The Love Deficit
When God made us in His image, He made us to love and be loved. The extent to which we can comprehend the love of God, is the extent to which we can experience the life He has for us.
Ephesians 3:14-19 is a Holy Spirit inspired prayer, “that you and all the saints may be able to comprehend the breadth, and length and height and depth of the love of Christ, so that we may be filled up to all the fulness of God”.
We naturally have a ‘Love Deficit’. Our un-renewed mind does not comprehend the extent of Christ’s love for us, and consequently, our experience of God falls short what it should and could be. To comprehend, in this context means to ‘lay hold of and make it your own’. The love of Christ is ours, it’s always there for us, but that doesn’t mean we have taken possession of it- or made it our own.
Instead, fears and insecurities that have been part of our lives since we first experienced rejection limit our ability to comprehend the love of Christ. This love deficit brings about symptoms of sin and rejection that hinder our spiritual, emotional and physical well being.
The15th to 18th centuries was known as the age of discovery. Great sailing voyages were made around the globe as nations explored new lands. After a few months at sea, sailors began to experience a mysterious illness. Open sores developed on their skin, they began to smell rank and strangely they had terrifyingly mysterious dreams which often caused them to wake in tears. Because the illness occurred when they had been away from home for a while, some people thought they were missing home, or that there was an ingredient in the soil that they lacked. Some tried bringing crates of soil from their homeland. When sailors developed symptoms of this mystery disease they would roll them in the dirt in an attempt to cure them. Eventually, they discovered that sailors who ate fresh vegetables and fruit didn’t develop the dreaded disease. The disease was, of course, scurvy and the sailors were suffering from a deficit of vitamin C.
We get our first look at the ‘love deficit’ in the lives of Adam and Eve. Created in perfect love, to know and experience a fully loving relationship with God and each other, when sin entered their lives, they hid from God, they feared judgement and began blaming each other. Original sin caused death and death made itself manifest first in our ability to give and receive love. (Genesis 3: 6-13)
The Apostle John wrote, God’s love is made perfect in us, when we can fully love others and when we are free from fear of judgement and rejection (1 John 4:7-21).
The Bible describes what a ‘love deficit’ looks like. Do we fear the judgement of others? That is a love deficit. Is it hard to receive love unconditionally? That is a love deficit. Can we easily love others when we have been wronged by them? If not, that is a love deficit. In fact, the effect of a love deficit on our lives is staggering and includes; an ineffective faith, impatience, unkindness, jealousy, arrogance, rudeness, a critical spirit.
In Clint Eastward’s 1992 Academy Award-winning movie, ‘Unforgiven’, Eastward stars as a reformed killer and outlaw named William Munny; “the same William Munny that dynamited the 'RockIsland and Pacific' in '69 killin' women and children and all, and done a lot worse than that…”
Munny was now a single father who had turned his hand to farming. When local villains viciously attack the girls in the local whore-house, Munny comes to their rescue. As the story develops we begin to discover the dark side of Munny’s past life and the contrast with his new life. The movie climaxes with a merciless shot out, where Munny so terrorises the villains they panic and miss-shoot.
We know very little of Manny’s back-story. Why and how did a murderous outlaw have such a change of life? We know his wife died, probably in childbirth, because we see her tombstone on Munny’s property. In the epilogue, we find out that Munny took his children to California and made a fresh start selling dry goods. The film closes with a voice-over describing how Munny’s mother-in-law made the long journey to Wyoming to visit the grave of her only daughter- because she could never understand what her daughter saw in the outlaw. With this, Munny’s life story falls into place. The unconditional love of his wife had healed the love deficit which drove him to be a vicious criminal.
How much more the would comprehending Christ’s love for us, transform our lives?
