Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: We're talking about how we can know that God loves us and how we can love him in return. We love him because he first loved us. It's no doubt in my mind that understanding the love of God begins to bring a response in the human heart. And so, you can't just stir up love for God. You can't manufacture it. You can't somehow fan the flames and get it going by trying to stimulate it with music or you might get a fuzzy feeling, but that's all on the emotional level.

Love is not on the emotional level. Love is partly on the emotional level, but if we live our lives out of our emotions, we're going to be in trouble. The Holy Spirit did not come into our lives to do his deepest work in the shallowest part of us, which is our emotions. Always remember that. He came into our hearts to do his deepest work in the deepest part of us, which is in our decidings, our decisions, our knowings. Knowing who God is, knowing how it works, that we can connect with him.

Knowing when we get down on our knees, what it is to pray and to know something is accomplished by the time we get up off our knees, whether it be worship, which is an accomplishment, whether it be the work of prayer on behalf of another, whether it be our own soul's nourishment. Knowing, that's where spiritual action actually takes place, in our knowings, not our feelings. The problem is we are so tempted to live our lives out of our emotions, and that's why we're in the mess we're in with the relation or breakdown in this country, in the family.

The mess we're in is simply because we've been living in our emotions. I've been absolutely appalled as I've traveled lately to look at racks on airports, at card racks. I'm always looking for nice cards to send to people, funny cards, just card cards. Instead of writing a big long letter or taking somebody out for a cup of tea, just look for a lot of cards that say it for you and you can scribble a little note. They can do a lot of good, a little encouraging Bible verse or whatever it is for somebody.

Have you looked yourself lately in these public places at the sort of things there are? There are whole racks now devoted to the divorced and to love outside the boundaries of what we would call legitimized love. For example, two little cards that you can buy and send to your relatives or whoever it is, your friends: "Happy divorce, welcome to the unhooked generation." There's lots of those sort of little cards. This one intrigued me: "A feeling too big for words, my love for you."

That really is what most of those cards on the card rack talk about: Eros, the feeling too big for words. And so, as we come to this series on living love, this short series on what really living love is all about, we have to realize there are different levels of love. America basically is operating on the shallowest level of love: the emotion level. Not an unimportant level, but the shallowest level that is not going to last. And when 1 Corinthians 13 talks about a love that will last, a love that will continue, a love that will go on loving, then it's talking about something a whole lot more than emotions that blow as the winds blow.

There's this great searching, this nostalgia for a love that will last. I remember being in church and seeing Wynn and Bob, two people in our congregation, standing up here celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. I looked around at the congregation's faces, and it was very interesting to me the looks on people's faces. There was a great longing, there was a great hunger, there was a great, "Oh, 50 years they've been living together. How incredible."

As the pastor asked them questions, "Well, what's the secret of this 50-year wedding that we're seeing re-celebrated here today?" I always remember Wynn saying, "There came a point 20 years into our marriage when we discovered how selfish we really were, and that if we didn't change that, our marriage wouldn't last." That was the turning point, and that's why they're still together. Now, right in the heart of the passage that we are discovering and reading about, there is a little word that tells us that love isn't selfish.

Quite honestly, as I spend hours and hours and hours listening to people's marital problems as I do in the calling that I'm involved in wherever I go, as I listen, I come down to that bottom line. It's really very simple: people are selfish. Some of them are too selfish to get married. And if they get married as selfish as they are, they are not going to stay married because you cannot work out any sort of going, loving, lasting relationship with obdurate selfishness ruling in somebody's heart and life.

Love isn't selfish. And so God makes us with this capacity to be able to love somebody and go on loving, whether it be a partner or a child that's difficult. God is an expert at loving children that are difficult. He tells us in the Old Testament, "I am Hesed. I am love." He tells us in the New Testament, "I am Agape. God is love," 1 John 4:8. All love comes from him. He's the source of real love, right love, true love, living love. If he's the source and we don't know him, how can we then love?

We're loving on two cylinders. Even though we are made in the image of him, disconnected we can love on two cylinders. It will not be sufficient unless Agape love comes to fuel and to rule our other loves. When sin spoiled our relationship with God, the image was marred, and the man became dominant, subjugating the woman. As John Stott said, headship degenerated into domination, and their relationship was spoiled. The relationship that had been absolutely wonderful in the Garden of Eden was spoiled because sin came and spoiled it.

As soon as sin came and spoiled it, God said, "What have you done?" The man said, "She gave me the fruit." The woman said, "The snake made me do it." Everybody started blaming each other. Guilt came, and they tried to hide away from God, who'd given them their loving relationship in the first place. It didn't work. And God began the arduous job of rolling back the effects of the fall and putting things right, which would require his own intervention. He would have to come.

