Hesed - Unfailing Love
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| Photo by George Hodan |
Piles of books surround me and I attempt to glean truth from theologians and scholars of yesterday as well as today. For weeks I have read and studied and listened to teachers, pastors (my husband at the top of the list) speak on the topic of grace, losing our first love, obedience, my identity as a daughter of the King, and how obedience flows from that identity.I'm trying to pull it all together as I unpack Jesus' exhortation to the Church at Ephesus recorded in Revelation 2:1-7. (Hear Chuck's messages on The Church - Too Big to Fail? ) Jesus commends their works, their toil and patient endurance, their pure doctrine, but then shocks them with these words, "But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first." His warning intrigues me. I sense Jesus speaking to me personally. Is he cautioning me to check my own heart and motives and spirit? Am I in danger of losing my first love? Have I already lost my first love?Jesus gives clear directions to the Church of Ephesus on how to respond to His exhortation and I take them as my own road map.
Remember
Jesus to the Church:
Remember from where you have fallen; repent and do the works you did at first. (Rev. 2:5)
First Stop: Travel back in time about 30 years to the beginnings of the Church of Ephesus in Acts 19. There I find a group of people who experienced the life transforming power of meeting Jesus. I watch as they fall in love with the Savior and turn their community upside down with their response to the Gospel. I begin to imagine what would happen in our neighborhoods if we also "remembered our first love" and the "rock from which we were hewn."
Second stop: Paul's letter to the Ephesians. What did these people believe? What did Paul teach them about their identify as sons and daughters of the King? What had they forgotten about their Savior that created a void in their church and their community impact?
As I unpacked Ephesians 1, I realized it is a treasure chest full of priceless gems, each one designed to point me to the unfailing love of our Father. Throughout the writings of Paul, we see a man who cannot come up with enough words to describe the love of God and what it means to be loved by Him. Paul's own history as a holy war terrorist intent on slaughtering the Christians in the name of God, makes these words and his inability to fully describe this love - even more powerful. Paul taught God's truth daily for two years in the city of Ephesus. Imagine how these truths infused the Ephesian Christians with passion for Jesus and how that passion encouraged them to reflect redemption in their daily lives. Lives driven by love for Jesus, not an effort to gain His approval or make Him love them more.
Third Stop: The Divine Imperatives Fueled by the Divine Indicatives
Repent and do the works you did at first.
How often I am caught up in the imperatives of scripture - the call for holiness, obedience, supernatural love. And I miss the divine indicatives - what I have heard called the "white noise of the gospel." You know, the background noise of life that we don't hear because it's always there. Passages like Ephesians 1 that focus on God's love affair with me. Jesus calls on the Ephesians, and me, too, to soak in those "first love" truths, to allow them to reveal where my motives for obedience have blurred from a response to God's gracious love into obedience for obedience sake, or attempting to earn His pleasure or blessing or more of His love. Allow the priceless gems Paul displays in Ephesians 1 to remind me that Jesus paid it all, and all to Him I owe. And that His blood has made my sin white as snow - even my efforts to clothe myself in my own righteousness rather than His.
Priceless Gems
Paul will give the Church at Ephesus those divine imperatives, "a to do list" later in this letter, but he starts with a doxology of praise that includes these descriptors:
Blessed with very spiritual blessing
Chosen in Christ
Holy and blameless before Him
In love predestined as sons and daughters
Glorious grace
Redemption
Forgiveness of our sins
The Riches of his grace lavished on us
We have obtained an inheritance
We are the praise of his glory
Sealed with the promised Holy Spirit
Soaking in this passage overwhelms me with the hesed of God: His unfailing, faithful, never ending, undeserved, enduring, steadfast, rock solid faithful love.
An eternal love
“Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love (hesed) for you will not be shaken” Isaiah 54:10.
A love that endures and doesn't stop when we fail or sin or betray the Lover
“No one is cast off by the Lord forever. Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love (hesed).” (Lamentations 3:31-32)
A love that is not emotional only, but acts on behalf of the beloved
Hesed is God's covenant love in action, persistent and unconditional seeking after the object of His love (God demonstrates this love toward Adam after he sinned, and every minute of every day when He calls me to Himself even though I sin).
Hesed is what initiates that first love with Jesus. But it is more. It is the enduring love that not only acts in my behalf but will never let me go, not when my love toward Him cools or when life shatters my dreams or I betray my Lover. We live in a culture that knows very little of living life through the grid of enduring love. And so we have the privilege of demonstrating with our own lives a glimpse of what God's Hesed looks like.
We see this kind of love demonstrated by the man who gives up his career so that he can care for his wife who was diagnosed with Alzheimers, or the couple who adopt special needs children who cannot feed or care for themselves, the father who refuses to give up on his wayward son, the husband who works every day at a job he hates so that he can provide for the family he loves, the woman who refuses to respond in kind to the friend who betrays her with gossip, the teacher who treats the"unlovely child" with the same respect and compassion as the "lovely." The more we understand this Hesed and see God love us this way, the more we will understand how this kind of love equips us to respond to the divine imperatives of the Gospel.
I will never do justice to unpacking the different aspects of His love during our study, The Gospel Challenged Woman. But I am eager to begin to share how Hesed has kept me and continues to transform me as I rediscover my First Love. I'm praying that as we soak in the treasures of Ephesians 1, we will become channels of His compassion whose redemption stories turn our communities upside down with the Hesed love of our Savior.
In His grip,
Sharon