How God Renews Our Relationships

In the previous posts, we have seen how God renews us in the major areas of our lives. He renews us mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Now we will examine how he also renews the social area of our lives. Our experience of God's love renews our relationships with others.

When God lives in us and renews us, he causes us to love others (1 John 4:12). Because God has accepted us, we are freed to reach out to others and show them the love God has shown us. The infusion of God's love into our hearts changes how we relate to others.

In this post, we will examine how the experience of God's love makes it possible for us to relate to others in renewed, healthy ways.

I. The Experience of Alienation

I believe that in some way each of us feels like the Elephant Man. The Elephant Man is one of my favorite movies; in fact, when I watch it I can barely take my eyes from it because the story is so gripping. It is a true story about the life of Joseph Merrick, an Englishman who was born with a disease that disfigured his body so severely that people could not bear to look at him. He was displayed as a freak in a circus sideshow where his owner treated him like an animal and abused him.

He was rescued from that dismal existence by the kind doctor Frederick Treves, who took him to the London Hospital and cared for him. Beneath the grotesque exterior, Treves discovered a warm, sensitive human being who was intelligent and engaging. In one of the most moving scenes in the movie, Treves takes Merrick to his house to visit with his wife. While they are drinking tea, Merrick tells Mrs. Treves that he must be a great disappointment to his mother. He said that he wished he could find his mother because he had tried to be good and he would like to see if she could accept him just as he is.

Like the Elephant Man, each of us desires unconditional acceptance because we feel alienated from others. I agree with Gerald May, who said that there is "a fundamental human longing for unconditional love, one that affirms and supports people just as they are and does not demand that they make themselves different in any way." But he notes sadly that "unconditional love is a very rare experience in our society" (1983, p. 72).

Alienation from others began with the very first sin. When Adam and Eve sinned, they sewed fig leaves for themselves to hide behind (Gen 3:7). Then when God came to talk with them, they hid from him. Their actions illustrate that sin has disrupted our relationships. Because of our shame, we are so defensive and self-protective that we hide our true selves from others. We find it hard to let our barriers down so that others can come to know us; consequently, we feel alone and isolated.

The process of alienation for each of us begins in childhood. As infants, the world revolves around us because we are born helpless. Humans are unique among the mammals in that they are born incomplete, unable to take care of themselves, and subject to the dangers of the world. We are born prematurely because of our oversized brain. At birth, the brain weighs 350 grams, but at the end of the first year it weighs 825 grams (1/2 of its final total). Because our brain grows so quickly, we must be born while the head can still pass through the birth canal, but this means that our body is not developed enough for us to take care of ourselves.

Our helplessness makes us completely dependent on the care of others who love us. Our parents (or other caretakers) must love us unconditionally or we will die. Although we need love to survive, there is not much about us that is lovable:

• our eyes are out of focus;
  
• we have a bad complexion and are missing our teeth;
  
• we disturb others' sleep and exhaust their energies;
  
• we are demanding and self-centered;
  
• we break all rules of human decency with glee;
  
• and we leak various bodily fluids at the most inappropriate times.
  

But our helplessness and vulnerability bring forth compassion from others who must care for us. Infants are accepted, loved, and cared for even though they are self-centered, manipulative, uncivilized creatures.

When we are born, we are completely identified with our mother. Because we began life united with the mother's body, we feel identified with the mother once we leave the womb. Gradually, we become aware that we are individuals separate from our mothers. When we cry, sometimes she doesn't come. She doesn't always want to play when we want to play. Sometimes when we are sad, she is happy, and when we are happy, she is sad.

As we grow older, we are forced to sleep alone in our rooms while our parents get to share each other's comfort in the dark. We begin to explore the world around us, and we discover there is a lot out there that is separate from ourselves. By the end of the first year, we are aware that at a certain point, we end, and the rest of the world begins. Those boundaries are defined by our bodies. The rest of our lives is spent defining and developing our identity and individuality. We develop ego boundaries that separate us from others and give us a unique identity, but they bring a sense of loneliness that makes us long to return to the first year of our lives when we experienced union with all things.