There was no other way. He would have to come and put it right. The price of putting relationships right—our relationship with God, our relationship with our husband or spouse, our relationship with other people, our relationship with our children—the price of that was the death of God. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Ask me how God can die and the universe can still hang in space; I don't know. Only God can die and still keep it up there. God in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

The price of it was the death of Jesus Christ, who said, "Look at me and you're looking at God." He was God; he was divine. And so God has a way. "Yes, I'll come. I'll intervene. I'll have to go down there and do something about this." He did it. He rose again from the dead. He sent forth his spirit of love. God is love. God is a spirit. The Spirit of Christ, who was God, can come and live in our hearts. He knew how to love because he is love.

Therefore, lent to our loveless hearts, a power to love becomes available to the human race. Love came down at Christmas, love all-lovely, love divine. Love was born at Christmas; stars and angels gave the sign. God made it possible to reconnect. He helps us to see all our human loves in perspective. He's given us this love manual, the Bible, his love letter to us, the greatest love story ever told. We just run over those three words: Agape, Phileo, Eros.

Agape: charity. Charity never fails. Charity is very patient. Charity is very kind. Charity envies not. The old-fashioned word for love. And yet charity and love have lost their meaning. Love now means something very different. I remember when we were doing street work in Europe, we'd go into the pubs and ask if we could borrow their piano and take a pianist along, somebody that could really play and sing. We'd say to the man that owned the pub, "Could we borrow your piano and have a hymn sing?"

I was never turned down, ever. In eight years of pub work, nobody ever said no and gave us the piano. The team would come in, and we'd sit with the people. We'd get our orange juice or whatever it was, and we'd start making conversation. Then the person at the piano would say, "Let's sing hymns." "Yeah, yeah. Do you know The Old Rugged Cross?" And we'd sing The Old Rugged Cross, and we'd watch. Everybody would have their beer in one hand, and tears would start coming down their faces as we sang What a Friend We Have in Jesus and some of the great hymns of the faith.

As soon as we came into that bar, because we'd go back with our hymn singing and they'd look forward to it, every other Sunday we'd go back into some of these pubs and they'd wait for us. As soon as we'd go back, they would get a look in their eyes and their hands would go into their pockets because they would see us rather like the Salvation Army: charity. They're coming to ask for something; they're coming to get something.

It was always my great delight as leader of the team I was in: "Put your hands out of your pockets, we haven't come to ask you for anything. We've come to give you something." Charity. We've come to tell you about a love that gives. Charity is giving, not getting. See how that word has totally reversed its meaning from how it was used in the King James in 1 Corinthians 13. And yet today, love is getting, not giving. Sex is getting, not giving.

The Bible talks about sex as using our body to bless the other. The world talks about sex as using her body or his body to get satisfaction for myself. That's lust, not love. Getting something that I want for myself, and there's a perversion, there's a turning around. Agape is being primarily concerned with the other's wellbeing irrespective of the cost to myself. Phileo: this need love we talked about. Inferior and yet wonderful. The love that people can have if they're not believers, if they're not Christians.

There are some wonderful love stories in the world, people that have never heard the name of Jesus who've loved each other faithfully for 50 years. Where does that love come from? Well, it comes because we're made in the image of God. And even though we're not connected, Phileo love can rise to incredible heights. But it's always tinged with selfishness. It's need love rather than gift love. I think of it specifically in our relationship to our children, our adult children as they leave us and go off into the world.

We need to be needed. When we're not needed anymore, that hurts. God often has to take our fingers and say, "Hey, hold it lightly, don't hold it tightly." We need Agape's love. We need the Holy Spirit's love. The Holy Spirit's love is shed abroad in our hearts by his Spirit that is given to us. God needs to be the God of our loves. He needs to transform them because he transcends them. He's bigger than them. He's able to do something with our loves and keep them from being selfish.

I'm going to be dealing with coveting and pride and grasping and greed, and how that ruins love, wrecks relationships. But what God can do is to give us the ability to give people space, not to be jealous, not to clutch, not to be suspicious. We need to place our human loves under divine authority. That way he'll transform them from need love—I need to be needed, I need you to need me—into gift love. I give away my love.

I remember when my husband was on the road all the time. I needed to let Agape control my Phileo love. He was away for months and months on end, out of the country, up to 10 months of the year in the end. I had three small children, and that went on for year after year, 10 years. I learned this lesson every day of my life, that I needed to kneel down at the beginning of my day—and it had to be a very early beginning with three small children—and say, "God, be the God of my love for my husband today."

My theology had to help me. I knew he was where God wanted him, and I would not be happy if he was home at my side, therefore. God would be sufficient. He turned my need love into gift love. Only God could have done that for both of us. There's a wonderful story in John chapter 2. If you want to turn if you've got your Bible with you, if you just turn to it, it's a well-known story. It's the story of the wedding at Cana.

