Being God’S Beloved: Forty Days of Reflections on God’S Love

By Adrian D. van Breda

Many of us struggle to come to grips with the idea that God loves us. We may know it and believe it in our heads, but getting that into our hearts and into our lives is not easy. Sometimes what we have learned about God makes it even harder to really know that we are Gods beloved.

Being Gods Beloved will lead you through forty reflections on what it means to be beloved of God, combining deep spirituality, thoughtful Bible study, and warm pastoral care. The reflections lead you on a journey from before creation, through the Old Testament, into the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, and on to the presence of the Holy Spirit. It tells the great love story of God for the Creation over thousands of years. Providing fresh insights into well-known passages, making thoughtful use of word studies, and inviting us to think creatively about God in relation to the world, this book will immerse you in an awareness of Gods love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Oct 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490853352

Adrian D. van Breda

Adrian van Breda has degrees in ministry, systematic theology, and social work. A professor of social work and a licensed Anglican lay preacher in South Africa, Adrian is committed to spreading the gospel of God’s love for all creation. He is married and the father of a teenage son.

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Copyright © 2014 Adrian D. van Breda.

Author photograph by Lynda Smith.

Cover Art by Louise Sparrow.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked (AV) are taken from The Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible (‘the KJV’), the rights in which are vested in the Crown in the United Kingdom, is reproduced here by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press.

Scripture quotations marked (NASB) are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked (NRSV) are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-5334-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-5335-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014917309

WestBow Press rev. date: 10/20/2014

Contents

Acknowledgements

Day 1.   Preface

Week 1.   God’s Character and Initial Engagement with Humanity

Day 2.   Who is Your God?

Day 3.   The Heart of God

Day 4.   In the Beginning

Day 5.   The Call to Work

Day 6.   Abraham’s Blessing

Week 2.   God’s Love Revealed all through the Old Testament

Day 7.   The God who Draws Near

Day 8.   Chesed

Day 9.   Slow to Anger

Day 10.   Persistent Love

Day 11.   The Psalms

Day 12.   Song of Songs

Week 3.   Theological Reflections on God’s Love

Day 13.   God’s Love and God’s Holiness

Day 14.   God’s Love and Human Sin

Day 15.   God’s Love and God’s Wrath

Day 16.   God’s Love and God’s Justice

Day 17.   God’s Love and God’s Standards

Day 18.   God’s Love and God’s Being

Week 4.   The Incarnation and Message of Jesus of Nazareth

Day 19.   The Incarnation

Day 20.   The Kenotic U

Day 21.   The Foot Washing Parable

Day 22.   Lukan Manifesto

Day 23.   Great Commandment

Day 24.   Great Commission

Week 5.   The Ministry and Work of Jesus the Messiah

Day 25.   The Wedding at Cana

Day 26.   Jesus Touched

Day 27.   Jesus is Moved

Day 28.   Jesus Sees You

Day 29.   Jesus and Judgment

Day 30.   Jesus Loved Him

Week 6.   Jesus’ Death and Resurrection

Day 31.   The Cup of Suffering

Day 32.   The Cross and Community

Day 33.   The Cross and Redemption

Day 34.   The Death of God

Day 35.   Divine Forgiveness

Day 36.   The Resurrection

Week 7.   Living in the Spirit of Life and Love

Day 37.   The Spirit of Love

Day 38.   The Spirit of Persistence

Day 39.   The Spirit of Community

Day 40.   The Spirit in Action

Guidelines for Small Group Study

About the Author

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Theological Education by Extension College, South Africa, where I did my Bachelor of Theology, for helping me to perceive and appreciate the greatness of God’s heart, overflowing with love for all of creation.

I am grateful to Michael van Breda and Mike McCoy for the helpful, critical, thoughtful and caring edits to earlier drafts of this manuscript.

