Loved Before The Work Was Good

Nobody taught them this. That is what makes it hard to argue with.

If you asked them directly whether God loves them more when they do good work, they would say no, immediately, and they would be right and they would mean it, and there would be no hesitation at all.

And then you could watch their week.

A good stretch and they pray easily. They open the book. They feel like somebody who belongs in the room. A bad stretch, a piece that did not come off, a thing sent back, and something quietly closes: they do not pray as readily, they do not go to the thing on Wednesday, they feel like a person who has turned up somewhere they are not currently entitled to be.

They would never call that a theology. It is not a theology, it is a wiring, and wirings do not answer questions, they just run.

It has been running for a long time, and the odd part is that they cannot remember installing it. Nobody said it from a pulpit. Nobody at home said it. It arrived on its own, the way weather arrives, and it is now the actual operating arrangement of their life with God, running underneath a set of beliefs that say the opposite.

You may have your own two things. What you would say if asked, and what you actually do on the Wednesday after a bad week, and the distance between them.

The timing is the whole argument

Here is one sentence, and everything in it hangs on when.

But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.Romans 5:8

While we were yet.

That phrase is doing all the work. Not after. Not once there was something to commend. While. The decisive act happened at the point in the story where there was, by any assessment anybody could run, nothing to recommend the subject at all.

Which means the love cannot be a response to quality, because quality was not present when it was demonstrated.

I want to be loud about this and I am going to keep my voice down, because you have heard people be loud about it and it did not reach the wiring. So let me be plain instead.

You are loved on a timing that makes the assessment of your work impossible as a cause. Romans 5:8 puts the demonstration while we were yet, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a fact that old and runs it into a wiring that has been going the other way for years.

Here is why the wiring survives good theology so easily.

Everything else in your life works on merit, and works on it fairly. Your work is assessed and the assessment is often right. People respond to you more warmly when you are doing well. That is not cruelty, it is simply how most things function, and you have spent thirty or forty years inside it.

And then one relationship in your life does not work that way at all, and there is no other example of it anywhere, so your system does what any system does with a single exception: it quietly reclassifies it as the same as everything else.

You are inside the one relationship in your life that was never running on merit. The written word fixes the moment of the demonstration before there was anything to assess, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been closing the book on you after a bad week.

The honest half, and this is important. This does not mean the work does not matter. It matters. Doing it well is a good thing and you should keep wanting to, and I am not going to hand you a message that makes excellence sound suspicious.

What it means is that the work and the love are on separate accounts, and only one of those accounts was ever settled by you.

And there is a part only you can do, and it is deliberately awkward, because gentle versions of this have not reached the wiring. You name the worst thing you ever made. Out loud. And then you say when the love started, and you say it in the same breath, so the two of them are in the same sentence for once.