Deficit Love
29/August/2007 12:19 Filed in: Weekly Column
29 August 2007; Volume 9, Issue 28
PDF copy
If you haven’t visited the Wonder Springs website recently, Sunday we posted pictures of a pair of large Big Horn Sheep that appeared at the cabin last Saturday and spent the night on the little rise about one hundred feet from the front door. These sheep are not native to the area and speculation still has not determined why they showed up. Luck, fate, or God’s design. The God’s design scenario was our chosen explanation.
The sheep only remotely have anything to do with this week’s article. Within this writer’s prerogative you should understand that the first job that God gave Adam in the Genesis creation account was to name all the animals. My question is why in North America do wild sheep look more like goats and wild mountain goats look more like sheep, and really what is the real differences between either kind anyway? A ruminant discussion that might enlighten the masses.
After Adam had completed that naming job, God saw that it was not right for man to be alone, and He created a helper for Adam, now that he was about to have some real work to do. Pretty much everyone is familiar with the Genesis account of the fall of mankind as Eve was tempted by the devil to eat of the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Bible commentators are really a very boring group of guys, or maybe they have been blinded by a guy type of thinking, but I think one of the first truly deep theological questions in the Bible is why did the devil choose to temp Eve rather than Adam? The standard line goes something like, “Satan knew that Eve was the weaker vessel, therefore she would be easier to tempt into sin than the older and more experienced Adam.”
But turn on the thinking part of your brain for a moment, if that was really true, the great man of God’s creation, Adam, would have just given the whole episode a pass and said, “Well honey you are on your own, I’ll go and see what God wants to do with what you have done.” If that be the case, there would have been no reason for the whole Bible.
I suspect however, that Satan was a whole lot more cunning than either Adam or Eve, not just the beasts of creation. Possibly the devil knew that Adam was such an easy con, that he really was not up to the challenge of the evil tempter. Eve however, was a much more difficult contest. As Eve went, Adam would follow along like a sheep or goat led to the slaughter and that is what happened.
If Satan would have been foolish enough to start with Adam all he would have had to do is say, ”Hey man, do you want to be really cool, here take a bite out of this and you will be a real man, not God’s wimp!”
Chomp!
Eve would have responded, “You did what? Your sleeping on the couch tonight and until you go seek forgiveness and get right with God. What’s a wimp anyway? You’re the only dude around, you set the standard, Adam you be ‘da man, especially without all this satanic evil wickedness.”
If Satan would have tempted Adam, sin may have never entered the human kind.
Deficit love began in time and space when God provided a covering for Adam and Eve’s nakedness. Deficit love was the center of God’s redemption of mankind, before the foundation of the universe. As God pronounced His verdict on the three, we see God enter into a covenant of grace alone, centered in God, not in human works. That covenant centers, for all time, in the finished work of Jesus Christ as the ultimate deficit lover.
Evolution really has no explanation for the existence of love in any form. As a result, we see in our evolving world a continuing rise of just sex as an end without any emotional bond between the participants. We are bombarded every day, justifying sex just for the pleasure. However, just as with love, there is really no evolutionary logic for the emotion of pleasure. If pleasure was not involved, the biological urge just to procreate would suggest that internet porn sites would feature only rats and rabbits.
In our common understanding of society and culture, love really is the essence of humanity. Bundled with love is a whole host of human virtues that separate humanity, if one were to look at them honestly and logically, from all the rest of the animals. Human beings are just a way too complex personality bundle to have evolved through long periods of time and random change. This is not only logical, to think otherwise is just absurd foolishness.
Wishful thinking aside, only a fool says that there is no God (Psalm 14:1, 53:1).
Virtually every wedding you go to, many funerals, and many times just for no apparent reason, the Apostle Paul is quoted in his famous love chapter of 1 Corinthians 13. “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13)
Paul is writing in this epistle about common love, but also a unique deficit love that is available to God’s children, which has a deeper manifestation than is available to humanity in general.
Mothers and women are perhaps the greatest example of common deficit love towards their children and also their husbands or men. Over a lifetime of growing up, mothers bestow upon their children far more love in all aspects than she will ever minutely receive in return. The same deficit love is true toward the husband or man, who must have his night out with the guys, or his sports time in front of the tube, or in person. Furthermore, many times for no apparent reason at random times men are just jerks.
Deficit love should be looked at as a gift, that must be given away, or it focuses inward and becomes not self love, but narcissism. That is probably one of the reasons that men find it so hard to practice deficit love. Not because they desire to become narcissistic jerks, but because they have been trained culturally and in the family setting, to be takers rather than givers.