You remember Jesus, this was the very first miracle that he had ever performed. He goes to Cana to a wedding, and Jesus's mother is there at the wedding. The governor of the wedding is there because in those days weddings were very different from they are here in all sorts of ways. They had a governor who was in charge, and he'd sit at the head table in between the bride on one side and the groom on the other.

Then all the guests would sit at tables going down from the head table like this. The most important guests would sit nearest the head table, which is something like we do today, isn't it? Where we belonged. In the middle of this wedding that Jesus and his disciples and his mother, who had some sort of role in helping to serve at that wedding, something awful happened: the wine ran out. That was a great disgrace because if the wine ran out—and that was the governor's job to make sure that everything was right—then the family would be in disgrace.

This was a cultural thing. And so, Mary comes to Jesus and says the wine's run out, and he said, "Well, it's not my time yet. It's not my time to begin the miracles and to begin my ministry quite." What have I to do with thee? It sounds a sort of harsh response of Jesus, but he says, "My time is not yet come." I'm sure it was very gently said. However, his mother simply said to the servants, "Whatever he tells you to do, do it."

I don't know if you've ever thought about that. Jesus then told the servants to fill the water pots with water and pour them into everybody's cups, which they did. He had never performed a miracle. Now, if you'd been a servant, would you have done that? What's more, it wasn't the governor who was in charge that was telling them; it was a carpenter from Nazareth. Never performed a miracle. This was the first miracle. Hadn't been performed yet. But they did it.

Mary said, "Whatever he says to you, do it." I wonder what went through the servants' minds as they poured out that water, and as people drank it. I'm sure they were all going to lose their jobs they felt. Seeing the look on their face and the governor drinking it and saying, "Why did you keep the best till the last? People usually wait till people are pretty drunk or far gone and then bring out the lousy wine. You've reversed it. You've kept the best till the last."

Now, that's a little miracle story. We know it, but let me apply it in perhaps a way that you've never thought about before. Here's a picture of love, of love at its best. Love on its wedding day. If you can't have Eros love, Phileo love, and trustfully Agape love all coming together on a wedding day, when else can you? Here you have that beautiful picture. But where is Jesus in this wedding? He is not the governor; he is merely a guest.

He's probably at the end of one of those tables with the disciples. And the wine runs out. Now, when Jesus takes over and becomes the governor instead of the guest, starts giving the rules, starts ruling the situation, the water is turned into wine and as the scripture says, it was better than any they'd had before. What a picture. Because so often at a wedding, Jesus can be there, invited surely, but only as a guest and not as the governor.

I want to tell you, the wine's going to run out. The wine is running out. The wine does run out. But when Jesus is made the governor instead of the guest, he can turn the water into wine. I sat in front of a marriage that's gone not too long ago, and I went through this story just as I'm telling it to you. I remember being able to say with such heartfelt conviction: he can turn this water into wine. I'm telling you, I've seen him do it.

I know it in my own marriage. He can do it in yours. He can keep that wine from turning into water, and he can turn the water into wine. That's what happens. And you know so many times people say, "Well, I'm Christians, we had Jesus, we both believed in him," but he wasn't the governor, you see. He's got to rule your loves, your human marriage, or it will come apart. What a story and what a picture.

Not only is it a wonderful picture of perfect love and what Jesus can do when he's Agape of that love, but we can influence the next generation. We can tell our kids, "Wait for the right one. Marry a Christian." And not just any old Christian. I remember my daughter coming home wanting to date this fellow, and I said, "Judy," and I started to object because I knew little about the young man, I didn't particularly like her choice.

She said, "But Mom, he's a Christian." And I was lost for words for a minute because we'd told our kids they could not date non-Christians. And so here she is, "Well, he's a Christian." And my husband from behind me said, "Judy, what sort of a Christian is he?" It isn't just he's a Christian. What sort of a Christian is he? Oh, to help our kids to aim high and say, "If God isn't going to give me a godly man, I'll do without."

I came to Christ on that basis, lying in a hospital bed. And the girl that led me to Christ asked me three questions: "Are you willing to be a missionary? If not, don't become a Christian. Are you willing never to be married? If not, don't become a Christian." And I can't remember the third question, I was so staggered at the first two. I remember saying to her, "What do you mean, I'll never be married?"

She said, "I'm not saying you'll never be married, but the chances are very slim." I said, "Why is that? Aren't there any men that are Christians in England?" And she said, "Very few. Go to our churches; they're full of women, old women at that. Very few men around. And the Bible says that you are not to marry a non-Christian. Be not unequally yoked together with an unbeliever." So by the law of averages, you're not going to. Is he your God or is marriage your God? That's what it was. Is your love for a future husband your God or is God your God?