I am grateful to the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Irene, South Africa, for permitting me to preach the Gospel these past several years and for participating so actively and engagingly in a pilot of Being God’s Beloved over Lent 2014.

I am grateful to my loving wife and son for standing by me during the hours of writing and prayer and self-doubt and grappling over this book, and for being God’s hands of love in my life.

And I am grateful to God, for being long-suffering and gentle with me, for journeying with me even when I lost sight of him, and for giving so generously of himself for me.

Day 1.   Preface

We all surely know that God loves us. But over the years, listening to many people, and also listening to myself, has taught me that while most of us know that God loves us, many of us don’t really know God’s love. There is an intellectual or cognitive knowing that we have, because we read it in the Bible and we celebrate it particularly at Christmas and Easter. But that truth has often not sunk below our brain into our mouth, our heart, our gut, our hands, and our feet.

Because of my training in clinical social work, I can’t help but see the psychology of this. Many of us have been well-schooled, from childhood, to doubt ourselves. Those messages we have learned as children are deeply engrained in our bones: You never do things properly; you always mess up; why can’t you be more like so and so; if only you…; I’m disappointed in you. Probably in most instances, these kinds of messages were not intended to break us down. Yet they remain embedded in the underlying fabric of our psyche, of our spirit, and interfere with our openness to receiving, knowing, and accepting God’s love.

Many of us have had these messages reinforced in our childhood faith in the church. We have been taught that we are terrible sinners, that God cannot stand to be in the presence of sin, that God hates the sinner, that even the very best that we do is like filthy rags to God, that we always fall short of God’s expectations, that God’s wrath is upon us, that we deserve eternal flames, and so on. There is biblical and theological truth in these messages. But they are lopsided, overemphasizing our inadequacy and reinforcing our psychological vulnerability.

Ultimately, for many of us, we come into adulthood with a nagging and persistent feeling that God cannot love us; that we are unlovable; that we are damaged goods. And when we do mess up in our faith, which we all do, at least on occasion, this nagging feeling crows in triumph. And sometimes that makes it hard to return to God – we are such failures and so useless, God would be better off without us.

It is as if we know that God does not love us more clearly than we know that God does love us. This is not right.

And so, I have been wondering for some time what our lives would be like if we really, really, really believed, really knew, deep in the core of our being, that we were much loved by God. How would we be different if this truth was not just a loosely-held cognitive belief, but also a deeply-held certainty?

I suspect we’d have a much more intimate and consistent relationship with God, because we’d experience and trust in God’s abiding love. We’d be less likely to sin, because we’d be more cautious about grieving God. We’d experience less anxiety, because even (or especially) when times are hard we’d be certain that God is present and concerned. We’d be more generous, because of an abundance of love that enables us to share more love with others. We’d be better witnesses to those around us, because there would be fewer toxins and more joy in our faith.

Being God’s Beloved is intended to lead you through a series of 40 reflections on how much you are loved by God. It has a clear agenda – to convince you of this fact! It will speak to less happy topics, such as sin and wrath, but the center and focus is always on God’s love. This is because I believe, deeply and surely, that love is the center of God’s heart. And if love is at the center of God, then everything else that we talk about in our faith should be in relation to love.

I hope that by the end of this journey, you will feel immersed in God’s love, that God will have filled you up, inside and out, with God’s extravagant, generous, warm, embracing love. That this will not be something you merely know, but something you are, in your inner being. And that you will already have begun to see how naturally that transforms your Christian living, in your daily devotions, your struggle with sin, your participation in God’s mission in the world, and your witness. Because when we truly know that God loves us and when our lives begin to reflect that knowing, then we will Be God’s Beloved.

So, I am delighted that you have decided to start this 40-day devotional with me. It will be a journey that we take together as we immerse ourselves in the truth that we are much loved by God. To structure this devotional, I am following in the footsteps of those who have seen the value of a 40-day period of spiritual reflection. Rick Warren has nicely shown how 40 days is a meaningful spiritual period in the Bible:¹

• "Noah’s life was transformed by 40 days of rain.

