8.3 God Likes Me
© 2015 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
To know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:19).
Expressed in these words are two dimensions of reality, the first inner, the second outer. We know the meaning and reality of the second dimension, being filled with all the fullness of God, only as we know the depths of the first, the love of Christ for us which passes knowledge. With God the inner always comes “first,” not in time, but as the source of the outer.
The Ambiguity of “Love”
The word “love” is one of the most watered down words in human language, meaning so many different things that, even though we understand with our minds the real meaning of God-Love, yet our hearts are too abused by failure in this world to trust the many dubious claims of “love.” When I left move community, I loved and walked with God, certainly, but I was so numb inside, with the hopeless despair that my flesh could never be pleasing to God, that He could not yet melt my frozen heart. Two years of no longer being subject to the claims that my “flesh” separates me from God were required before I could say three words and place a period after the third. “God loves me.”
God’s Answers
That was just the beginning, however. I spent the next three years walking together with John Eldredge through his books, in tears on most every page, over and over, often on my face on the floor, as God took me through every bleeding wound, every hurtful place, every confusing accusation and showed me Jesus in me in all of it. God answered every difficulty of my life. But God’s answers were, at every point, the total opposite of all the “fixes” thrust at me through all those years. John Eldredge taught me, from the New Testament and from the Spirit of Christ, to say two VERY important things. “It was not my fault,” and, “My heart is good.”
Christ in My Heart
When I look at my human heart, I see Christ. How do I see Him? With my human understanding? Misreading all the variations of feeling found in the human heart? Paul says that when I look at my heart, I see Christ; I believe what God says. I no longer worry about the shades of emotion in my human heart, because it is inside the human part of me that Jesus is revealed. We start there! When we look in our hearts and see Christ, we are rooted and grounded in love.
God Likes Me
But it is not enough to say, “God loves me.” I can accept mentally that God loves me. God has to love me because God loves everybody. But here is the bottom line. “God likes me.” Can you say that? When you have just blown it, when you’re feeling your worst, go to the mirror, and look at yourself. Can you say, “God likes me”? “God likes me. Everything I am, He likes. I am special to Him. He likes me, and I am clean. “I am clean!”
Rooted and grounded in love!
Spending Time with Me
I cannot go forward, I can accomplish nothing unless I am rooted and grounded in the fact that God not only loves me, but He likes me. The Father likes to spend time with me, to listen to me talk. The Father likes the way I see things, the things I like. The Father likes to do things with me, to be with me. We will always stay away from someone we think doesn’t really like us. What is sin? Sin is staying away from Jesus because we think He doesn’t really like us.
Let Jesus like you, just as you find yourself to be. Allow Him to enjoy being with you.
The Wounded
All of us have been wounded and abused through our life in this world. All of us have treated others badly. All of us have been under assault from the moment we were conceived by an enemy who fears who we are, who is terrified of what we are becoming. Yet we did not know. Always the blame lay upon our shoulders. And we have lived in a church who has taught us that God is displeased with us, that we are sinners who do not measure up.
Here’s the truth, Jesus was as with us, carrying us, sharing all those things with us, hurting with our hurt, bearing the lion’s share of it, stumbling with our stumbling as much as He does the same now – through every moment and circumstance.
Only the Lost Know Salvation
Let me paraphrase something C.S. Lewis said in the introduction to The Great Divorce. – Those who know they are in Christ Jesus now, look back at every moment of their lives and see that all of it was He, all of it was the shaping hand of His glory. And those who decide that the self-accusation of Hades is what they prefer now, look back at every moment of their lives and see that all of it was pointless and absurd, all of it was Hades.
We have always lived in the tree of life; we have never lived anywhere else. Why is the tree of life a thorn tree? For this reason. Only the lost know salvation; only the forgiven wash His feet with tears.
Only Our Seeing Changes
“God likes me.” We must begin here. We must know the liking of God for us as we are all through every part of our being and makeup. You see, being transformed into His image does NOT mean we will become something else. Being transformed into His image means that we will come to love God-Revealed through every aspect of our humanity as we find ourselves to be. We are transformed by the changing of our minds. Our minds change as God fixes our eyeballs. We see Christ alone, and we give thanks. God likes what He made; that’s why He made me the way I am.
Acceptance and Joy
Here is the knowing of Father that I live in.
“Daniel, seek to know, accept fully, and celebrate with all joy your human limitation, the particular, individual shape and design by which I crafted you in all wisdom and foresight. At the same time and to the same degree, seek to know, accept fully, and celebrate with all joy My divine UN-limitation, the particular, individual ways by which I fill you with all of My glory and flow out from you to bring life and joy to others.”
The idea that we must break free from our human limitations is a false story; it is a hatred of being just like Jesus. I reduce myself down to the precise human limitation God crafted me as, Christ as me; that is, I rid myself of pretending.
To Be Like Jesus
To know myself as I really am, as God designed and fashioned me to be. To know when, where, why, and how my own heart sings in the joy of human fulfillment. To know that God likes me as I am. While at the same time and in equal measure, I ratchet up my seeing and expectation of the God who fills me full. To be utterly content with myself as I find myself to be in the present moment. To be utterly ecstatic with the God who fills me full with all of Himself, always arising into life. To be like Jesus – marriage union forever.