The experience of being loved unconditionally as infants never leaves us, but we can never experience it again. As we grow older, we soon discover that acceptance is conditional. After the first year, the child discovers that love is no longer unconditional but is given only when certain conditions, requirements, and demands are met. Through the rest of our lives, we find that people love us only when we deserve it. They value us only when we can meet some need they have. They accept us only when we live up to their expectations of us. This lesson is reinforced by parents, teachers, ministers, and employers. But we always long to be loved unconditionally again and to love others unconditionally.

The loneliness that comes with individuality causes anxiety, shame, and guilt. Loneliness and alienation are the universal experiences of people, according to Erich Fromm: "This awareness of ourselves as a separate entity, the awareness of our own short life span, of the fact that without our will we are born and against our will we die, that we will die before those whom we love, or they before ourselves, the awareness of our aloneness and separateness, of our helplessness before the forces of nature and of society, all this makes our separate, disunited existences unbearable prisons.... Our deepest need, then, is the need to overcome our separateness, to leave the prison of our aloneness" (Fromm, 1956, pp. 8-9).

II. The Cure for Alienation (1 John 4:8-12)

How do we overcome our loneliness and alienation? Charlie Brown once walked up to Lucy who was standing behind her booth that said, "Psychiatrist, 5 cents." He asked her, "Can you cure loneliness?" "I can cure anything," she assured him. "Can you cure deep-down, bottom-of-the-well, black-forever loneliness?" "All for the same nickel?" she asked. Charlie Brown was looking in the wrong place for help with his loneliness.

Experiencing unconditional love is the only true antidote to our loneliness, as Erich Fromm recognized: "The full answer to the problem of existence lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, fusion with another person, in love. This desire for interpersonal fusion is the most powerful striving in man. It is the most fundamental passion, it is the force which keeps the human race together, the clan, the family, society. The failure to achieve it means insanity or destruction--self-destruction or destruction of others. Without love, humanity cannot exist for a day" (Fromm, 1956, pp. 16-17). Victor Hugo also said: "The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, in spite of ourselves."

Some people try to satisfy their need for acceptance in marriage, but this rarely works. Soon husbands discover that, when they leave their dirty socks on the floor, the wife does not accept them unconditionally. When wives do not keep their house as spotless as Mommy used to, the husband does not accept them unconditionally. Trying to satisfy our need for unconditional love in marriage places an impossible burden on another human being.

Gerald May warns against attempting to satisfy our need for unconditional love from human beings: "If you grow to invest all your longing for unconditional love in me, if you truly come to expect it from me, then your pain will be immense when I fail to measure up—as I most certainly will. Then you are left to deal with that pain, and you have only two options. You can become depressed, hating yourself and feeling that you were somehow unworthy of my love, or you can hate me, reviling me for my callous insensitivity" (1983, pp. 137-8).

Only one person is capable of loving us in all the right ways in all the right amounts at all the right times, and that person is God. First John 4:8 says that God is love. According to Leon Morris, "love is the essence of his being" and "love is the basic fact about God's nature" (1981, pp. 136-7). Daniel Migliore says that "God is self-sharing, other-regarding, community-forming love" (1991, p. 64). God cannot stop loving because love is what he is. Love is not simply what God does; love is what God is. For God to stop loving, he would have to stop being God.

A farmer printed on his weather vane the words, "God is love." Someone asked him if he meant to imply that the love of God was as fickle as the wind. The farmer answered: "No, I mean that whichever way the wind blows, God is love. If it blows cold from the North, or biting from the East, God is still love just as much as when the warm South or gentle West winds refresh our fields and flocks. God is always love."

God proved his love for us by giving his Son to die for us: "God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins" (1 John 4:9-10). Leon Morris says that "we will never understand what love means if we start with human response." Rather, he says, "it is the cross that brought a new dimension to religion, that gives us a new understanding of love." Apart from the cross, there is no reason to believe in a God of love (Morris, 1981, p. 129). About this verse, C. S. Lewis says simply: "In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give" (1960, p. 175).