• Moses was transformed by 40 days on Mount Sinai.

• The spies were transformed by 40 days in the Promised Land.

• David was transformed by Goliath’s 40-day challenge.

• Elijah was transformed when God gave him 40 days of strength from a single meal.

• The entire city of Nineveh was transformed when God gave the people 40 days to change.

• Jesus was empowered by 40 days in the wilderness.

• The disciples were transformed by 40 days with Jesus after his resurrection."

And so my prayer is that you and I too will be transformed by these 40 days of reflection on Being God’s Beloved.

I have grouped these reflections into seven clusters, each comprising six reflections (except for the last, which is just four reflections, to complete the 40 days):

• Week 1 – God’s character and initial engagement with humanity.

• Week 2 – God’s love as revealed across the Old Testament.

• Week 3 –God’s love in relation to other theological themes, such as sin and wrath.

• Week 4 – The incarnation and message of Jesus of Nazareth.

• Week 5 – The ministry and work of Jesus the Messiah.

• Week 6 – Jesus’ death and resurrection.

• Week 7 – Living in the Spirit of life and love.

This division of the reflections into six-day weeks is so that you can plan to have a day off each week, perhaps on Sunday, to mull over what you have done in the past week. Or perhaps to catch up if you fall behind with the readings. Or if you are doing Being God’s Beloved as part of a midweek fellowship or Bible study group, you may wish to take off that day from the reflections. (Guidelines for small group study are included at the back of this book.) You are, of course, free to structure your reflections as you like, but I encourage you to do no more than one per day, so that you have time to meditate and pray on the reflection, and so that you engage in a prolonged and rhythmic reflection on Being God’s Beloved.

I wish you God’s richest blessings as you journey through these reflections on what it means to Be God’s Beloved. I will be praying for you over this time.

Blessings and joy

Adrian

Week 1.   God’s Character and Initial Engagement with Humanity

During this first week we reflect on who God is. Theology and spirituality both rightly start with God, because theology is our reflection on the meaning of our encounter with God, and spirituality is about our relationship with God and how we live that out in life. Both center on God. Who God is, or who we believe God to be, has vital implications for faith and life, and so it is a good place to start. Once we have clarity about God’s most deeply held values and characteristics, we can make sense of everything else in life in relation to these touchstones.

We will also give attention in this week to God’s earliest engagement with humanity, in the first chapters of Genesis. I have increasingly come to see the value of these opening chapters for setting the scene for divine-human relationships. The patterns of human living and God’s partnership with humanity are established in these chapters, and still have relevance for us today.

Day 2.   Who is Your God?

Where do we start with a book like this? Since our goal is to be God’s beloved, we should start with God, shouldn’t we? This is one of the important things that I realized when I started imagining this book. Initially I thought this would be a book about love – meditations on love. But as I went along, I began to realize that a book about being loved by God is not so much about love, as it is about God. God is the one who does the loving – it is God who loves us, not some abstract notion of love.

So this book is actually about God – our topic is God – the God who loves us. And that, of course, raises the fundamental question of who is God. If God is a God of love, then the idea of God loving us ought not to be that difficult. But if God is a God of something else, then the idea of God loving us can be quite a challenge.

So, here’s the question for you as you read and reflect today. Who is your God?

Some will object to this question. God is God, they will say. There is no ‘your God’. There is only ‘God’. They may fear that we are creating God in our own image. They are right, in one sense. God is who God is – I am who I am (Exodus 3:14). How we see God, who God is to us, does not change God. God is God’s own person. We do not get to dictate or even shape God’s character. And creating a personal image of God for ourselves that bears no relationship to the God who is, is not a smart thing to do.

