A Loving God Sent His Son

A Loving God Sent His Son

Reflections on John 10:10 and John 3:16–17 — the First Fact of the Gospel

By Michael A. Graham

We are all looking for life. We want our days to be full, alive, worth the living, and we go looking for that life in a hundred places — in work, in love, in family, in the next thing we are sure will satisfy. Underneath the looking there is an ache, a sense that something is missing. We try to fill it, and for a while it holds, and then it drains away, and we are looking again.

Two of the best-known verses in the Bible speak straight to that search. The first is the Lord’s own word about why He came:

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10).

The second tells us why He came and what it cost Him:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:16–17).

This is the first of the Five Facts of the gospel as Jack Miller lays them out in A New Life, and the booklet states it in a single sentence: “A loving God sent His Son Jesus into the world to bring you a new and abundant life.” I want to state that gospel promise plainly and let it stand at full strength, and then face the honest question it leaves us holding. The promise is large. It is meant to be. And if I shrink it to fit my experience, I lose the very thing God is offering. So let it stay large, and let us walk into it.

These five facts in the A New Life booklet are five sides of one gospel of the Triune God, mutually reinforcing, so that you could walk into the whole through any one of them. We take them one at a time because we cannot hold all five at once. This first one is the ground the others stand on. It begins, as the whole gospel begins, with God.

The Principle — A Loving God, and the Life and Love He Gives

Let the words of Jesus do the work. “I have come,” He says. He came from the Father, down into our world, to bring us the life we had lost. “That they may have life.” The word He uses is zoe. We have other words for life. Bios is the span of our days, the years we are given. Psyche is the breath in our soul, the natural self that lives and feels. Zoe is higher than both. It is God’s own life, the life that was in the Word, the life He means to pour into us. “And have it to the full.” To the full — more than enough, life that runs over its own edges. The booklet calls it abundant life, life with more than it can hold.

Now hear John 3:16. “God so loved the world.” It starts with God. The love is His, and He moved first, before we had taken a single step toward Him. The little word “so” tells us the kind of love it is: He loved like this — and the verse is about to show us how. The word behind the loving is agape, a love that gives itself away for the good of another. Then “the world” — and in John that word carries no compliment. The world is the human race in its turning away, the place that loved the dark and would not know its Maker. That is the world He loved. And the love gave: “his one and only Son.” He gave, and the One He gave was His own Son, the only one of His kind, the Son He loved.

There is an older scene behind those words. Once before, God asked Abraham for his only son, the son he loved, and at the last moment He spared the boy and provided a ram in his place. Here God gives His own Son and goes through with it, for us.

This life and love did not begin with us. They have always been in God — the Father, the Son, and the Spirit loving and giving to one another before the world was made. Creation was the overflow of that eternal life and love. God made us, gave us His own life, set His love on us, and made us His children to share what is His. We took that life and love and spent it on ourselves, like the son who took his father’s wealth and squandered it in a far country, until we sat with our faces in the pig sty — dead to the life and love we had left behind. They were not gone; the Father still held them, and still loved us. We were the ones who had gone away. And God came after us. “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). He saw him a long way off, which tells us He was watching the road. And He ran — a grown man, running to a son who had wasted everything. That is your God. He came the whole way down to where we were, and farther, down to a cross.

His life and love are a different kind than ours. The way we live curves in on ourselves. We love what feeds us and live for our own. God’s life and love run the other way, pouring themselves out — Father to Son, Son to Father, and out to us. His is an other-centered life and love, and here is the part I keep having to relearn: it is the very thing our hearts were made for. It is the rest Augustine spoke of, the rest we are looking for in all the wrong places, the rest the heart cannot find until it finds it in God. We were built for self-giving life and love, because we were built for the God who is self-giving life and love. The counterfeits never satisfy us because they are not it.

And the life He brings is His own. It is Christ Himself, given to us. “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). To know Him is the life itself. So when God offers you life, He offers you Himself — His nearness, His joy, His love that holds. That is the promise, and He means every word of it. A loving God sent His Son to bring you life to the full.

The Problem — Why We Do Not Have It

Here is the honest question, and I have to ask it of myself first. If a loving God gives life to the full, why do I not have it? Why does the promise sound so much larger than the life I actually live? You have heard the promise, some of you for years. You look at your own heart, your own home, your own week, and the fullness is missing. Perhaps you have read and prayed and served, and tried hard to feel something, and you still stand here with empty hands.

