The One He Loves

God’s love can be tricky depending on what presuppositions I’ve tried to squeeze it into. But here’s the deal. God keeps busting out of all my little boxes.

I have always known that God loved me. We all know John 3:16 “God so loved the world…“ (and I’m betting you finished the verse in your head before I even started quoting it.) We church kids learned to recite it from childhood in the same way we sang our ABC’s. There was no reason to doubt it. God said it. He doesn’t lie.

But there was a great divide for me between John 3:16 and John 13:23 where John refers to himself as “the disciple who Jesus loved” And maybe I could overlook it, but He does it again in John 19:26 and AGAIN in John 21:7. And I confess until this very minute of looking up the reference, I thought John only said it once. The perfectionist pharisee that I was raised to be always read those words from John and thought, “Well aren’t YOU cocky!”

But I’m just this minute noticing that John doesn’t even use his own name in the whole book? Most of the Gospels and New Testament letters start with the author identifying themselves by name. This wasn’t pride. It was just the way you put a header on a letter. But John doesn’t. He starts straight in with “God in the Beginning” as if starting that way maybe also states “who I am doesn’t matter. You need to see God first. He is and has always been absolutely everything you need to know.”

I’m going to have to go back and check this, but is it possible John never tries to use his own name whenever he refers to himself?

One thing is for sure, John sees his whole identity as a follower (disciple) whose whole reason for breathing is out of gratitude at being loved personally by the Savior of the whole dang world! It is said, the one who is forgiven much loves the most.

John seemed to be a creative, a writer. The kind of person who was in touch with their emotions like artists often are. The way he structured his letter is much like poetry. Here’s a guy who was boiled in oil and had to live in pain thereafter. Here’s a guy who so clearly understood the love of God that they separated him from any people so it wouldn’t rub off on anyone he came into contact with.

John understood love. It oozes out of all his writing. He must have been “dangerously contagious” in that understanding.

Me? Until a few years ago, I knew God loved me in a broad brush but real sense. I knew His voice. Spent lots of time alone with Him. But in the deepest, most closed off part of my heart, I wasn’t sure he liked me. I mean, he HAD to love me. He IS love. (1 John 4:16) (And again, this is John writing… hmmm)

But until I got really real and confessed my doubts, my resentment, my frustration with God for making me like he did - so oversensitive, so easily hurt, so artsy that it made me different, so different - that I was able to repent and let Jesus dethrone me. But He dethroned me WITH. HIS. LOVE. Not with judgement or condemnation like I actually expected.

I was equal parts Mary and Martha. And maybe I still am. But a few years ago as I processed some Martha guilt of being too busy and trying too hard to perform for His acceptance, I was overwhelmed to see words I’d never noticed. John 11:5 “Jesus loved Martha and her sister Mary and Lazarus.”

I had always left Martha scolded by Jesus as He seemed to prefer (love) Mary. But that’s not what Jesus was doing. Correcting yes. Scolding no. Inviting Martha closer, yes. Shoving her away in preference to another? Absolutely not.

When Jesus came - finally - to raise Lazarus from the dead, who was out waiting for him? Martha.

And now in reverse, Mary was not excluded, but invited to Jesus also. He shared the grief of two very different personalities, both of whom He loved.

In a recent study, I saw Martha condemned again saying she went to Jesus that day for information, but Mary came for comfort. Personally, I think that’s not a conclusion we are free to make here. For a personality like Martha, information IS comfort. That’s how God made her. My mom is 99 and is the most tender soul ever. You'll find her in her prayer closet with her Bible on her lap praying and moaning in intercession both first thing in the morning and last thing at night. But information is comfort to my mom. She needs the latest news feed to feel ok.

They both say, “If you had been here” and were both answered individually in a way that Jesus knew they needed in their deepest being. He’s so kind that way.

The point is, when it comes to being loved, John saw that same overwhelming love he received being given to others as well. It is JOHN who tells us how God loved the world so much that He gave His only Son. The Son who John put his whole identity in. It was John who later explained that God IS love - through and through. And it is John who chose to tell the story of this family noting how deeply Jesus loved not only John himself, but others too!

It was this kind of confidence I ached for as I drove to Rock House Center on my turning day a few years ago. I asked the Lord, “What am I missing?” He responded, “You have always believed that there is no sin, no bad action that will make me love a person less. But you need to learn that there is no GOOD action that will make me love you more than I already do.”

I was undone. I have remained undone. I got to my counselor’s office ready for what the session would unfold. When we prayed through my repentance of thinking so little of God’s love - as if He relied on my behavior to make His choices over how He loves - when I fell on my knees sobbing at my inherited but personally embraced pride… that was when I got up laughing. Patty said, “How do you feel?” I said, “I get it! I’m the disciple Jesus loves! I get how John could say that! But until you’re on this side of repentance, it sounds so cocky. It’s not. It’s just so overwhelming that you can’t say anything else. He loves me. He loves me. He loves me.”

Even now, I’m sobbing at the power of it. The POWER that chased away a lifetime of loneliness rooted in my feelings of being separate from Him, even though we talked daily.

I was living under the dining table, happy to eat crumbs and grateful. But he has a chair for me next to him with my name on it. He has a chair for every single person next to him with their name on it. We are each His favorite! I don’t know how He does that, but He’s God, for Pete’s sake. He can do anything. His heart is just that big!

The emphasis is NOT on who is saying “the one Jesus loved”. The emphasis is on WHO loved the one gratefully overwhelmed and saying “He loves me” The emphasis is on Jesus! Our one and only lover of our souls.

It won’t be easy to walk in this radical realm of being “the one Jesus loves.” Poor Lazarus got raised from the dead. The tilting of the axis on what Jesus could do. Proof positive that He has power over death! And immediately the Pharisees try to kill the poor Lazarus. We don’t even know what happened to Lazarus. The walking miracle called Lazarus eventually had to die - again. But I’m pretty sure he died knowing he was “the one Jesus loves.”

Jesus is who He says He is. And He loves me.

Jesus loves me. This I know.

He’s waiting for each of us to look in His eyes and say the same. “I am the one Jesus loves.”

love,