It has been many, many years since I last entertained a conversation with anyone about taking and giving personalities. Thinking about it briefly, it is probably because we are all now so entropic that evolutionarily speaking a truly giving personality no longer exists outside a museum. Mother Teresa was the last of the breed.
The facts are however, deficit love is not part of the genome, but rather a gift from God. As the church slouches towards worldly, evolutionary, entropy, or collapse, there is no giving in the church and as a consequence no means by which deficit love can enter into society in the broader sense.
I first mentioned deficit love in the Know KNOW Books article some weeks back, it was in the context that in order to receive God’s grace in unloving situations, you must love from the deficit position, knowing that you will never receive returned love commensurate to what is given to others. However, in those situations, God empowers the lover to continue to love, and to live by grace and faith even though all seems impossible.
To move beyond self indulgence requires one of two motivators. Neither of these have there roots in the survival of the fittest either. However, both obligation and conviction serve the ultimate goal of moving beyond your self towards a positive influence within the larger community.
Obligation comes from the root that the larger community needs me and what I can provide. This is somewhat the stage were environmental greening is playing. The world is in dire straits climate wise and we must all pull together to change the abstract world of others. The problem is for all the bells and whistles, hype, and condemnation of those less enlightened, any sort of true community is never achieved, because the participants quickly run into the big hurtle of their personal comfort zone. Sinful human nature is such that sacrificing comfort is tensioned with commitment. The commitment always comes out in second place.
Conviction however, is rooted external to the self, it is imposed from without, so strongly that sometimes the commitment demands that comfort be crucified. True change in this world is always brought through the committed, not the involved. “Pass the ham and eggs please,” said the chicken to no one there. We say that conviction comes from the conscience. That conscience is really a part of the personality that God placed into every human being, when He created mankind in His image and above all the animals.
One of the basic tenets of the Reformation was the Total Depravity of mankind. The development of a conscience is a sign that the grace of God is working in the human soul. That grace is only irresistible in the sake of salvation, in the eyes of the Calvinist. For pretty much everyone else, in all circumstances God’s grace is mostly resisted, and over time, pain and suffering in many forms teaches us that life is much more satisfying when acting diligently when the conscience beckons us to come and die to yourself, when through that death you may truly live.
The Reformation came about by convicted and committed frail human instruments of God. When Luther was asked to recant his writings, he stated that: Unless I am convinced of my error through the power of the Holy Scriptures, I can not renounce what I have written, “Here I stand, I can not do otherwise.” It is further said of Luther that he took on the total power of both the state and the church, and died in his sleep. In that era, that is a miracle of the grace of God working through deficit love.
Other reformers had similar things that happened in their lives, but needless to say their convictions of conscience moved them beyond what they could have imagined, or in most cases even desired.
Too often today, the church condemns society for it’s evil ways. However, that condemnation many times comes from the obligation to make a statement, to justify one’s position within the hierarchy of the denomination, or within the audience of nondenominational evangelicalism. True commitment is lacking and so deficit love is also absent. Consequently daily the world gets more corrupt and disgusting.
What is missing in the church and in society is an example, or better stated, frail human examples which truly understand that they have received the ultimate gift of deficit love, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That love restoring communion with God, which was present before the serpent Satin tempted the woman and Adam into sin. Sin bringing about their separation from God, their spiritual and natural death.
That concept has throughout history been called the gospel. That gospel has either vanished or has been given a secondary role in most of the church today. Instead of the preaching of Jesus Christ crucified as Paul aptly states, instead we hear about how to love one another through the application of 3 - 12 easy steps that even a Christian can use to bring heaven back to earth.
This therefore is herefore to state that as a consequence these false gospels and teaching applications rob the church and society of the eternal source of deficit love. How is that possible when Christians are so pious. Go back to the obligation section and read through that again. Deficit love inhabits the worship of those who truly understand that God’s love can not be repaid, only passed on with a personal human touch. How does it work? Miraculously, mysteriously, and absolutely.
So don’t try to change the world through your actions, just give away love to everyone you meet. Ask nothing in return, and slowly that love will begin to act through the deficit, and then the grace of God can empower you to even greater love in all circumstances. Pretty soon music will become music again, and life will improve not only for you, but also for those to whom God brings into your community, either personally or through the means of our rapidly changing world.
It would be nice if the world’s rapid change would be for the better, understanding the reality of deficit love is the first step, followed by just loving on people. It’s a gift pass it on!