Mark this well, because everything turns on it. The gospel keeps its word. God has not overpromised. The promise is whole. The lack is in us. And that is good news, though it may not feel like it at first. If the gap were in the gospel, we could only lower our hopes and learn to want less. The gap is in us, and that is the very thing He came to heal. Jack Miller put his finger on it:

Some Christians would say that [we] overpromise what God’s grace can do to renew hurt, broken, and wicked people … Yes, let me acknowledge the working of God’s grace sometimes takes years to soak into our lives. Grace definitely is for the long haul and must overcome much resistance in our lives. But isn’t much of our problem right here? We tend to resist grace by underestimating what the Lord of grace has done and is doing for us. We minimize in our hearts what He has done in His work for us in His atonement and is now doing in us by the Spirit. So then the problem lies not so much with grace, but with our tendency to overestimate what we can do by our own moral willpower, and in this manner we hinder the Spirit of Christ by our unbelief.

— Jack Miller

Miller lays the weight exactly where it belongs — on our unbelief, on our habit of resisting a grace that is already at work in us. So the question turns from the gospel and onto us: where does that resistance begin? It begins, strangely, in something good. The longing for life is good. God built it into us. The trouble is where we take that longing. We want the life, and we want it on our own terms — ourselves at the center, in charge, deciding and providing. And a self at the center has no room for the life of a God whose whole life is given away.

The thief in the Lord’s parable always has counterfeits ready: the world’s life and love, cut down to our own size. Our longings land on them — a marriage, a child, a career, a pleasure, a screen, a name, a win — and we make each one a terminal point, the place where we are sure we will finally arrive: when I have that, then I will be alive, then I will be loved. The Bible has a plainer word for them: idols. Jeremiah called them broken cisterns: “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water” (Jeremiah 2:13).

Picture it the way the prophet does. A river of living water runs through the desert, and the trees with their roots in it stand green and teeming with life while everything around them is parched. And there we are, out on the dry ground with a shovel, digging our own tanks to catch a little rainwater — water that came down from God in the first place — and the tanks are cracked, so the little we manage to hold drains away, slipping through our fingers like sand. The cruelest part is this: the spring is running right beside us the whole time. We are dying of thirst a few feet from living water. And we will not drink, because somewhere down deep we know that to drink from this spring is to die to the self at the center, to become, like the God whose water it is, other-centered. We would rather perish on our own terms than live on His.

And still we go back to them, because we love the dark more than the light. John names it: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). We love what the thief is selling, because it lets us keep ourselves at the center — to take God’s good gifts on our own terms, consuming them, and using even the people around us to get them. It is the prodigal’s demand: give me my inheritance now, the share that falls to a son only when his father is dead. We want the gifts of God without God. It is Adam’s sin in the garden, the serpent’s old lie believed again, made ours. We have built our own life for years, and that is why the fullness has not filled us.

There is a word for where this road leaves us, and it is in the text: “shall not perish.” Perish — to be lost, to come to ruin, away from the God who is life. This is not a far-off destination we are slowly traveling toward. We are perishing already, as John says plainly: “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son” (John 3:18). God does not have to do anything to condemn us. We stand condemned already, perishing where we sit. The wonder of the gospel is that He comes to save us out of that present perishing, and to set us in His grace.

And here is the heart of God toward us in the meantime. He knows how self-centered we are, and how slow we are to change. A man would cut his losses and start over. God will not: “How can I give you up, Ephraim?… My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused… For I am God, and not man—the Holy One among you” (Hosea 11:8–9). His God-ness is His refusal to scrap us. He keeps coming for us, and He will finish what He has begun.

The Gospel — How Christ Gives Us His Life

Now hear how He gives us the life. Look at one word in John 3:16: “gave.” “God so loved the world that he gave.” We hear that word and picture the manger. In Scripture it is the word of the altar — a lamb laid down for sin. Every Passover, every Day of Atonement, for hundreds of years, taught us to look for Him. So John the Baptist saw Him coming and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).

The Son lived the one life of self-giving love that we failed to live. He loved God with all His heart and loved His neighbor as Himself, and so He kept the whole law, which is summed up in love (Matthew 22:37–40; Romans 13:10). That is what the zoe life looks like when it is lived out — loving God and loving people, all the way to the cross. He owed no death of His own; He had done nothing wrong. He took ours. He stepped under our death and carried it into the grave, and in its place He hands us His own life, the life that cannot die. This is the trade the cross makes: He takes what was ours — our sin and our death — and gives us what is His — His righteousness and His life. Paul says it in one breath: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Death was the wage we had earned. Life is the gift He gives. He took the wage, and handed us the gift, exactly as Paul says: “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23).

