor home and suggests they should sell their home, buy the motor home and see the country. Evelyn shares his enthusiasm and their adventures begin.
One of their purposes in traveling is to spend time with their grown children, their son Anthony, who had set out for adventure himself, but somehow ended up pumping gas in Booder, Indiana. And their daughter Deirdre, who lives in Oregon.
As a child, Deirdre’s adoring father called her “Precious” or “Princess” and never wanted her to do things like go fishing with him or anything else that might soil her pretty dresses. As an adult, Deirdre has devoted her life to becoming everything her father wouldn’t let her be. She works hard as a laborer, excelling at physical jobs rarely held by women. She gets pretty dirty and pretty sweaty pretty much every day. Her male co-workers respect her because despite her slight build, she can outwork most, if not all, of them.
But there is a price to be paid for living your life just to spite your parents, and Deirdre Decker has paid it. She is an angry woman who is close to no one. She lives alone, and her life is a monument to her own strength and independence. When her parents come to visit, they come out to her work site. Deirdre takes some pleasure in having her parents, especially her father, see her working in the heat and the dirt, knowing that he must hate to see the life his “Princess” has chosen.
She becomes incensed when her mother makes lunch for everyone at the job site. She doesn’t want to be mothered and she doesn’t want to see Evelyn mother anybody else, either. She expects that her co-workers won’t want her nicely sliced white-bread sandwiches and lemonade and cookies any more than she does, but of course, they don’t have this problem with her mother, and they come back for seconds and thirds.
Finally, Lloyd and Evelyn get the none-too-subtle hint that Deirdre doesn’t want them around. As they drive away, Evelyn asks, “What just happened back there?” And Lloyd replies, “Nothing. Absolutely nothing happened”
Transition
What Lloyd & Evelyn both know is that more than “nothing” has happened. What has happened is that they have tried to show their love to their daughter in the only ways they know how and she has tossed it back in their face. Their gentle, if often clueless, love has been met with a torrent of anger, pride and hate.
Their goal was to reconnect with their child. But what happened was nothing except to increase the distance.
As I listened to this story unfold, I found myself filled with a mix of emotions. I was angry at Deirdre, angry that she would act so spitefully and hatefully to her parents, who genuinely cared about her, who hadn’t done anything to hurt her, although they had never really taken the time to listen to her and understand her. Couldn’t she have just seen into their hearts a little bit and receive it?
But, though I hate to admit it, that there were times when I had a similar attitude toward my parents. I was never as vocal about it, I hope I was never as cruel, but some of the core thoughts and attitudes have been in my heart, too. It took me way too long to “get” that my parents really did love me.
How painful it is to pour out your love to someone and be repaid with hated, anger, rejection. Last week [in "Four Dimensional Love"] I said the love of God is: broad enough to include every person who has ever lived, it is so long-lasting that it will never let us go; its quality is so high, it will never let us down; and it is so deep, it can meet the deepest needs of our being.
So why is it that so many people reject God’s love like Deirdre rejected her parents’ love?
And why is it that even those of us who call ourselves His sons and daughters often find that when we think of God, our first thought is not, “Oh, how He loves me!”
Why is it that we don’t live in His love?
Why don’t we experience it on a daily basis?
Is it some defect in the way God loves us?
Is it that God just doesn’t know how to communicate His love in a way that penetrates our hearts?
Is God like Lloyd & Evelyn Decker: Well-meaning but clueless about what we need? If you were to sit down in your living room, hit the remote control and nothing happened, what’s the first thing you’d do?
Call the cable company?
Call KDKA and ask what happened to their signal?
Call ABC & CBS & NBC & Fox?
Probably most of you would check the batteries in the remote. Or you’d see if you could turn on the set without using the remote. You would assume that the problem was not that all the broadcasting satellites had failed, but that something in your own system had failed:
The remote
The TV
Maybe you’ve lost power at your house
The problem would not be with the signal going out,
The problem is that the receiver is not picking it up.
The same is true of God’s love
The “signal” is always going out.