Escaping Pretending
Here is what I have found. We must know “God likes me” through every hurting place in our lives until there is no more hurt, until we can look at any moment or circumstance and be at peace inside the love of God. You see, if we do not know how much God loves us to be the way we are, then we will not remain seated upon His throne, looking out through His eyes, sharing His heart. No, we will run back out to the unbelievers and the pretenders, weeping, weeping over our awfulness, trying so very hard to get God to be pleased with us, convinced that He never will.
Yet it is necessary to look briefly at pretending, this horror from which we are escaping.
A Line Drawn
Since too many of our brethren hate human weakness, this word you are hearing is not overly popular. There are some who will argue that believing that “God likes me as I find myself to be” is new age nonsense and deception.
We must draw a firm line in the concrete. Human weakness serves one purpose, to be filled with the glory of Christ. To glorify human weakness apart from Christ is appallingly absurd. And knowing that God LIKES me serves one purpose, to be strong in the love of God, the liking of God towards others.
But two types of pretenders attach themselves to this teaching.
The Narcissist
They sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. Genesis 3:7b
The narcissist says, “God likes me, me, me, me, me.” We say, “God likes Christ Jesus, and Jesus is all that I am.”
A narcissist looks at all of his woven fig leaves and calls all that pretending “my human weakness filled with God.” We look at our lives empty of God and flee with all horror on the one hand and all joy on the other into Christ our only life.
A narcissist trusts in self separate from God. We trust in Jesus our only self.
The Bully
Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Genesis 3:8b
Narcissists hurt only themselves; bullies hurt other people. Bullies are so little and weak in their own sight that the only thing that will compensate is to hide behind the tree trunks of hurting other people and calling it “God.” A bully hears this word of Christ as us, this word that “God likes me” and hears something you and I don’t hear. “Christ lives AS me. I like to hurt people and put them down. It makes me feel superior. God likes me the way I am. God likes me as I hurt other people. Exposing to everyone other people’s faults and failures is my “gift” from God.”
Paul’s Gospel
The disciples believed and taught that Jesus had done something wonderful for us through His death and resurrection. Then God sent Paul to blow that idea right out of the water.
Paul’s gospel places you and me utterly and literally inside of Jesus from Gethsemane to the throne. Paul claims that in every step of Jesus through the Atonement, there ARE you and I, in His death, in His burial, in His resurrection, seated now with Him upon the Father’s throne.
In order for us to KNOW how our human weakness is absolutely vital to the victory and revelation of Jesus Christ, I want to take us back now into two moments in that Walk.
Here Am I
John was the only one anywhere near the path of Jesus from Gethsemane on. Matthew, Mark, and Luke wrote out from what they heard from others. Yet it was the writer of Hebrews, writing out from Paul’s gospel, who gave us the words of Jesus spoken at every step, heard by heaven though not then by earth.
Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?” So he said, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.” Genesis 3 – Then the Lord God called to Jesus and said to Him, “Where are You?” So He said, “HERE AM I. I AND the children whom You have given Me!” Hebrews 2:11
A Snapshot of God
God-Revealed, the Appearance of the Father to all creation, flat on His face in the mud, broken under the weight of a cross He cannot carry. “Carry your cross,” He had said. Yet here He is, the very Christ of God, incapable of carrying His own. How many times have I been there with Him, having blundered badly, having been thoughtless and hurt other people, not intentionally, no, but so very embarrassing.
In His heart, Jesus says, “Father, I give You thanks.” But as He speaks through me, here are His words, spoken without pretense or shame : “I am so sorry. I was wrong; I don’t know what I was thinking. Please forgive me.”
A Second Snapshot of God
“Please forgive me.” – “Will you carry my cross for me, bearing me upon your heart into the mercy seat of God?” “I forgive you.” – The Father, with all His heart, bearing the cross for His broken Son through the stout legs and willing heart of Simon of Cyrene, bearing the cross for me through your willing forgiveness.
God-Revealed, the Appearance of the Father to all creation, hanging naked, bloody, bruised, and unashamed from a cross of wood, speaking to the worst bullies on earth. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
Do you see God? Does He not break your heart with Love revealed THROUGH the weakest possible position?
God and I Together
When I know that God created me weak that He might reveal the glory of His heart through me in tender compassion for others. When I know that God LIKES me the way I find myself to be. Then I know that God and I together see others as better than ourselves; God and I together lay down our life for you.
In the lesson on connecting our weakness to Jesus, I asked this: “How on earth does boldness of heart filled with omnipotent power see others as better than one’s self as God does?” Read slide 18 and 19 again. See how God does this wondrous thing.
Power and Authority
Rooted and grounded in love. – That the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.
The third most important verse in the Bible is the power of God flowing out of our bellies in mighty rivers of healing and life across this earth. The fourth most important verse in the Bible is the authority of God to cast down all that opposes the speaking of Christ, to cast down the accuser, to defeat the beast and the curse.
Here is where we are seated. Here is where we stand.
My strength is made perfect in your weakness. – Rooted and grounded in love. – That the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.