Wilsonian has a very real and honest post that prompted these thoughts today...
Jealousy is not seen as a positive emotion. Words like discipline and rebuke, also don't usually strike us as positive. Yet, God's word uses these terms in relationship with God's love, in ways that are supposed to strike us as nurturing and healing.
Hebrews 12 talks about the fact that God disciplines those he loves. The word is even rendered as rebukes in some translations. Maybe it's just me, but for many years, every time I read that, I cringed. Because of my very strict upbringing words like rebuke & discipline haven't always felt closely tied in to a healthy nurturing love. I knew it was supposed to be a positive, but between my head and my heart (and other parts of my body) the message always got truncated (my big word for the day).
Only recently has it hit me that this, God's rebuking/disciplining love comes out of a deep, deep well of healing and restoration. A never ending love, stubborn, jealous love. But not jealous like someone in a codependent relationship that asks for everything and offers nothing.
On the contrary, it is a jealous love that is Jealous for our best. Jealous for all that would cause us to know what abundant life truly is. Jealous because it knows that we have traded true love, for something ugly, something that has bound our very souls in so many ways and places that we actually believe the darkness is bright. It's from this heart that God's love is extended to us.
Yes, it can get uncomfortable and even hurt for a time, but it only hurts because we've stepped so far away from true love we don't recognize it easily. What feels like pain is actually Jesus breaking through and ripping out the chains that had kept us in bondage for so long.
Here's the point, our part in the process is just to surrender...to let him love us. Often we short circuit the process, by trying to show God that we really are loveable in what we do & say. But the shortest route to knowing this love is not through our doing, but through surrender. To bask in it. To allow it to touch us wherever it wills, accept it, and live in the newness of that light. It is here we can KNOW (experience) the depth and width of the only love that nothing can separate us from. God's stubborn, never ending and jealous love.
Posted by edsurrender...
Posted by: wilsonian