Love, Vision, Humility, and Abandonment

“At the center of care for the heart is the love of God. This must be the joyful aim of our life. That is why Jesus, underlining the deep understanding of life worked out through the Jewish experience, stated that the first commandment is to ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ (Mark 12:30) This is a command. It is something we are to do, and something we can do it. We will learn how to do it if we intend to do it. God will help us, and we will find a way.

The love of God, and only the love of God, secures the vision of God: keeps God constantly before our mind. Thomas Watson tells us that ‘The first fruit of love is the musing of the mind upon God. He who is in love, his thoughts are ever upon the object. He who loves God is ravished and transported with the contemplation of God.... God is the treasure, and where the treasure is, there is the heart.’ King David gives us the secret of his life: ‘I have set the Lord continually before me; because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken.’ (Ps. 16:8)

Vision of God secures humility. Seeing God for who he is enables us to see ourselves for who we are. This makes us bold, for we see clearly what great good and evil are at issue, and we see that it is not up to us to accomplish it, but up to God —who is more than able. We are delivered from pretending, being presumptuous about ourselves, and from pushing as if the outcome depended on us. We persist without frustration, and we practice calm and joyful non-compliance with evil of any kind.

God looks to those who are humble and contrite of spirit, and who tremble when he speaks. (Isa. 66:2) He resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. (I Peter 5:5) Remember, ‘grace’ means that he is acting in their lives.

So the humble are dependent upon God, not on themselves. They humble themselves ‘under the mighty hand of God.’ (I Peter 5:6) That is, by depending upon God to act. They abandon outcomes entirely to him. They ‘cast all their anxieties upon him, because he cares for them.’ (vs. 7) The result is assurance that the mission and the ministry will be accomplished, in God’s time and in God’s way. They don’t need to be the vision, and the goals we set for them are God’s business, not ours. We do the very best we know, we work hard, and even self-sacrificially. But we do not carry the load, and our ego is not involved in any way with the mission and the ministry. In our love of Jesus and his Father, we truly have abandoned our life to him. Our life is not an object of deep concern.”

~Dallas Willard