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An infinite life expectancy is not just measured by endless years of time; it is also defined by limitless pursuits of love. The gifts of love that God bestows upon us never seem to have an off-switch. When James exhorts us to ask for wisdom from God, he does not specify we should only ask once, or twice, or limit our requests to some predefined number. Instead he states an obvious truth, when we feel our need, we should ask. Perhaps the greatest reason our IQ’s do not exceed the Einstein’s or DaVinci’s of history is that we think ourselves “wise enough”. We are “wise enough” to get to our jobs, manage our families, maintain our friendships, and absorb the lessons from school or church. Sure we might feel a periodic pressure from an upcoming test we need help with, or project due in our employment; but in general we think ourselves capable enough to meet most of life’s challenges, therefore not especially in “need” of God’s wisdom. This thinking is borne of the disease of evil. Since we are less able to deduce how much better our lives could be, we are more content to remain where we are, than to pursue what might otherwise be limitless. Evil has made mediocrity our norm, and has tempered expectations to the statistical bell curve of humanity. But this was not, and is not, our destiny. We are free to seek the wisdom of God on our knees, and in our prayers, as often as we wish. Since when is “wise enough” a standard by which we measure infinity? Perhaps growing wiser in the wisdom of God is something we will never grow tired of experiencing, and as James exhorts, it begins now.
A never-ending increase in wisdom leads to a never-ending understanding of truth. There is more buried in the words of scripture than a cursory reading will reveal. But this deeper truth was not meant to be withheld from us, it was meant to be discovered. It is simply that we have tried to ascertain it in the limited wisdom we allow ourselves. When we realize that no matter how smart we think ourselves today, an offer from God to increase our wisdom is ever on the table, all we need do is ask for it and believe and know He answers our requests. In effect, we are only taking God up on His offers that exist already. And a deeper understanding of truth is something He longs to provide us with. He longs to share things of deeper meaning with us, particularly those of a spiritual nature. But He has been confined to work with our limited ability to understand – mostly because we refuse to ask to increase our own understanding. It is the mental equivalent of trying to run a race only using one leg. We may think we are doing great hopping along on one foot in our race, but the simple use of the other leg would add a whole new dimension to speed, than hopping could ever hope to produce. A more accurate self-assessment, is that we are never done “needing” what God longs to provide. And no matter our lack of ability to perceive it, our “need” is truly severe and immediate.
Where wisdom is concerned it may not be God’s intent to make each of us quantum physicists; but is worth noting that subjects of that nature are child’s play for the God who invented the rules and equations that define them. However wisdom that produces fruit is always something God longs to share. For example, we think our marriages “good enough” when we can get through the day without fighting like cats and dogs (over money or in-laws), killing the children (so to speak), and still being able to maintain a quasi-squishy lovey-dovey feeling for our spouse. That’s life right? But an increase of wisdom that yields a new set of ideas and creativity that would bring something new and special to the life of our spouse; or a new approach in teaching our children with an effect so as to yield positive results that will endure for the length of their lives; these aspirations are possible when the limits of our minds have been eliminated. In short a marriage that relies on human wisdom and human strength, carries with it inherent human limitations. But what happens when boundless is the rule of the day? What happens to the quality of a marriage that does not rely on human limitations but on the infinite potential of God? The result is a level of love that makes a quasi-squishy feeling look like the puppy love of a teenager. Instead comes a deep and abiding love that cannot be moved, or perhaps even tempted. When human limitations give way to infinite potential founded and rooted in God, there is no limit to what the love in our families can become.