But we know God primarily in the context of our personal relationship with God. Yes, we can and do learn about God through God’s working in history, particularly through what is revealed in the Bible. And yes, God is who God is, independent of God’s relationship with me or you. But primarily we know God as God relates to us. This is not so peculiar. It is true for all our relationships. We see people through our own eyes – we see them in the context of our relationship with them. All true knowing of people is relational – we know in relationship.

I am a university professor. If you asked my students who I am, they’d probably say I am a strict and demanding person. I have high expectations of them, I’m not easily satisfied, I’m pedantic about spelling and referencing, I demand punctuality and professionalism. (I see myself as also warm, supportive, responsive, and helpful, but I’m not sure these are the qualities most of them would tell you about if you asked, Who is your lecturer?) I’m also a lay preacher at my church. If you asked my parishioners who I am, they’d probably say I am a warm, engaging, patient, listening, and thoughtful person. (At least, that’s what I think they’d say if you asked, Who is your lay preacher?) These sound like two different people, don’t they? Truly, though, I am the same person – lecturer, lay preacher, father, husband, friend, employee, son, writer – Adrian is who Adrian is. But Adrian is experienced as a different person by different people.

People know us, and form a picture of who we are, in the context of their relationship with us. In the same way, we get to know people and form a picture of who they are, in the context of our relationship with them. That is how we know people.

In just the same way, we get to know God and form a picture of who God is in the context of our relationship with God. Our experience of God is who God is to us. And our experience of God, if authentic, points to something in heart of God. God may be different things to different people, because God meets each of us where we are, with our hopes and fears, with our experiences and scars. But we should recognize that there may be more to God than our own experience of God – God is multifaceted, and we may have seen only a few of those facets.

So, as we engage with the question of who is our God, we look to our experience of and relationship with God, because this provides us with the most immediate insights into God. But we should also leave space to learn that God may be more – indeed, that God is more – than what we have experienced. There is an ongoing journey of discovery open to us.

But there is more. It takes two to tango. It is not just that God meets each of us uniquely in the context of a unique relationship. It is also that we, ourselves, are unique, bringing ourselves into the relationship with God. Who we are, what we have experienced in life, what we have learned over the years, influences how we see God. For better or for worse, we do not see God as God truly is. We see God through the eyes of experience.

Our backgrounds shape, and sometimes distort, how we see God. Some of us, for example, were molested or hurt in various ways as children by our fathers or by father figures. This can influence how we see God, particularly when God is presented to us as Father. For some of us, God becomes the good parent who shows us what we ought to have experienced from our fathers. This can be healing and restoring – God saves us from bad fathering. For others, God is tainted by our painful experiences, and it is hard to pray, Our Father in heaven. Every mention of God as father can evoke trauma and fear, damaging and even destroying our relationship with God.

So, this question, Who is your God? speaks not only to God, but also to ourselves. It requires us to look in the mirror and ask, Who am I? We need to open ourselves to the possibility that we may be distorting God because of our experiences or learning. Perhaps our picture of God is not authentic.

But there is still more! How we see God, who God is to us, changes us! We become who we are, in part, by how we see God. Our image of God is very important to our own development as human beings, as social beings, and as beings in relation to God. So this question, Who is your God? is important for yourself.

Let us then come back to this question: Who is your God? Or if you prefer: Who is God to you?

We need to find a place where we can experience God authentically, where we have a relationship with God that is true and genuine, so that who God is to us becomes more closely aligned with who God really is. A good place to do that is in the pages of the Bible. One can also do this in nature, in conditions of poverty, in a community of faith, through adversity – we can and do encounter God authentically in many contexts. But an important place is in the pages of Scripture. This is because in Scripture we encounter God in relation to many other people. And we begin to see God’s self-revelation over many years. As we see God in action, in fellowship with people, we begin to see God.

The problem with the Bible, however, is that God is multifaceted and varied. We can easily pull out passages where God is vengeful, wrathful, violent, dismissive, and hypersensitive. And we could build a picture of God on those texts. Many have done so, and many of us struggle