Guests are a mixed blessing.  There is; on the one hand, the novelty of having a favored individual close at-hand, but the flip side is that a novelty tends to quickly wear off –  Hence; the three-day or three-week rule that would provide a framework of time within which to take mutual enjoyment.

Then there is the more entrenched reality of shared living, whether of spouses or roommates, families or communal contexts.  There is reason as to why some would argue that you marry the person with whom you can’t lived without, rather than the one with whom you want to live or after whom you lust, as likes and lusts masquerading as loves have limited shelf-lives.  It simply isn’t easy to get along, no matter how well-intentioned the respective parties may be, as flesh, however constructive in intent, will quickly find reason to claim prerogative over or take umbrage against other flesh.

What happens when God wants to come, not merely for a visit, but for life?  We will; I have every conviction, discover that, at the natural level, we don’t really like Him all that much, as we will discover that His Presence will be disruptive to our natural instincts, proclivities and affairs.  And He; though He will never cease to love us, will readily be grieved by our sin and quenched by our spiritual obtuseness.

Such is why, as is envisioned by Jesus in the Book of Revelation, that Jesus stands outside of our hearts, knocks and awaits admission into our inner sanctum.  “Here I am!  I stand at the door and knock.  If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3.20).

The very fact that Jesus desires to be with us is an extraordinary aspect of His heart.  That He does not force His way into our lives is of comparable significance, as One who is omnipotent by nature could easily apply the rather twisted maxim that “might makes right.”  And that He awaits our answer, not hastily absconding with Himself, is further attestation to His loving and earnest disposition towards us.  There appears to be every desire on His part to come amongst us, dwell with us and bless us with His Presence.

Of course; whether this actually happens is entirely up to us.  Whether we open our lives to Him is entirely contingent upon whether we desire Him with whatever degree of authenticity, as well as to what extent we are willing to address the conditions for His Presence.  What plays out does so within the parameters of what we may call the Grand Contingency – “If!”

First; there is the issue of desire.  Second; there is the issue of effect.  Do we really desire Jesus to enter our lives, and are we prepared to do whatever is required of us for this to happen?  Again; IF!

Jesus was quite direct:  “If you love me, you will obey me, and if you obey me, my Father and I will come and we will make our home with you” (John 14.23).

“If you love me.”  It all rides on “IF,” “IF”being what we may call the Great Contingency.  God’s actions are not dependent upon man’s responses, but man’s response determines whether one may experience what God has to offer.

It is important at this point to ask whether we actually do love God.  We say we love Him, at least we do to the extent that we subscribe to and articulate, whether privately or corporately, the basic tenets of Christianity.  But I rarely ever hear anyone ever actually saying, “I love Jesus.”

 I believe that we all-too-often mistake what we “like” and what we “want” (aka lust after) for love.  Our likes are certainly congenial, and even our lusts can be affably sought after and expressed – After all; it’s all so natural and feels so right. 

The problem is that our “likes” are fickle, in that they may come and go in very arbitrary and irrational fashion, and the satisfaction of our lusts may actually prove to be at someone else’s expense.  Thomas Hardy’s late-19^th Century novel, Tess, is a case-in-point; certainly, as it pertains to sexual satisfaction, but the problem is much broader and deeper.

Do we “like” Jesus?”  Do we “want” Him in our lives?  I’m not certain that we actually would like Jesus.  Consider the biblical accounts concerning those who met Him.  The demons were terrified of Him, thinking that He came to destroy them.  The religious elites were put off by Him, sensing a threat to their vested interests and the accompanying perks of comfort, prestige and authority.  The commercial interests of His day were far more concerned with their profits than with His healing and delivering power.  No; they didn’t like Him.

Would we?  Would we “like” Him enough to re-prioritize our lives?  Away from football?  Away from comfort and convenience.  Away from sexual immorality?  Away from “Sunday” Christianity?  Enough to tithe our incomes to His House?  Enough to spend more time in devotion and less in leisure?  Enough to sell all we possess and give to the poor?  Enough to trust Him and not any human agency for our welfare?

How badly do we want Him?  Badly enough to invite Him into our homes?  Strongly enough to set aside certain habits and practices so that He wouldn’t be uncomfortable?  Urgently enough that we would accept the call to leave behind everything, pick up the cross and follow Him? 

He did say, “If you love me.”  It’s important to understand what such love is.  It is what the Greeks called “agape,” which is a holy, sacrificial kind of love, the love that surrenders all, defers to the existent need and is more mindful of the greater good or one’s partner or one’s Savior.  Jesus said, “No greater love has anyone than that one lay down one’s life for a friend” (John 15.13).  It’s the kind of love that sets aside one’s personal prerogative.  It says, “No!” to self and “Yes!” to another; in this instance, Jesus Christ Himself.

“If you love Me, then you will obey Me.”  Our Lord could not have more simply expressed Himself.  Mere “like” or the more overtly insidious “lust” gives the lie to one’s profession of love.  Obedience gives the substantiation.

It is not “I love You, but …” It is “If you love Me, you will …” You will obey Me.  Obedience carries great significance in the eyes of God.  It was certainly the hallmark of Christ’s life.  We read in the Scriptures that He learned obedience through what that He suffered (Hebrews 5.8).  He was obedient into death, even death on a Cross (Ephesians 5.8).  And, while He prayed that the cup of wrath might be taken from Him, He cried out, “Nevertheless; not My will, but Your will be done” (Mark 14.36).

Obedience is an act of will, will in the sense that we must willfully lay aside our own will.  The life of the Christian is all about self-denial.  We are called to lay down our lives, if ever we are to please God, if ever we are to pick them up again in newness.  I love how C.S. Lewis has put it:  “Nothing that does not die will ever see Resurrection.” 