We must allow God to unlock our minds to what is really possible with Him. In this way we can begin to see past the self-imposed boundaries that evil has come to suggest are our limits. Heaven is not about the golden concrete, it is about the infinite potential. And the Kingdom of God, has not been withheld from us for a future date, as our Lord Himself has said … “it has come”. The infinite potential of our destiny is not something we must wait to experience. It is something on our roadmap that begins in the here and now and sees tangible results in our day-to-day experiences. When we let go of our mediocre expectations and begin to realize the infinite in our current reality, we realize better just what God has in mind for each of us. This begins when we allow God to change “how” we think. The disease of evil acts as an impairment to what God intended us to be. It acts as an inhibitor to His divine destiny for each of us. This is why the full elimination of evil from within us should be our first and foremost concern. This is why no evil must remain a part of us, no cherished sin worth holding on to. When evil is fully gone from us, we will be able to fully realize what God has in mind for us. To accept our existence with evil as a part of who we are, is to accept a constrained life unable to reach the potential of the infinite. Only a full surrender of everything that we are to Christ, can result in unlocking our minds through His daily re-creation of who we are from the inside out.
It is interesting the things that God values from an infinite point of view. Wealth for example, is a relatively hollow pursuit with little tangible value, particularly from God’s point of view. How could God even measure wealth in terms we utilize? How much gold is enough for God, or diamonds perfectly cut, or in silver coins stacked how high? The city of heaven was described in brilliant beautiful terminology and yet Christ forsook it all, in favor of redeeming us, His children, from the evil we had embraced. Apparently from the point of view of God, trinkets and minerals matter very little when measured against the infinite potential of even one of His living creations. Scripture does not condemn earthly wealth, but it does see it as more of a “burden” than a blessing. This is because how we value wealth distracts us from what is truly of value, each other. Too often we are consumed with the acquisition of wealth, in order to bring a life of ease and comfort, and thereby we insulate ourselves from what is truly of value. Even if our collection of trinkets was infinite, what would they truly be worth? Compare planet sized collections of pure golden coins, with a spouse who spends every day determining and acting out new ways to enrich your life, and demonstrate to you the love that is ever growing within them for you. Planets of gold guarded in isolation afraid to lose what has been amassed, or a simple love that is ever growing and constantly demonstrated – no contest. God could have simply made entire empty universes of golden planets if He valued that mineral as much as we seem to. He did not. Gold is not what God thinks is limitless, but people are. We are. And our God is constantly thinking and inventing new ways to reach us and show us exactly how much He loves us. This action of showing us love is what brings fulfillment and joy to Him.
Our gratitude is important to Him, but our acceptance of His gifts means even more. God longs to give us His wisdom. He longs to increase our ability to reason so that we might better understand Him and what is truly important in our existence. He longs to take away our sins and addiction to self and evil, not because we deserve it, but because He loves us and hates to see us bound to suffering and death. God longs to pour our His Holy Spirit into our lives and with it the endowment of spiritual gifts. These are things God sees as infinite. An infinite love is something God wishes to share with us, unbound by our self-inflicted limitations and addiction to evil. Accepting these gifts from God brings HIM pure joy, as He knows what it will do to our lives. He finds joy when we find joy. He finds love in us, when we allow Him to place it there. He is able to better talk with us, when we allow Him to do so. He longs to remove the restrictions from us that self-obsession has imposed. We just need to let Him. Our need of Him is so much greater than we perceive. Our need of Him is extreme and immediate, but masked by our affliction of evil. Satan seeks to distract us from our need of God, so that our infinite potential in Him is never realized. Satan easily defeats humanity, but is powerless in the face of divinity. When we allow God to re-create us, it is God who inhabits us, and He who Satan sees when he attempts to confront us. Only then do we resist him, and find him fleeing from the God he sees reflected in us. It is not we who Satan fears; it is our God we allow within us.
