God Wants More Than Our Obedience

The two main characteristics of charity are to do good for one’s beloved and to live in union with him or her. Using images drawn from friendship as well as marriage, Jesus tries to tell us how closely united with us he longs to be. It was to the end of this unity that he became eternally united to us by taking a human nature. The goal of this section is to pray and reflect through the meaning of the Incarnation and the presence of the Holy Spirit—in our lives and in our work defending the truth about the Lord’s humanity and earthly mission.  

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Do we worship a God of power or a God of love? Do we understand love’s need to come to us in humility and not in might?  

God loves us more than we love ourselves. We are not a distraction or a burden to God; he longs to be with us. We are loved, redeemed, one in whom God himself rejoices. 

The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a mighty Savior, who will rejoice over you with gladness, and renew you in his love, who will sing joyfully because of you.  

-Zephaniah 3:17 

To prove this, he has become just like us. For us—for you—a divine person has chosen to live a life of a hungry, tired, mortal working man. To seal this union, the Father also sends his Holy Spirit to live in us: to be the loving principle of our life just as he is in the life of the Holy Trinity.   

We take seriously—and we proclaim and defend as good—the created order as God’s first gift to his people. Beyond that and even more importantly, God has elevated and ennobled the created order by uniting it to his divine nature in the Incarnation. Every embodied being, all of time and space, and everything that fills this cosmos were never the same after.  

This means, practically, that all things now have the potential of bringing us closer to Jesus Christ. That is why, for most people and probably for you, holiness will be realized nowhere other than where you are right now—probably not in the monastery, most likely not in extreme acts of asceticism, but in the very life God has set out for you in this moment. 

God, the great lover, desires not only good for us but intimate union with us. Why? Perhaps because intimacy leads to identity. We tend to become like the people we are around the most. And that is why, as wonderful as the technology that makes seeing and talking and texting to our close companions is, there is no substitute for being with them in person, in the flesh.  

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