PDF copy
If you haven’t visited the Wonder Springs website recently, Sunday we posted pictures of a pair of large Big Horn Sheep that appeared at the cabin last Saturday and spent the night on the little rise about one hundred feet from the front door. These sheep are not native to the area and speculation still has not determined why they showed up. Luck, fate, or God’s design. The God’s design scenario was our chosen explanation.
The sheep only remotely have anything to do with this week’s article. Within this writer’s prerogative you should understand that the first job that God gave Adam in the Genesis creation account was to name all the animals. My question is why in North America do wild sheep look more like goats and wild mountain goats look more like sheep, and really what is the real differences between either kind anyway? A ruminant discussion that might enlighten the masses.
After Adam had completed that naming job, God saw that it was not right for man to be alone, and He created a helper for Adam, now that he was about to have some real work to do. Pretty much everyone is familiar with the Genesis account of the fall of mankind as Eve was tempted by the devil to eat of the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Bible commentators are really a very boring group of guys, or maybe they have been blinded by a guy type of thinking, but I think one of the first truly deep theological questions in the Bible is why did the devil choose to temp Eve rather than Adam? The standard line goes something like, “Satan knew that Eve was the weaker vessel, therefore she would be easier to tempt into sin than the older and more experienced Adam.”
But turn on the thinking part of your brain for a moment, if that was really true, the great man of God’s creation, Adam, would have just given the whole episode a pass and said, “Well honey you are on your own, I’ll go and see what God wants to do with what you have done.” If that be the case, there would have been no reason for the whole Bible.
I suspect however, that Satan was a whole lot more cunning than either Adam or Eve, not just the beasts of creation. Possibly the devil knew that Adam was such an easy con, that he really was not up to the challenge of the evil tempter. Eve however, was a much more difficult contest. As Eve went, Adam would follow along like a sheep or goat led to the slaughter and that is what happened.
If Satan would have been foolish enough to start with Adam all he would have had to do is say, ”Hey man, do you want to be really cool, here take a bite out of this and you will be a real man, not God’s wimp!”
Chomp!
Eve would have responded, “You did what? Your sleeping on the couch tonight and until you go seek forgiveness and get right with God. What’s a wimp anyway? You’re the only dude around, you set the standard, Adam you be ‘da man, especially without all this satanic evil wickedness.”
If Satan would have tempted Adam, sin may have never entered the human kind.
Deficit love began in time and space when God provided a covering for Adam and Eve’s nakedness. Deficit love was the center of God’s redemption of mankind, before the foundation of the universe. As God pronounced His verdict on the three, we see God enter into a covenant of grace alone, centered in God, not in human works. That covenant centers, for all time, in the finished work of Jesus Christ as the ultimate deficit lover.
Evolution really has no explanation for the existence of love in any form. As a result, we see in our evolving world a continuing rise of just sex as an end without any emotional bond between the participants. We are bombarded every day, justifying sex just for the pleasure. However, just as with love, there is really no evolutionary logic for the emotion of pleasure. If pleasure was not involved, the biological urge just to procreate would suggest that internet porn sites would feature only rats and rabbits.
In our common understanding of society and culture, love really is the essence of humanity. Bundled with love is a whole host of human virtues that separate humanity, if one were to look at them honestly and logically, from all the rest of the animals. Human beings are just a way too complex personality bundle to have evolved through long periods of time and random change. This is not only logical, to think otherwise is just absurd foolishness.
Wishful thinking aside, only a fool says that there is no God (Psalm 14:1, 53:1).
Virtually every wedding you go to, many funerals, and many times just for no apparent reason, the Apostle Paul is quoted in his famous love chapter of 1 Corinthians 13. “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13)
Paul is writing in this epistle about common love, but also a unique deficit love that is available to God’s children, which has a deeper manifestation than is available to humanity in general.
Mothers and women are perhaps the greatest example of common deficit love towards their children and also their husbands or men. Over a lifetime of growing up, mothers bestow upon their children far more love in all aspects than she will ever minutely receive in return. The same deficit love is true toward the husband or man, who must have his night out with the guys, or his sports time in front of the tube, or in person. Furthermore, many times for no apparent reason at random times men are just jerks.
Deficit love should be looked at as a gift, that must be given away, or it focuses inward and becomes not self love, but narcissism. That is probably one of the reasons that men find it so hard to practice deficit love. Not because they desire to become narcissistic jerks, but because they have been trained culturally and in the family setting, to be takers rather than givers.