A better perspective is demanded by those who would seek to reach the infinite. What is valued throughout eternity should be what we place value upon in the here and now. Those things which are neither constrained by evil, nor limited in eternity, are the things with which we should seek to spend more of our energy on. In short, it is people we will be joined with throughout the eons of time. This is why relieving the plight of their suffering in a world of sin, takes so much a priority within the scriptures. The reason why the widow, and fatherless, the poor, the afflicted, the naked, those in prison take such a prominent place in the admonitions of scripture – is that these souls have great needs that we can be a part of relieving if we will but spend a bit of our energy in their direction right now. In heaven, it will require a degree of intellect and creativity to find new ways to demonstrate our love for each other. But in the world of pain in which we live today, the needs are much clearer, and more immediate. By demonstrating our love now to those in need of love, we reflect the great desire to love of our Father who is in heaven. It is in this way, we show the world around us, what the will of the Father is. Christ was always working to relieve the misery of those He encountered. His judgments were reserved for those who saw themselves in no great need (ironically the religious leaders of His day). But His mercy was always poured out without reserve on the desperate.
Are we to see ourselves as merely the “religious leaders” of Christianity today, or will we allow Christ to live out His will to relieve the suffering of those around us as we surrender ourselves to Him? To examine in life what is of infinite value, is to see that love is never enough. Therefore to demonstrate love to those in need may be just what they require to awaken to what is boundless, and what is possible. To those in great need, a simple demonstration of love, a simple gesture of kindness in action, is a miracle of its own. Imagine how many people pass by the needs of the downtrodden before the one takes action to help relieve his suffering. The “good Samaritan” (described in Luke 10:30-37) was not the first person on the scene to encounter someone in desperate need, he was merely the first person to take action to see the need relieved. In this parable, the image of a “Samaritan” conjured up imagery of an evil addicted hopeless person whose religious ideology was based in error. Jews despised Samaritans for their lack of purity. Yet the Samaritan does the very thing that the supposedly doctrinally correct spiritual leaders refused to do – to save a man in need. Christ teaches us a different perspective in this story. He shows us that no matter what our doctrinal belief system; the injured man on the road needs our love, more than our ideology. A demonstration of love that knows no limits is an enactment of the will of the Father.
The Samaritan was not praised by Christ for his doctrinal understanding, nor was he glorified by Christ as some sort of saint. Christ was pointing out the practicality of love to change the life of another. He was showing that love in action is more a reflection of His Father’s will than any perceived piety of religious leaders. In short, it is love that is infinite, as it is demonstrated. The Samaritan was indeed “wiser” than his more doctrinally accurate contemporaries, as the wisdom God values was reflected in “how” he loved the life of a stranger. Were that story true, the friendship and bonds of love those two men would surely have established in the here and now, would be with them throughout the eons of time in the place we call heaven. It is this story of salvation that shows us the nature of love in action. The stranger did not already know the men who passed him by in this time of need. But I would be willing to bet, he would certainly want to meet the one who saved him, and paid the price for his recovery. I would be willing to bet, the victim on the road would want to know more about “why” that good Samaritan would have stopped to save him a stranger in need. And in the seeking of the knowledge of that love, is the living witness of the God it is we serve. It was not the Sabbath truth, or the beauty of tithing, or the promissory system of sacrifice for the atonement of sin, that would lead the robbery victim to seek our God. It was instead the living demonstration of a God of love in action that would make a tangible difference to one in need. And the love that moves a heart to action, can be boundless in its application, both here and for all eternity.
It is our destiny to discover the infinite. Our limitations of self are removed through the process of re-creation as we surrender our will to Christ. And what we find that is valued through all eternity is a love that knows no limits, and was first demonstrated in action by the very life of our God Jesus Christ. While the beauty of truth is better understood by the wisdom God longs to give us. It will never be better defined in our reality than when we apply wisdom to demonstrate love in the life of another. This is the hidden truth ever revealed in the proper study of doctrine, that infinite love is at the core of every truth, or it is not truth you are examining. And there is no better place to see what infinite love looks like than in the life of Jesus Christ. We need not be content therefore to accept the mediocrity of human limitations. We can instead find our current existence unbound by self. We can explore marriages that know no limits in joy or service. We can explore relationships with our parents, our children, our families, and our friends that we never dared to dream could be so rewarding. We can even begin to see the melting away of our enemies, into what will ever be our closest friends, as we let love dissolve negativity and divinity dissolve mediocrity. The selfless expression of love is our roadmap to infinity.
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