We obey God because we die to ourselves and live for Him.  We obey God because such obedience is the outgrowth of our God-given faith.  We obey God because we love Him and wish to honor Him.  We obey God because we trust Him with our lives, believing that He who knows best has our best interests at heart.  We obey Him in order to conform to His holiness (1 Peter 1.14, 15).

Christian obedience has love at its core.  “Now that you have purified yourselves by your obedience to the truth, so that you have sincere love for the brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart” (1 Peter 1.22).  Obedience is the predicate and the embodiment of love.  It participates in our cleansing from sin and prepares us for our consecration on behalf of His family.

Obedience is an act of deference in the gentlest sense, but also of submission and surrender in the most forceful sense.  The Apostle Paul instructs us to be “mutually submissive to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5.20).  The applications of such submission are universal, from husbands and wives to parents and children to employers and employees – Always; obedience is performed out of love for God, as we are mindful of His sovereignty, and out of love for one another, that we may be mutually beneficial in building up one another in the love and truth of Christ.

Obedience is an act of discipline.  We must train ourselves, both in terms of preparation to be disciplined and to be disciplined.  The distinction is helpful as, just as the sinner cried out to Jesus, “Lord, I believe; help me in my unbelief” (Mark 9.24), a similar duality arises, in that we do the things that we don’t want to do and don’t do the things that we do want to do.  It is a fundamental lack of obedience that creates and habituates us in a lack of obedience, as we are naturally inclined to self-will.  We need to ask God to help us to be obedient.  “Lord; You have been my helper” (Psalm 27.9).

God is so good that He defers to our need and acts “obediently” in response to our need.  What is at issue is whether we defer to Him, acting obediently in response to His dictate.

“If you love me, you will obey Me and, if you obey Me, My Father and I will come and make our home with you.”  This is so beautiful!

No one need ever be or feel alone.  Almighty God, the very One who exists in triune fellowship as Father, Son & Holy Spirit, would move to share His fellowship with each of us.  I know of no political or governing leader who would think, let alone act, in such a way.

God created us for the express purpose that we might glorify Him and enjoy Him.  He would take pleasure in our company, as evidenced by His walk “in the garden in the cool of the day” as he looked for Adam and Eve.  He was as grieved as we were damaged by our fall from Him. 

I hearken to the story of Abraham, when three visitors visited with him – One guess as to who the three visitors were?  Hint:  You have as many as three guesses, but really only need one! 

I think of Moses, who was described as a “friend of God.”  One is also reminded of David, who had a “heart for God.”  More ruefully; one is mindful of the psalmist who wrote while in exile:

“As the deer pants for the flowing streams, so pants my soul for You, O God.  My soul thirsts for the living God.  When shall I come and appear before God?  My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, ‘Where is Your God?’  These things I remember as I pour out my soul:  how I used to go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival.  Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?  Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God” (Psalm 42.1-5). 

We all would, and now do, thanks be to God for and through Jesus Christ!  What once separates us (or still does separate us), no longer does (or no longer will) as we receive (or will receive) Jesus Christ as our Savior and embark upon a well-trod but painfully-marked path.

We have been reconciled to God.  We have peace with Him, by which we now have access to His throne of grace by the very faith  that such grace has bestowed upon us (Romans 5.1, 2) and “through Him by the one Spirit to the Father” (Ephesians 2.18).  We have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place (Hebrews 10.19).  And, to top it off:

“You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone, in Whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.  In Him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” (Ephesians 2.19-22).

I can’t ever forget when Jesus first began to live with me.  He came to me in the privacy of my bedroom in August 1975.  He drew me to Himself, comforting me in my distress, washing me in His blood, instilling His Spirit within me, embarking me upon a life of devotion, grounding me in scripture, prayer and divine fellowship, and all that just for starters, His visit never having ended, for He had come to live with me; Praise God!

I will always remember the night in Boston in the winter of 2001, when His Spirit visited me, coming upon me during a time when I felt myself to be a failure to my ministerial calling.  I had endured two years of such debilitating concern, all the while confessing my sin, pleading the blood of Jesus, clinging to Him that I might continue apace (if not yet afresh) with my ministry.

Billy Graham’s daughter Annie Graham Lotz stepped to the podium in the main hall of Boston’s Back Bay Convention Center and, drawing upon and reading John 21, shared about the Apostle Peter’s restoration to ministry.  The Word struck me like a bolt from the blue and the Holy Spirit flooded my heart and mind.  Hundreds of people shared the hall that night but, like a precision-guided missile, the Spirit found me.  I walked away that evening with a similar sense of restoration, now to continue afresh (and not just apace) with the work that God has given me to do, with the Holy Spirit within me.

And then there is the entire year of 2019, during which my loving and heavenly Father quite literally sustained and provided and helped me to surmount what would otherwise have been a devastating experience.  I felt as if my heavenly Father carried me, His little child, in His arms as He helped me to navigate the shoals of congregational and financial fallout of the prior year and my worsening cardiac travails of the current one.  It is a story that warrants an entire essay, so I will save it, so may it suffice for me to say that my relationship with my loving and heavenly Father was, if not established (for that was long ago), further embedded in my experience of His holy love.  I will always be grateful for, and can never forget, the labors of Dr. Hartzell V. Schaff and the staff of The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, but am forever (literally) indebted and devoted to my loving and heavenly Father for His divinely-consummate care of me amidst that critical time.

I invite you to come to Him and to receive Him or, if you have already done so, to further live to bless Him and to know His blessing, for …

“You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Hebrews 12.22-24).

Praise God!  Love Him all the more, in obedience to and fellowship with Him – And be blessed of Him in embodiment of His Word and as temples of His Holy Spirit.

Bradley E. Lacey (January 13, 2021)