It has been many, many years since I last entertained a conversation with anyone about taking and giving personalities. Thinking about it briefly, it is probably because we are all now so entropic that evolutionarily speaking a truly giving personality no longer exists outside a museum. Mother Teresa was the last of the breed.
The facts are however, deficit love is not part of the genome, but rather a gift from God. As the church slouches towards worldly, evolutionary, entropy, or collapse, there is no giving in the church and as a consequence no means by which deficit love can enter into society in the broader sense.
I first mentioned deficit love in the Know KNOW Books article some weeks back, it was in the context that in order to receive God’s grace in unloving situations, you must love from the deficit position, knowing that you will never receive returned love commensurate to what is given to others. However, in those situations, God empowers the lover to continue to love, and to live by grace and faith even though all seems impossible.
To move beyond self indulgence requires one of two motivators. Neither of these have there roots in the survival of the fittest either. However, both obligation and conviction serve the ultimate goal of moving beyond your self towards a positive influence within the larger community.
Obligation comes from the root that the larger community needs me and what I can provide. This is somewhat the stage were environmental greening is playing. The world is in dire straits climate wise and we must all pull together to change the abstract world of others. The problem is for all the bells and whistles, hype, and condemnation of those less enlightened, any sort of true community is never achieved, because the participants quickly run into the big hurtle of their personal comfort zone. Sinful human nature is such that sacrificing comfort is tensioned with commitment. The commitment always comes out in second place.
Conviction however, is rooted external to the self, it is imposed from without, so strongly that sometimes the commitment demands that comfort be crucified. True change in this world is always brought through the committed, not the involved. “Pass the ham and eggs please,” said the chicken to no one there. We say that conviction comes from the conscience. That conscience is really a part of the personality that God placed into every human being, when He created mankind in His image and above all the animals.
One of the basic tenets of the Reformation was the Total Depravity of mankind. The development of a conscience is a sign that the grace of God is working in the human soul. That grace is only irresistible in the sake of salvation, in the eyes of the Calvinist. For pretty much everyone else, in all circumstances God’s grace is mostly resisted, and over time, pain and suffering in many forms teaches us that life is much more satisfying when acting diligently when the conscience beckons us to come and die to yourself, when through that death you may truly live.
The Reformation came about by convicted and committed frail human instruments of God. When Luther was asked to recant his writings, he stated that: Unless I am convinced of my error through the power of the Holy Scriptures, I can not renounce what I have written, “Here I stand, I can not do otherwise.” It is further said of Luther that he took on the total power of both the state and the church, and died in his sleep. In that era, that is a miracle of the grace of God working through deficit love.
Other reformers had similar things that happened in their lives, but needless to say their convictions of conscience moved them beyond what they could have imagined, or in most cases even desired.
Too often today, the church condemns society for it’s evil ways. However, that condemnation many times comes from the obligation to make a statement, to justify one’s position within the hierarchy of the denomination, or within the audience of nondenominational evangelicalism. True commitment is lacking and so deficit love is also absent. Consequently daily the world gets more corrupt and disgusting.
What is missing in the church and in society is an example, or better stated, frail human examples which truly understand that they have received the ultimate gift of deficit love, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That love restoring communion with God, which was present before the serpent Satin tempted the woman and Adam into sin. Sin bringing about their separation from God, their spiritual and natural death.
That concept has throughout history been called the gospel. That gospel has either vanished or has been given a secondary role in most of the church today. Instead of the preaching of Jesus Christ crucified as Paul aptly states, instead we hear about how to love one another through the application of 3 - 12 easy steps that even a Christian can use to bring heaven back to earth.
This therefore is herefore to state that as a consequence these false gospels and teaching applications rob the church and society of the eternal source of deficit love. How is that possible when Christians are so pious. Go back to the obligation section and read through that again. Deficit love inhabits the worship of those who truly understand that God’s love can not be repaid, only passed on with a personal human touch. How does it work? Miraculously, mysteriously, and absolutely.
So don’t try to change the world through your actions, just give away love to everyone you meet. Ask nothing in return, and slowly that love will begin to act through the deficit, and then the grace of God can empower you to even greater love in all circumstances. Pretty soon music will become music again, and life will improve not only for you, but also for those to whom God brings into your community, either personally or through the means of our rapidly changing world.
It would be nice if the world’s rapid change would be for the better, understanding the reality of deficit love is the first step, followed by just loving on people. It’s a gift pass it on!