The two lives meet most plainly when the Good Shepherd speaks. “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). Hear the two words for life in that one chapter. The life He gives us is zoe, the life of God. The life He lays down is psyche, His own soul, His earthly life. He gave up His psyche so that we could have His zoe. The exchange is right there in the Greek.

The whole of it was costly to Him. The Lord pointed back to a strange scene in the wilderness, where Moses lifted a bronze serpent on a pole and the dying who looked at it lived: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14–15). The dying looked, and they lived. We look to the Son lifted on the cross, and we live. He endured it for the joy of bringing us home to His Father: “who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2).

The deepest agony of the cross was not the nails. It was the separation from God that belonged to us, taken onto Himself. In the garden He fell on His face and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me” (Matthew 26:39), and His sweat became like drops of blood falling to the ground (Luke 22:44). The cup He dreaded was the wrath and the abandonment our sin had earned. On the cross He drank it to the bottom, and He cried out our cry: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). That cry came from the One who from all eternity had only ever known the life and love of His Father. He bore our forsakenness so that He could give us His own place with God. This is love that gives itself away for the ones it loves.

And the ones He saves, He keeps: “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:28). He bought this life by His dying, and He keeps it by His rising. Once He has you, His hand holds fast, and He will carry you home.

The cross also tells the truth about us. It is the sharpest criticism ever spoken over the human race — that our sin ran so deep it took the death of the Son of God to answer it. The cross knows us all the way to the bottom. And it is exactly there, in that deepest exposure, that God pours out His deepest love. He sees the worst of us, names it for what it is, and dies for us anyway. The place where we are most thoroughly found out is the place where we are most thoroughly loved.

The Response — How We Receive It

How do we receive this life? The verse tells us: “whoever believes in him.” To believe is to lean your whole weight on Christ and let Him hold you. And “whoever” — the young and the old, the close and the far, the worst of us. That means you.

And faith comes as we hear it. Paul says it plainly: “Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). This is a great relief, because it means we do not climb up to this life or feel our way into it or manufacture it by trying harder. We receive it as a gift, and we get under the gospel and stay there. We say it to ourselves when we wake afraid. We say it to one another when one of us forgets. We say it out to those who have yet to hear it. And the Spirit, who loves this gospel more than any of us, makes it land and lifts up Christ as we hear.

There is a reason I keep saying we get under the gospel and stay there. Many of us have treated the gospel as a doorway only — the way in. We walked through it, we were justified by faith, and then we left it behind. We took up the work of changing ourselves in our own strength, as if grace got us through the door and now the law could carry us the rest of the way. It cannot. The Christian life is strenuous. It asks more of us than the old life ever did. But the strength to live it is drawn fresh from Christ every day, and never worked up out of ourselves.

The gospel was always meant to be more than the doorway. It is the doorway, the foundation we stand on, and the umbrella over the whole of life. We do not graduate from it. We live under it. The same grace that carried us in is the grace we drink every morning, the way a thirsty man drinks at a spring. Miller named the drift exactly:

Too many believers give lip service to justification by faith, but in effect, once they’ve been justified, they forget all about it and live as if the law can change them.

— Jack Miller

The cure for that forgetting is the old gospel itself, kept near and said often — the same word that first brought us in. This is why I long for every person at our church, child to elder, to know this gospel well enough to say it — to themselves, to one another, and to the people the Lord brings their way. The gospel is the great leveler. It pulls every relationship off the ground of earning and onto the ground of grace. The child raging that his parents have failed him comes to see that they need this same grace he does, and the demand softens into mercy. The husband and wife at war across the table remember that they are two sinners under one grace, and the fight stops being “earn your place with me” and recenters on the love that gave itself for them both. The preacher learns that he needs it as desperately as anyone in the back pew, which is why he asks them to pray for him every week — so he can bring it to them with his whole self, and not as words only.

This is the most ordinary thing in the world, and the most needed. It is the life and love we reach for when our child is driving us to the edge and we want to lash out, when the old resentment toward our spouse rises again, when a coworker has wronged us and we would like to choke him, when the news tempts us to despise people made in God’s image. We have none of that patient, self-giving love stored up in ourselves. We draw it fresh from Him, or we do without it.

