I have found one of the greatest joys of having a child is rocking her to sleep at night.
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And recently, as I sat in the near-dark of my daughter's room, rocking her to sleep, I found myself staring at a poster on her wall.
It is a colorful collection of animals and toys and things that fill a child's imagination - all used to decorate the English alphabet.
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And as I stared at the poster, the thought occurred to me:
All the brilliant works of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Hemingway, - and every great writer and thinker in human history - are constructed upon the foundation of these twenty-six simple characters.
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Our world can seem so complex at times.
But, when we take time to reflect, things that appear to be complex are usually built upon simple foundations. Often, things that are of the utmost importance are the simplest in form.
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The Gettysburg Address - the most famous speech in American history - is less than two hundred words.
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The Sermon on the Mount - the most famous sermon in human history - is less than five hundred words - and probably only took 18 minutes to deliver.
And when God decided to share his good news with a lost and dying world, he did not recruit thousands or tens of thousands, but twelve, twelve simple men.
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John - my favorite new testament writer, has a gift for presenting the complex and powerful ideas about God and Christ in simple, yet powerful, ways. And in his first epistle John seeks to describe God using only a single word.
Can you imagine? The God of the universe; the father of creation; the begetter of the calculus of all science and existence and life itself can be summed up in one word!
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What word in its singular simplicity could summarize the God of all things?
Love.
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John tells us in his first epistle that if we would know God, we must know love.
In fact, he tells us that love itself describes the nature and character of God.
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G o d i s l o v e.
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But because something is simple in no way means that it is easy or trivial.
It may be easy to imagine a God of love as long as we keep him in our imaginations. But when the God of the Bible revealed his love to us in Jesus, he threw down the gauntlet. He challenged us to love. John, in the same epistle, tells us that if we want to love God, we must love our brothers and sisters. He asks us how we think we can love God whom we haven't seen if we can't love our brother who we see everyday.
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Love like God's can be a frightening thing. C.S. Lewis said it this way:
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; 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 broken, it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable . . . . The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers . . . of love is Hell." To surrender ourselves to a life of love is to have our hearts and souls exposed before one another. To make ourselves vulnerable and submissive. To risk everything that the cynical of our world would have us protect.
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But in that laying bare of our hearts we discover the greatest thing of all. In that vulnerable and precarious position we find that every pain is thwarted by the God of All Comfort. Every fear is overcome by the God of the Fire and the Lion's Den. And every weakness, doubt and imperfection is made right by the God of the Cross.
But to love we must first allow ourselves to be loved. To reach out in compassion to lift others up, we must first allow God to reach down to us and lift us up. To forgive another demands that we first taste true forgiveness.
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It is much easier - though certainly not simpler - to try to live as though it is about what we do and not about what we are; to live as though it is about our actions and not our hearts.
If I can paraphrase Paul, though:
If I know all the rules and keep them religiously but have not love,
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If, to you, God is still complex and distant; if he is still a God merely of Law and not a God of Love, then you need to look deeper at who he is. If you have tried to walk the easy and manmade path of doing-it-yourself instead of the path of the Cross, then look to the example of Jesus, who rejected the easy path of rule-keeping and self-sufficiency and chose, instead, the simple, difficult path of submission to God’s love.
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