Love & War

I’m ready to admit it, I like Tamar Braxton!  I watch the show; listened to the new single...I’m sorry, Lord, forgive your child (LOL). 

Seriously, listening to her song Love and War did get me to thinking.  I didn’t have a huge spiritual epiphany but the song title, coupled with a conversation that I’d had earlier did prompt this thought—we generally only fight the hardest, longest or the most about whom or with those we love the deepest.  I’m telling you, NO ONE can make me as angry as my husband. But by the same token, he also holds the record for making the happiest (don’t tell my daddy). 

When I think about my relationship with God over the years, it’s been a bit of a “Love and War” situation.  I know that God loves me with an unmerited, undeserved love.  I’ve done nothing to warrant His love for me and yet I receive it.  Scripture tells us in Romans 5:8—“But God shows His love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” In fact, there are times when I know that He should just throw me away but, His grace invites me right back into His loving arms.  It’s kind of like a mother and her child.  As parents, we give our children advice, guidance, warnings, spankings, punishments but at the end of all of that—there is always love.  Because we want what is best for our children, we are constantly cajoling them to do what is right.  I submit, as a mom of teenagers, that the teen years are absolutely the “Love and War” years but, I digress (I do that a lot).

I have been married for nearly 17 years, and it hasn’t always been easy.  In fact, there were days when I just wanted to throw the towel in the ring and end the fight altogether.  It wasn’t worth it…the arguing, the cursing, the screaming, and the “cold wars.”  Oh yes, beloved, I have said some ungodly things in the heat of an argument!  Many days I would have liked to pack up my babies and hightail it out of there.  But it wasn’t God’s will for my life. 

In relationships, there will almost certainly always be a push and pull—a test of the will, if I may, where compromise is inevitable.  That is the nature of human relationship.  And so it is with our relationship with Christ.  Our human minds find it difficult to believe that God can love us despite our ways.  Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”  And we tend to view ourselves in light of that wickedness and not in the light of God’s love--thus the “push and pull” of love and war.  God isn’t at war with us; however, it is our sin nature that we war against.  I contend that until we submit fully to God’s love and His will for our lives, we will be like children who are determined to have their way—often lost, confused without purpose or a plan and headed for certain destruction; fighting a war we have no chance of winning.  Today, why not hoist up the white flag and surrender to God’s plan for your life.  With every breath that we breathe, Jesus is keenly aware of every fleshly desire, every hurting place, every burden and every wound.  He’s not avoiding us, He’s waiting…why not surrender.

Let’s Pray:

Father, I confess that I am often at war with my flesh because of what it desires.  At times, I am consumed by the darkness of my humanness and self-centeredness.  Help me to find you in the aftermath of this self-inflicted war.  And Father in Heaven, I thank you for loving me enough to wait patiently for me to find my way back to You.

In Your Son’s name,

Amen.