And this grace is too full to keep. The Father ran for the son in the far country, and His heart is still out there, with the ones far from home. There is a second prodigal in that story — the older brother, who stayed at home and took the remaining inheritance for granted and resented the father’s lavish welcome of his lost brother. He should have seen his father’s grief and gone out himself to find his lost brother and bring him home. He would not. But there is a true elder Brother in this gospel who did exactly that: the Son of God, who saw the Father’s heart for His lost children, left the Father’s house, came the whole way into our far country, and at His own cost carried us home. He is the elder Brother the older son refused to be.

To receive His grace and keep it for ourselves, with no eye for the ones still in the far country, is its own kind of lostness. So He fills us with His own life and sends us out to do what He did — to go after the lost, because His heart for them has become ours. And here is the wonder of it: the life and love we carry to them is not ours to manufacture. It comes from outside us, from Him, and flows through us to them, so that the more we pour out, the more we have. We are giving out of an abundance that was never our own.

Abundant Life, Abundant Love, and Our Fears

Here is where I have been living this week, and I want to follow it to the bottom, because I think this first fact, taken at full strength, undoes some of the deepest fears we carry.

Begin with the economics, because that is the hinge. So much of our anxiety runs on scarcity. We treat life as a finite quantity draining out of a fixed tank, so we have to grab it, hoard it, maximize it, and never miss, because the clock is winning. “Seize the day.” “You only live once.” “Make the most of your limited time.” Every one of these runs on the bios and psyche register — life measured in years and heartbeats and experiences, with death as the hard stop. The fear of missing out is the fear of a finite life running out before I have caught enough of it.

The zoe life does not improve that economy. It ends it. You cannot run out of what is infinite, and you cannot miss what has already been given to you in full. So the frantic grasping is not disciplined into submission; it is disarmed at the root, because what I was so frantically reaching for has already been given to me in Christ. Notice that the Lord attacks our anxiety at exactly this word. In Matthew 6 He says, “Do not worry about your life” — and the word is psyche. The what-will-I-eat, am-I-missing-it worry is psyche-anxiety, and His answer is the Father who feeds the birds and the kingdom we already belong to. In Luke 12 He tells of the man whose barns were full, who said to his psyche, “Take it easy; eat, drink, be merry” — the original bucket-list man — and God said, “This night your psyche is required of you.” The seize-the-day man is the fool, and the verdict on him is that he was rich in the wrong currency. Jesus calls us instead to be “rich toward God.”

This is why death loses its grip on us at two levels at once. As the end of life, it has been undone: “whoever lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:26). It is not that the believer holds an indestructible life of his own; it is that the indestructible life and love of Jesus holds the believer. Faith has no power in itself. Its whole worth is that, by the Spirit, it joins us to Christ, and His life — the life death could not keep down — holds us fast. So physical death becomes a doorway home. As the punishment for our separation from God, it has been paid, the condemnation lifted at the cross. Hebrews puts the two together and names the bondage exactly: Christ shared our flesh and blood so that “by his death he might… free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14–15). I have come to think that the fear of missing out, and the frantic urge to grab life by the horns, are simply that old slavery wearing modern clothes — the fear of death sublimated into the fear of an unlived life. Paul stands on the far side of it and writes the death of all our FOMO: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). The man with the most zoe loses nothing by dying. He gains.

The lie underneath the fear of missing out is that life is out there — in the experience, the moment, the achievement — and that I must catch it before it is gone. But zoe is not an experience I must chase down and catch. It is a Person. And the deepest comfort runs deeper than my having laid hold of Him, because if my safety rested on my own grip, John’s very next lines would loosen it. Read on past 3:16 and you come to the verdict of 3:19: “Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” Left to myself, I love the dark. I would not come to the light; and even the good I managed to do I would want to claim for myself, rather than let it be seen as done in God. If the ground of my hope were only that Christ has been handed to me, to take or to leave, I would leave Him, and be lost.

My hope runs the other direction. The Father has handed me to the Son, and the Son has bound Himself by a promise He will not break: “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away… this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day” (John 6:37, 39). There is the self-giving love of the Triune God at the root of my salvation — the Father gives a people to the Son, the Son receives them, does the Father’s will, and loses not one. So I cannot miss God, not because my hand is strong enough to hold Him, but because His hand will never let me go. That demotes everything else from “essential, do not miss it” to “good gift, hold it loosely.” I can skip the trip, lose the years, even lose my life, and I have not missed out, because the Life has hold of me. The only fear of missing out worth having is the fear of missing God — and the gospel answers that one all the way down, because the Son keeps every one the Father gives Him.

