Love and Submission
Written by Herb Scheur
There are people I disagree with. I cannot and do not hate them. I cannot and do not affirm them. I do love them as best as I can. I don’t want to hurt them. I don’t want anyone else to hurt them. If they choose to feel hurt by my love, that’s on them. My love is not based on feelings or emotions. That’s not really love. True robust Christian love is quite well defined in I Corinthians 13:4-8a. Verses 1-3 tell us what love is not. It’s not doing things to make me look good to myself and others. It’s not doing things that will make me feel good about me, and maybe make others feel good about me. That’s 21st century North American self- love, self-worship, not really love. Real love is what actions you take to love, how you do love, and why you do love. Love is typified by patience, kindness, it is not envious or boastful or rude or irritable or resentful. Not my way or the highway. Not rejoicing in falsehoods and the resulting sin but rejoicing in the truth. Bearing, believing, hoping, enduring all things. Love keeps on loving, it never ends. Love is about doing what you don’t want to do, when you really don’t want to do it with people you don’t really want to interact with. True Christian love is being in submission to God’s Will as revealed to us in His Word. Whoever and wherever we are, we are to be in submission by loving others as God loves us.
Look at the love of the Good Samaritan. Did you really think he was just waiting for a chance to be nice to a Jew? That the Good Samaritan didn’t have places to go, people to see, things to do? Had the Samaritan just heard Jesus’ teaching about loving your enemies? Probably not, and yet he “had pity on him” (NIV) “was moved with pity” (NRSV) and “had compassion” (ESV). What did this pity or compassion look like? Did the Samaritan lay down next to him? Show sympathy and empathy and share stories about the nasty robbers, and tell him how terrible it was that he had been harmed? None of the above. There is no recorded conversation between the man and the Samaritan. The Samaritan doctored him as best as he could, loaded him on the Samaritan’s donkey, and took him to help. He didn’t ask him about how he felt about it. The man may have been carrying property that wasn’t his. He may have been thinking it would be better to die along the road rather than in the bosses’ office. And the Samaritan doesn’t just move him the least possible. He takes the man to a secure place, an inn. A place that will have shelter, protection, nourishment, and care. The Samaritan pays to get him in and then does the first century equivalent of giving the innkeeper his credit card information. The Samaritan did love. He interrupted his trip to stop in a bad neighborhood and rescue an ethnic enemy. The Samaritan may have caused the man temporary pain. Binding up wounds and riding hurt on a donkey is going to cause pain, but not harm.
So, all of us, at one time or another have been lying beaten alongside the road. Either struggling or trying to recuperate enough to start struggling, praying that our loving Heavenly Father will grant us this amazing providential rescue. And then He sends a Samaritan. Or asks us to be the Samaritan. Sometimes we must be each other’s Samaritans. Walking, stumbling, or crawling together on the straight and narrow road. Mutually resisting the pagan culture we live in and its false gods of comfort, conformity, emotions, feelings, status, stuff, sex and self. As well as not bowing to the false gods in our churches of family, tribe, goodness, and sexual fulfillment in marriage.
I, like some others in the CRCNA, sometimes wonder why we are having this discussion about what constitutes obedience to the Biblical teaching about marriage. It feels like discussing gravity. We do need to understand how we are going to live with gravity. But it has no effect on what gravity is, or how it works. We can only profitably spend our time discussing how we react to it. This is foundational. When we say the Apostle’s Creed we start out saying that “I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.” Is this not our summary of Genesis 1 and 2 where the final crowning act to complete creation is to create man out of the dust of the earth, and woman from man. This is before sin. Before the plan for our salvation is revealed. Before circumcision and Passover are given as precursors to baptism and communion. Before God’s will for our lives is revealed in the Ten Commandments, there is the instruction and demonstration of what marriage is.
Look at the fact that even outside of the unchanged Judeo-Christian tradition, marriage has been understood to be only between a woman and a man. While the ideal of one woman and one man has not always been practiced or achieved, it has still been understood to be the ideal. As in Genesis, creation stories of indigenous peoples in North America and Polynesia have first couples that are female and male. Recently the Anglican Archbishop of Uganda commented, and I paraphrase loosely, that “this same-sex stuff is from you goofy white people. It’s not from Africa.”
Look at how God speaks to us. God speaks to each of us through prayer and meditation. He also speaks to us through His Word and the people He puts around us. What I think I hear and feel is important, but to elevate that above the witness of God’s Word (and God’s people) is a modern, cultural, unbiblical conceit. I do not always know what my life lived in submission should look like. But I do have some clear definitions and instructions as to what it cannot look like. It’s a place we can start. If you will help me avoid the buffet, my weakness, I will encourage you when you tell me you need encouragement, support, and prayer. We can be better together, but we must be going in the same direction on the same road. Not the road we find and like, but the Road we are by grace through faith placed upon.
Thank you for your time. Be blessed and be a blessing.
One more sinner struggling for submission, Herb Schreur.