Part III: The Doorway to the Deep Heart- the Cross and Knowing Others
The cross is everything. As we’ve seen, it’s the window through which we know the heart of God, the mirror in which we know our own heart, and today we’ll see that the cross is also the lens through which we understand the heart of others.
One of the reasons the gospel of the cross is perennially offensive is because it declares that you are so sick you that you cannot heal yourself, so enslaved you cannot free yourself, and so guilty that you cannot forgive yourself. Forgetting this or minimizing this will severely impact how you enter into, engage, and remain in relationships with others who share this same condition with you.
When you minimize the concept and reality of sin, you’ll idealize- whether you know it or not- your expectations of what your relationships should look like. Francis Schaeffer has said that if you expect others to be now only like what they will be in heaven then- namely, perfect- you will alienate and destroy others. In other words, the default mode of your relationships will become merely conditional, “I will love you if…” or “I will love you until…” This “utopian concept,” he says, will leave you disappointed and frustrated in some measure in practically all of your relationships.
The cross, then, tempers your expectations in your relationships with others but also says, this is the cost of love. There will, wonderfully, be times of feasting together, swapping stories, laughter, serving each other, grabbing drinks, and sharing burdens. These moments are the evidence that God’s beautiful image, while marred and twisted by sin, still remains in every person you meet, and is being restored in those who are followers of Jesus. Yet, there will also be moments that require patience, forbearance, and even forgiveness, some of which can be exceptionally painful. This, the cross trains us to think, is the cost of love.
The cross should also fill you with great hope for others. It is the power of God for their salvation, and it is also the power of God for your and their transformation into the likeness of the Son. Jesus’ self-giving for the welfare of others, motivated by a heart filled with unfathomable love for those whose hearts were dead and hardened by sin, is paradigmatic not only for what your love should look like, but what others can look like as they too are transformed into the likeness of our Servant-Savior by faith.
If you minimize sin and overemphasize the transformative hope of grace, you’ll eventually become disillusioned with how broken people actually are and the patience relationships require. If you minimize the transformative hope of grace and overemphasize sin, you’ll more than likely become cynical and bitter. Yet, the cross helps us hold both in balance: a realistic understanding of the hardships inherent with seeking to genuinely love another with a beautiful hope in and enjoyment of the transformative power of grace.
“Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.”
John 13:34
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