God Himself lives free of every one of these fears, and our freedom is drawn from His. The Triune God is other-centered life and love at the source: the Father giving Himself to the Son, the Son to the Father, the Spirit to both — an eternal exchange of self-giving love with no scarcity in it anywhere. God has no fear of missing out, because He owns the day. He has no fear of death, because He is life. He has no need to grab or hoard, because He is Himself an abundance of life and love, generous to the point of loving His enemies and dying for the very people who crucified Him. And when His Spirit pours that life and love into us — “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us” (Romans 5:5) — His freedom comes with it. We begin to lose the franticness, because we begin to share the abundance of the One who has never once been afraid of running out.

Now carry the same thing over to love, because the love runs on the same economy as the life. The world’s love is scarce — earned, ranked, conditional, withdrawable, tied to what I hold and what I produce. Lose the holdings and I fear I lose the love, the standing, the worth. So I grasp for love the way I grasp for life, and I fear losing it the same way. Agape severs that wire. “He loved you before you earned a thing,” and the back half is just as true: He will love you after you have lost everything, too. Read Paul’s list and notice what is missing from it: “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future… will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39). Bankruptcy is not on that list. Failure is not on that list. The one love we cannot afford to lose is the one love we cannot lose.

The Fear of Losing Everything

Let me get personal, and be honest about why. Jack Miller taught that a pastor leads best by leading in repentance — going first, naming his own sin and fear, so others can come down off their pedestals and meet grace at the same level. I am not making this about me. I preach this gospel to myself before I preach it to you, and you should be able to watch me need it.

The deepest fear in my life is the fear of losing everything, and some of where it comes from is plain. My father built a small charter-fishing operation into a large seafood business and was worth millions. Then he lost it — partly to a flood of imported farmed shrimp, partly to infighting in the family — and in the end he lost the house too. It was the house I grew up in, the one my parents built, finished the day they brought me home from the hospital. Years later, grown and married with children of my own, I drove back to empty it of the few things we were allowed to keep while the bank took the rest. Watching that, something got written in me in permanent ink: to lose the holdings is to be undone. And like my father, I am a risk-taker by temperament, which is a cruel pairing with that fear. Take the risk, and it may be the thing that loses everything. Refuse it, and I am burying the talent in the ground while life passes. So I am frantic to risk and frantic to hold — two coats on one fear. Either way, everything is on the table, and a man who stakes his soul on every decision can never rest.

And the fear was never only about money. It ran just as deep through love. When I married, I had no idea how self-centered I was; marriage has a way of revealing that to a man, and then children reveal it all over again, and you learn how much it costs to die to yourself and actually love another person. And then, with my father’s loss already behind me, there came a season when my wife, Vicki, told me she wanted a divorce, and left. I felt, again, that I was losing everything. By God’s mercy our marriage was saved — we are not divorced, she is here, and I thank God for her every day. And yet for the longest time afterward I still carried the quiet conviction that I was one failure away from losing her again — that if I were not loving enough, or did not provide enough, she might walk out, and I would lose the thing that mattered most. The same line that ran through me as a boy ran straight through my marriage: that love is earned, love is fragile, love can be withdrawn the moment I stop measuring up. Losing everything has always threatened both at once — the life I was building and the love I was sure I could lose.

It is the gospel, and only the gospel, that has begun to reach that fear, and it reaches both sides of it at once. The fear is about losing the two things I was made for — life and love — and in Christ I lose neither: the zoe cannot run out, and the agape will not be withdrawn. He loved me before I earned a thing, and He will love me after I have lost everything — money, name, even, if it ever came to it, the people I most fear losing. “Neither death nor life… will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.” My truest everything is hidden with Christ in God, where no market and no failure and no one’s decision can reach it. So I can run the worst case all the way to the bottom — the business fails, or the person leaves — and even there I keep my life, my belovedness, my Father, my home. Job lost it all in an afternoon — the literal worst case — and still said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised,” and “I know that my Redeemer lives.” He had the one thing the whole disaster could not touch.

And here is what the gospel showed me that I did not want to see: my grasping is itself self-centered. Christ has already filled me with life and love to give away — to my wife, my children, my church, whoever the Lord brings near. And still I reach to get it for myself, as though I were empty and the supply might run out. That fear is unbelief about the abundance. Worse, grasping love is the one love that cannot bless the people I am most afraid of losing, because it uses them to fill me. The love that actually blesses my wife and children is the love that has stopped needing them to make me safe — love that gives itself away because it is already full.

