Romans 5: Loving the Imperfect--the two-sided lens

 Ro 5:8 But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

This can be a hard thing to swallow--God loved us when we had nothing to offer Him.  Jesus gave His life for people who deep down neither wanted Him or saw the depth of their need for Him.

The issue was, for the most part, the great sacrifice Jesus made was for the most part, misunderstood.
Even those who did have some understanding were helpless to give anything back.  That is the definition of Agape love.

So--Now we have this wonderful gift of love from God--salvation through Christ.

   Ro 5:10 For if, when we were haters of God, the death of his Son made us at peace with him, much more, now that we are his friends, will we have salvation through his life;
 Ro 5:11 And not only so, but we have joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we are now at peace with God.
 
Every believer has the experience of having God love them while they are imperfect.  Yet why do we have such a hard time doing the same for those around us?

Every human relationship we have is with someone who is marred and scarred by sin. Every person we encounter is imperfect.  Yet we get so surprised when they let us down, hurt us or disappoint us.  We hold them in contempt and reject them, sometimes so deeply in our hearts that we are not aware of our own feelings.

We even get surprised and disappointed when our own imperfections are exposed.  Instead of being grateful for God's love that has covered our weakness, we hide, justify, deny or morbidly ponder our imperfections.

What God expects from us, is that we love imperfect people as well.  We always have to view people through a two-sided lens:  In one sense, we see that sin has ravaged every soul--even if they are a believer.  In the other sense, we need to see that despite that imperfection, God sees value in and desires a relationship with every person.

If we know this, and know that we ourselves have God's Spirit of love inside us we can choose to release the idea that everyone should be perfect or should behave as we expect.  We can release expectations and forgive every time.

Because we are still dealing with our own scarred souls, this takes work, practice and intimacy with God.  So this is a process and a struggle, but we can get better at loving imperfect people. Even ourselves.




  1Jo 3:16 In this we see what love is, because he gave his life for us; and it is right for us to give our lives for the brothers.