Only God can satisfy our deep-seated need for unconditional acceptance. We sometimes place this burden on other people (parents, friends, spouse), but, according to Diogenes Allen, "only God has unlimited abundance and to seek from a creature more than it can give is to lose even the good of which it is capable" (1987, p. 118). Morton Kelsey rightly concludes that "seldom can we offer to others much truly self-giving love until we have received it from the Divine Lover in one way or another" (1981, p. 27).

When we experience God's love, we cannot keep it to ourselves but must share it with others: "Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us" (1 John 4:11-12). When we allow God to fill us with his love, it becomes impossible to keep it within. His love flows out from us so that we become channels of love.

Love does not require giving up the individuality we have struggled so hard to attain. True love means that we maintain our separateness even as we bind our lives together by our care and concern for each other. When we love, we stretch our ego boundaries to include other human beings. Our ego boundaries become permeable so that others are allowed in. By loving others, our self becomes enlarged so that we lead richer, fuller lives.

III. The Risk of Love (1 John 4:16b-18)

Love overcomes our fear of rejection by God and others: "God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: hat we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love" (1 John 4:16b-18).

This passage refers primarily to our fear of judgment and condemnation, but it also has a wider application. Our experience of God's love gives us the freedom, security, and courage to risk letting down our guard and reaching out to others in love. The more we take the risk of loving, the easier it becomes to step out of our isolation and make ourselves vulnerable to others by caring for them.

Many are afraid to love because they don't want to risk rejection and hurt. C. S. Lewis said: "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken" (1960, p. 169). Elton Trueblood wrote: "This then is the advice to give anybody who never wants to be hurt: don't care! Don't care and then nobody can ever say, 'I told you so.' Don't care and you cannot be wounded because of the caring. If you don't want to be hurt, don't marry, then you can't lose. If you never want to hurt, don't have a child. A child whom you love so much could be a terrible disappointment. If you never want to be hurt, don't enter the church. Even this redemptive fellowship, on which Christ depends, can itself be disappointing and manifestly unworthy. Don't care and then you will be safe. But those who take the road to safety pay a heavy price, the price of turning their backs upon all of the best things in life."

Throughout our lives, we have found that people disappoint us, put their own interests before ours, and at times betray us. When we move out of our isolation toward another human being, we risk that that person will move away from us, leaving us more painfully alone than we were before. The price of love is pain: People will let you down, people will move away, and people will die and leave you alone.

We can easily become cynical like Linus who said, "I love humanity; it's people who give me problems." But we cannot love just in theory. Love is not just an abstract ideal. To love, we must become involved in the lives of others, and that means we will often become messy and dirty and hurt. Even in the church, it is a challenge to act in loving ways toward others, as one poem says: "To dwell above with saints we love, That will be grace and glory; To live below with saints we know, That's another story!"

We can fear being used and abused so much that we refuse to put ourselves in the vulnerable position of acting in a loving way toward another person. But the alternative is worse: to not live life fully; to adopt a paranoid stance that leads to a life of fear; to shut the door of our heart and lock it so tight that no one can get in and we can't get out.

To live without loving is not living; it is a living death. It stifles personal growth and reduces our world to the circumference of our selves. We may think we are safe and secure behind our locked doors and shuttered windows, but it is a very lonely safety and a fearful security.

The experience of God's love liberates us to let others through our boundaries so that we can bond with them in compassion and care. Our strength and security derives from the fact that no matter what anyone else thinks of us, we know what God thinks of us—and he thinks more highly of us than is humanly possible. Because we know he loves us, we no longer feel a need to compete with others or protect ourselves from them.

IV. The Community of Love (1 John 4:19-21)

When we take the risk to love others as God has loved us, our love will often call forth love from them: "We love because he first loved us. Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also" (1 John 4:19-21).

