Earning Love
Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. We had a fun little celebration with our girls. This year we gave each other small gifts, and the girls came home from school with gifts from their classmates. Of course, it can be over-commercialized, about profits and manipulating people into spending money. Valentine’s Day can quickly become a contest about who does more to earn the affection or love of another.
Valentine’s Day makes a lot of sense in light of human nature. We are prone to earn approval or love through performance, merit, or effort. It’s a part of our broken DNA. It’s how we cope in this world and try to belong. If we can earn the love of others, then we think we have sufficiently protected ourselves from pain and loneliness.
As humans, we tend to treat God the same way. We have the unspoken mode of operation that says, More Good works + Less bad works = God’s love.
God’s love is not something we can earn. Even more, it’s impossible to gain his love through our efforts.
So, are we doomed to live in misery and shame? Is God’s love unattainable? Is there any hope of experiencing the shame-defeating, steadfast love of God?
James Boice shares an illustration that speaks to God’s love. In the story, a young man, the son of a friend of Czar Nicholas of Russia, had been given a post as paymaster in a border fortress. The young man started well, but he eventually developed a gambling problem. It soon led him to take a few rubles from the money entrusted to him. In a short time, he lost track of the amount of money he had stolen. After some time, he received word that an official was coming to examine the books the next day. The young man studied the ledgers and realized his debt was enormous. Even after adding everything from his personal treasury, he was still prodigiously short.
Confronted with the magnitude of his debt and realizing he had no way to set things right, he decided the only way out was to end his life with his revolver. On his notes, which outlined all he’d taken, all that was missing, he wrote in large letters on the bill, “A great debt! Who can pay?” To work up his courage to go through with the deed, he began to drink more and more, but before he could bolster himself up all the way, he passed out.
That same night, Czar Nicholas, dressed as a common soldier, was visiting that fortress for a surprise inspection. Noticing a light on when all should have been dark, he entered the room to find the young man asleep at his desk. He recognized the young man immediately, and a quick survey of the room told him what had transpired – he saw the unbalanced accounting books and the revolver. Then he saw the words written at the bottom of the paper: “A great debt! Who can pay?”
As Czar Nicholas read the note, his heart went out to him. Moved by an impulsive love, he reached for a pen, wrote a single word on the paper, and left quietly. An hour later, the young man awoke to the sounds of the bugle call and immediately reached for his gun, but the single, new word written beneath, “A great debt! Who can pay?” caught his eye: Nicholas.
The young man dropped his gun and ran to the drawers where a signature of the tzar was available; he pulled out a copy to compare signatures and realized they were identical. He said to himself, “The king has been here tonight. He knows all my guilt and has seen me completely, and he has undertaken to pay my debt, and I don’t have to die.”
So instead of taking his life, he rested on the word of Czar Nicholas. He was not surprised the following day when a messenger from the palace arrived to pay the exact debt the young man owed.
Thus did the Lord Jesus Christ love us and pay our great debt. Like the czar, he too has come down among us in disguise as a human being, and, like the czar, he too has looked into the bottom of your heart and seen the worst, and like that king, he too has signed his name to your unpayable account.
Jesus paid it all.
All to him I owe.
Sin has left a crimson stain.
He washed it white as snow.
