On Love and Diamonds

Contrary to my last blog, I am going to stay in seminary. God can't be contained as an assignment no matter how many papers I have to write about His various attributes. He's too glorious. Satan can only tempt me to focus on myself and that is what I did and that is why I sinned. My love for God became my love for me.

Please pray for me: that I will love God. There is no greater more transforming prayer that you could pray for me than this.

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This week has been nothing short of cathartic and healing; a spiritual purging, if you will. Being transparent is an interesting concept. What is transparent? Air, water, some liquids, glass, and certain rocks. Yes, rocks! It is the last object that grabs my attention: transparent rocks, namely diamonds.

Now, I'm no expert on diamonds, but I feel it's safe to say that light can actually pass through a diamond. I find this fact interesting because diamonds are the hardest bulk material on earth. Only a diamond can scratch a diamond.

Why is it that light is able to penetrate through the densest material on earth but cannot pass through wood?

The answer:

order.

Due to a diamonds complex internal molecular lattice work, light can enter and pass through it. A wood is much less orderly, and thus wood is opaque.

Why do I bring this up?

Because of the necessity for my love to be in order so that the light of Christ can brilliantly shine through me.

As crazy as it may sound, love is the cause of 99.99% of our actions. The love of something.

When I cheated, behind it was my love for getting an "A" and my love against getting a lower grade.

When I confessed, behind it was my love for God's forgiveness and my love against being under His condemnation.

Love moves us and gives us our being. In spiritual matters, when we love, we love for something and simultaneously we love against something.

This is because the God of the Bible is an all or nothing God. You can't love God and love what is contrary to God. In the same way, you can't love breathing air and love what is contrary to breathing air, regardless of the health implications.

Nevertheless, we do.

I do.

Such is disordered love.

Such is an opaque diamond. A beautiful thing made ugly and worthless due to internal flaws that it acquired while under incredible heat and pressure.

As Christians, this life is our time of refining.

Temptations and trials are like the incredible heat and pressure that makes a diamond beautiful and priceless. Temptations and trials are gifts from God to transform us from junk lumps of coal into solid and strong objects through which His glorious light shines.

He will save us from the imperfections that will ruin us if we move how, where and when He tells us to.

I had to be moved. I have a flaw in me now forged in the fire. The blood of Christ saves me from eternal separation from God, but it doesn't save me from His loving discipline, both now and on that final day.

His discipline is loving because of His furious love against disobedience.

God is love because of His zealous favor for Himself and against anything less glorious, which is everything not Him.

May my disordered love be reordered toward the most ordered love there is: God's.