Daniel Migliore stresses that the concept of the Trinity means that "in God's own life there is an activity of mutual self-giving, a community of sharing, a 'society of love' (Augustine) that is the basis of God's history of love for the world narrated in Scripture" (1991, p. 61). Because God himself exists as a community of mutual love, he desires those he created in his image to experience the community of love. Migliore observes: "The divine life is social and is thus the source and power of inclusive community among creatures" (1991, p. 69).

God's love can reach through us to break down the walls that others have built around themselves. They will answer God's love with their love. They will return love to God who will fill them with more love, which they will then share with us. This completes the cycle of love. Morton Kelsey says that, when two people share God's love with each other, "it appears as if the Divine Lover were communicating with himself, using two of us human beings as the occasion and lifting us up into his love at the same time (1981, p. 45). Paul Tournier said: "How beautiful, how grand and liberating the experience is when people learn to help each other. It is impossible to overemphasize the need humans have to be really listened to, to be taken seriously, to be understood…. No one can develop freely in this world and find a full life without feeling understood by at least one person."

Unconditional love is the deepest longing of people, but they rarely experience it beyond their first year of life. The church should be a place for people to experience unconditional love. I love this quote from Jerry Cook: "Love is commitment and operates independently of what we feel or do not feel. We need to extend this love to everyone who comes into our church: 'Brother, I want you to know that I'm committed to you. You'll never knowingly suffer at my hands. I'll never say or do anything, knowingly, to hurt you. I'll always in every circumstance seek to help you and support you. If you're down and I can lift you up, I'll do that. Anything I have that you need, I'll share with you; and if need be I'll give it to you. No matter what I find out about you and no matter what happens in the future, either good or bad, my commitment to you will never change. And there's nothing you can do about it. You don't have to respond. I love you, and that's what it means'" (1979, p. 13).

A church is a place where people should be accepted in spite of their faults, where the irritations and personality quirks of others are tolerated, where people learn to resolve conflict in healthy ways. In the church, God loves you through me, he loves me through you, and our common experience of his love binds our lives together. In the church, instead of isolation, people experience fellowship; instead of enmity, reconciliation; instead of rejection, acceptance; instead of hostility, peace; instead of division, unity. The church is a group of people with hangups, neuroses, addictions, and sins who have joined hands to form a ragtag band of travelers who accompany each other on the spiritual journey. As we journey together following Christ's guidance, we experience from each other forgiveness, acceptance, freedom, compassion, empathy, and caring.

V. Conclusion

According to Romans 5:5, God pours his love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. God's love overflows from us to others. Our experience of God's love radically transforms how we relate to others. Self-centeredness is replaced by concern for others; coldness is replaced by compassion; fear is replaced by courage; and hatred is replaced by love.

At the end of the movie The Elephant Man, Treves and Merrick are talking, and Merrick says, "I am happy every hour of the day. My life is full because I know I am loved. I gained myself. I could not say that were it not for you." May God help us be the one who shows others his transforming love.

Reflection Questions

1. What does it feel like to be lonely?

2. Why is it so difficult to build healthy relationships with other people?

3. How would it affect someone's life to believe that God is love?

4. How does experiencing God's love affect us?

5. Explain the connection between God's love for us and our love for others.

6. Why do many churches fail to provide people the unconditional love they need? Where else will people find it if they do not find it in church?

Next Topic: "How God Renews Our Selves"

Sources:

Allen, D. (1987). Love: Christian romance, marriage, friendship. Cambridge, MA: Cowley.

Cook, J., & Baldwin, S. C. Love, acceptance & forgiveness: Equipping the church to be truly Christian in a non-Christian world. Ventura, CA: Regal.

Fromm, E. (1956). The art of loving. New York: Harper & Row.

Kelsey, M. T. (1981). Caring: How can we love one another?
New York: Paulist Press.

Lewis, C. S. (1960). The four loves. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

May, G. G. (1983). Will and spirit: A contemplative psychology. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Migliore, D. L. (1991). Faith seeking understanding: An introduction to Christian theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Morris, L. (1981). Testaments of love: A study of love in the Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.