God’s love is ever-present
But our receiver isn’t always working
Why don’t we experience the love of God?
Like Deirdre Decker, sometimes we even willfully play defense in the game of Love
Why do we do that?
There are probably lots of reasons, today we’re going to look at a couple of them.
A major reason some people fail to experience God’s love is Pride
Most of us probably think of a proud person as someone who brags all the time and constantly talks about how good they are.
If you’re a M*A*S*H fan, you might think of Charles Emerson Winchester – the pompous Boston surgeon who considers himself not only the world’s best doctor, but he seems to think he is some distinctly higher form of human life than those around him.
And I won’t argue that he isn’t proud – he certainly is! But the kind of pride that keeps us from experiencing God’s love isn’t limited to the Charles Emerson Winchester types.
So how do we know if we have the kind of pride that separates us from God’s love? Well I recently found a list of “Pride Detectors” that I thought might help us discover if we have a problem there.
The first one is: A spotty prayer life. That doesn’t seem to make sense does it? How can being inconsistent in prayer mean I’m proud? Because it means I am not actively relying on God, I don’t have a real sense that I need God, or I would be coming to Him in prayer regularly – not because I felt I should, but because I felt I had to.
So how’s your prayer life?
Here’s another one: a critical spirit
When you criticize others, you act as their judge… a role only God has a right to fill.
Pride Detector #3: Being defensive when corrected or criticized. Being unable to forgive ourselves when we fail. Being unable to laugh at our mistakes.
I’ve always kind of prided myself on my sense of humor
Several years ago I had a sense that the Lord was telling me that while I had a great sense of humor for jokes, I had no sense of humor about life. I saw nothing funny about my mistakes or failures. They were embarrassing and shameful to me. Why? Because “It’s fine for other folks to make mistakes, but not ME!”
That’s pride, folks.
I’m thankful that God’s taught me not to take my mistakes so seriously. I can laugh and shrug my shoulders and apologize easier. I don’t laugh at my sins, but I’m more willing to admit them and repent from them.
The ability to laugh at my mistakes and admit my sins enables me to do what I do better, because I’m not so obsessed that I might make a mistake. Can you laugh at yourself?
Here’s a couple other “Pride Detectors:”
Impatience about having to listen, or to wait
An unwillingness to serve,
An unwillingness to be led by someone else
How about saying, “I don’t need to read the directions!”
How did you do on the pride test?
I gotta tell you, I didn’t do too well. This exercise is not to make you feel guilty about being proud, but to examine and eliminate things that block us from experiencing God’s love.
Why is pride a block to experiencing God’s love? Pride puts me where God ought to be. When we repent of our pride and we humble ourselves before God, we open our hearts to experiencing His love
Another reason we don’t experience God’s love is Anger. I suspect that many of us, if not all of us, have been angry at God at one point or another.
I once read something that said if you wanted to trace anger back to its source, just use AHEN. I don’t mean a chicken, but the acronym A-H-E-N. When you see Anger (the “A”) it is usually covering a Hurt (the “H”). If you peek under that Hurt, you’ll see you had an expectation (the “E”) And if you look under that expectation, you’ll find a need – the “N”
And I would imagine that all of us, at some point, have felt like God has let us down:
A prayer wasn’t answered
A loved one wasn’t healed
The job didn’t work out
The marriage wasn’t saved
The child didn’t come back home
And it hurt! It hurt more than we even thought we had the capacity to hurt.
We had a need, and our expectation was that God would fill it – in just the way we wanted Him to. And he didn’t. And we don’t understand why not. And if we were to be honest, we may find we’re pretty ticked off about it. But we may be afraid to be that honest
I don’t know how it happened, but somewhere along the way many of us have gotten the idea that you’d better not tell God you’re mad at Him. Like if you cover it up, He won’t know
Think about human relationships for a minute:
Has anyone ever made you angry?
How about anyone in your own family?
What happens when you’re angry at your spouse or your parents or your best friend and you don’t tell them?
You start to pull away.
