Rooted & Grounded

It changes your life when you believe that you are loved.

My friend Angie and I were talking about this the other day, because she had heard a sermon about Simon Peter and John.  We were talking about how these were two disciples in the Bible that are obsessed with love.

Simon Peter is the disciple whose life goal is to prove how much he loves God.  When Jesus first meets him, he renames him Rock (I can’t help but wonder if Jesus was trying to be ironic by naming the most flighty, impetuous disciple after an inanimate object).

Peter tells Jesus he will defend him to the death, and Jesus has to say, “Get behind me, Satan!”

Peter tells Jesus, “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will!” and Jesus has to tell Peter, “Truly I say to you that this very night, before a cock crows, you shall deny Me three times.”

Peter jumps in the water to swim after Jesus, cuts off the ear of someone trying to take Jesus off to trial, walks on water and then falls in, denies Jesus, loves Jesus, dies for Jesus.  Simon spends his entire life yelling at Jesus “I LOVE YOU!”

John, however, simply calls himself  “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” or, “the Beloved Disciple.” He was not obsessed with how much he loved God,  but how much God loved him.

Jesus did not love John more than Peter.  Or more than any of the disciples, for that matter.  John simply found his identity in the term “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”  I believe that the more we know Jesus, the more we see that every time we fall into the sea or speak the words of Satan or impetuously lose our temper or are ashamed of our faith in a critical moment, He loves us.  He loves us.  We are not rooted and grounded in our own piety.  We are rooted and grounded in the love of Christ.

This is why I call myself, and you, Beloved One.  It is a step of faith, a step towards living as though this were true:

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:28-29