My mission in life is to grow deeper in the love of God.

That’s nice, but what does it actually mean? How can we know what the love of God is, let alone grow deeper in it?

Humans perpetually look at the vast cosmos in which we live and wonder, “What does it all mean? Where did it come from? How do we fit into it?”

God is a little English word that is a place holder representing the infinite mystery of all things!

I, in my tiny little human brain, cannot possibly, ever, imagine, let alone describe God and what the love of God actually looks like.

That’s a big problem.

We can, through our natural senses and observations, intuit two basic hunches about the nature of ultimate reality.

First, it is much, much BIGGER than us, BEYOND us, and substantively OTHER than us. The fancy word for this is transcendence.

Second, we can sense that there is some type of animating force that moves through everything and binds everything together in a web of life. We often use the metaphors of air, breath, water, fire to describe this cosmic energy. We also call it Spirit. It is within everything. The fancy word for this is immanence.

And yet, we don’t get it, because it is not us.

So, as humans, we either walk away from the challenge and develop the secular age that we have today, where there is no God.

Or, we construct an image of God that fits our agenda. That’s convenient.

Our images of God usually resemble us and perpetuate the fear, hatred, and violence that marks our human condition. Most wars throughout history have been religious wars where we cry out, “My god is bigger than your god, so we deserve to take what you have and eliminate you!”

Our current, secular age worships the same gods of power as our pre-modern siblings, we just don’t acknowledge them as gods.

Enter Jesus.

The opening lines of the Gospel of John 1:1-14 say that the Word of God–that infinite creative power that brought all things together–became flesh, and pitched his tent in our neighborhood.

God became human.

But, why?

As human beings, the only thing that we actually know, through experience, is what it means to be human, because that is what we are.

We cannot imagine an infinite God. Our head would explode.

We cannot imagine the Spirit of God, animating all life like wind, water, and fire.

But, we do know what it means to be human.

God came to us in human form, in the person of Jesus, so that we could see what the love of God looks like lived out in a human way.

When I take the time to study the stories of Jesus, recorded in the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. When I take the time to understand the social, political, historical, theological context of his world and then watch how Jesus interacted with his society, then I can start to see what God’s love looks like.

Jesus broke down walls of separation between people. He reached across boundaries that had been created out of fear and touched the untouchable, and loved the people on the margins.

Jesus spoke truth to corrupt power structures without violence or hatred.

Jesus did not repay violence with violence, or evil with evil.

He resisted the systemic violence of the Roman Empire and Corrupt Religious leaders by absorbing that violence on the cross–the cruel, horrific symbol of the violence and power of Empire–and as he died…

…he said, “Father, forgive them…”

God showed us that God stands with the crucified and all those who are crushed by those who seek to control the world through wealth and power.

The crucifixion shouts “NO!” to evil.

But that isn’t the end of the story.

That shout of “NO!” means nothing without the “YES!” that Jesus shouted when he rose from the dead.

The resurrection, the message of Easter, is the message of hope for the world. Evil does not have the final say. God’s dream for this world does not end in death.

God’s dream for this world is LIFE!

The risen Christ shouts a resounding “YES!” to life, and forgiveness, and second chances, and grace, and…LOVE that is demonstrated through self-sacrifice and forgiveness and reconciliation.

Why Jesus?

Because, without that story of a human being, I would not know what the love of God looks like, or how I should live my life.

I am a disciple of Jesus, because I believe that if I devote my life to learning the ways of that human, then I can be the kind of human that is filled with the love of God and overflows it to my neighbor, for the sake of the world.

This is where you can see how my mission statement connects with John 15:1-17. Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Stay connected to me, hang out with me, abide in me, and you will bear much fruit.”