The wall goes up.
You can’t maintain a loving relationship with someone if you’re angry at them and won’t tell them about it.
Or maybe you don’t get angry
Or you think you don’t get angry
Maybe it stops at the “Hurt” point and never boils over into anger.
But the same thing happens
If you don’t express that hurt to the one who hurt you, you will inevitably pull away from that person.
Before you know it, your relationship is a shell with nothing inside.
More than anything else, God wants you to be in a love relationship with Him. More than He wants your service. More than He wants you to witness to your neighbors. More than anything He would ever ask of you.
Think about the imagery Jesus uses in today’s verse:
How many times I wanted to put my arms around all your people, just as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would not let me!
He is comparing His will to the people’s will
“I wanted” to put my arms around you
“they wanted” Him to leave them alone.
Did you ever try to hug someone who won’t hug you back?
They stand stiff and rigid and refuse to return the embrace.
That’s a LOUD message of rejection
God is ever-reaching out to embrace us with His love
Do you know that God would rather have you wrestle with Him than walk away from Him? If you don’t believe me, read the Psalms, read about Moses, read the book of Lamentations. Just as in a human relationship, if you don’t deal honestly with hurt, anger and disappointment, you’re going to pull away from Him
If you are hurt or angry at God, express that – Be honest!
You can never experience the love of God without removing that barrier by dealing with it honestly.
The final barrier to experiencing God’s love I’m only going to touch on briefly: that’s Trivial Pursuits.
What would you have done if you had received a personal invitation to President Bush’s inauguration?
Would you have said, “I’m sorry, George, but this is really a busy weekend?” Probably not!
I would have been so honored to receive the invitation I would’ve dropped everything to go. Shortly after saying these words about Jerusalem’s rejection of Him, Jesus tells the parable of the Wedding Feast.
A wealthy man invites his friends to a great celebration, but they’re all too busy to come. A couple of them have just bought some new “stuff” and wanted to play with it. Somebody else had just gotten married himself – and didn’t want to share the joy of someone else’s marriage.
Each one is pre-occupied with his or her own life
They’re just too busy to experience the love of God
When they make out their schedules, God doesn’t make the “A” list.
On a slow day He might make the “B” list
But generally He’s down a lot further than that.
Conclusion
Amazingly, despite the rejection they experienced earlier, Lloyd & Evelyn Decker return to their daughter Deirdre’s. Lloyd had a heart attack while they were in New York, and they’ve decided they’d rather be with family than traipsing all over the country anymore.
So they park their mobile home on property behind Deirdre’s little house, and the battles begin again. Evelyn makes big “farmer’s breakfasts” for Deirdre every morning, while she snaps “I don’t eat breakfast! How many times I have to tell you that?”
Lloyd tries to “clean up” her yard for her – destroying her compost pile and putting little white plastic picket fencing around the front of her house, which she promptly rips out and throws away. And on it goes. Lloyd & Evelyn keep expressing kindness, in their own way, while Deirdre keeps on rejecting them and pushing them away.
One day, while Deirdre is at work, Lloyd takes it upon himself to shovel the snow from her walk. The task proves too much, and he has a second heart attack – this time it’s fatal.
Not long afterward, Deirdre is talking to her brother and says angrily, “I told him not to do it. But he just wouldn’t listen. He always had to be helping me. I didn’t want his help.”
Even her father’s death hasn’t softened her heart towards him. Lloyd Decker died trying to demonstrate his love for his daughter, but she refused to accept it.
She was proud and didn’t want any help; She was angry and wouldn’t deal with it; She was pre-occupied with her own life and didn’t want her parents’ intruding on it.
Like Deirdre, we too, have a Father who demonstrated His love, even to the point of death. He is not a Father who is clueless, but one who understands us perfectly and whose love can reach into the deepest corners of our lives and bring healing and wholeness.
But it means laying down our pride, honestly dealing with our hurt and anger and giving up trivial pursuits.
God really is crazy about you. More than anything, He desires a love relationship with you. To receive it is your move.