This is why the killing of my self-centeredness is mercy, and not the cruelty it sometimes feels like. Heaven is the home of an other-centered God and an other-centered people — an eternity of self-giving love with no scarcity anywhere in it. A self-centered heart would be miserable in such a place, a grasping man at a feast of givers, forever out of step, unable to enjoy the very thing it was made for. So when God sets about putting my self-centeredness to death, He is not robbing me of life. He is fitting me for the only life that is finally worth having, and making me able to belong where, deep down, I most want to be. Miller saw the strange arithmetic of it:

The height of joy is doing the will of another. This runs so counter to our culture. People are so unhappy because they are deceived into thinking that doing your own will is the height of fulfillment. The very opposite is true. It’s only serving the interest of others that you have fulfillment. We have the highest joy because we are seeking to serve the will of the One who is the Lord of the universe and Head of the church and whose ways are wise and who only desires our blessing.

— Jack Miller

If Miller is right, and the highest joy really is in giving ourselves away, then the death of my self-centeredness is the door to joy — gain that arrives looking like loss. I cannot reason my way into believing that while the fear still has me. This is where faith comes in. The fear is a failure to trust that the life and love are real and will hold; faith is trusting His life and love enough to loosen my grip and begin to give. The servant who buried his talent gave one reason: “I was afraid.” The cure for the fear that buries and the greed that gambles is the same — faith in the Master who owns it all and keeps the servant regardless. And faith comes by hearing, so the healing of these oldest fears is a daily return to the gospel, preaching it to myself, until the man who was sure he had to earn his place believes he was given life and love before he earned anything, and will keep them long after he can earn nothing at all. I am a long way from the end of that road, but it is the only one that goes anywhere, and the One who set me on it has promised to finish it. Jack Miller told his own version of this, and it has been a mirror to me:

It is very difficult to get a hold of the Bible unless God Himself is getting hold of you … Almost everything in my life was to keep me away from God. A lot of my life was an elaborate game to keep God at a distance so that I could be saved, but saved on a throne, my throne … I really did not know how to get in contact with God. The answer came when God got in contact with me … The heart of it was seeing that my sin was against God personally. It really wasn’t this sin or that sin, but my whole spirit of independence, autonomy, self-glorying. When I surrendered my life to Christ it released me from all sorts of hang-ups … I had been trying to come to God through the screen of my needs. And I didn’t know that my deepest need was that God loved me … This was the first time I knew it was all of grace—how deep was my sin but how much deeper was God’s grace.

— Jack Miller, My Encounter With the Gospel

That last line is the one I keep returning to: he had been coming to God through the screen of his needs, when his deepest need all along was simply that God loved him. That has been my screen too. And once a man believes his deepest need is already supplied — that his life and his love are secure in God — he becomes the freest steward of all: unhurried, unafraid, holding everything with open hands. He can take a risk or leave it as wisdom directs, love his wife and children without clutching, and pour himself out without fear, because he knows he cannot run dry. This is the freedom the whole gospel circles back to: the man who is teeming with zoe and held by agape is free to risk, to give, to lose, and to die, and to call it all gain.

Conclusion

We began looking for life. We were made to. A loving God came the whole way after us — from creation, where He first gave us His life and love, to the cross, where He gave His Son to take our death and hand that life back to us. And the life He gives is the life His Son lived: an other-centered life of loving God and loving people, the whole law kept and now poured into us by His Spirit. That is the abundant life — His own life and love, running over, more than we can hold.

So the old fear that I would lose everything has met its answer. The life cannot be used up, and the love will not be withdrawn, because I do not hold them; the One who is life and love holds me, and He loses none the Father gives Him. So I can risk, and give, and lose, and even die, and call it all gain, because the thing I was most afraid of losing is already safe in Christ.

This is the first of the Five Facts, and the five are one gospel. We came in today through the first door — a loving God who gives us life. There are four more, and every one of them opens onto the same Lord. This one is enough to live on, to die on, and to stake everything on. The promise is whole; where my life still feels empty, the lack is in me, and the healing is the Spirit’s to give. So I will hold it at full size, look to the Son lifted up, and live — saying it to myself all week, and asking His Spirit to make it real in me before I bring it to anyone else.

A loving God sent His Son Jesus into the world to bring you a new and abundant life.