SAVED ON THE CROSS

You remember the two thieves who died with Jesus on that Good Friday afternoon? They had a number of things in common: they were guilty of the same crime, suffered the same sentence and had exactly the same opportunity of grace, one at His left the other at His right. But one simple detail separates these two men: One asked to be saved from the cross, the other preferred to be saved on it; one wanted to be taken down from the cross, the other wished to be taken up to heaven.

Many Christians of today are pretty much like that thief on the left. We often pray the same way he prayed. We want a Christ without the cross and a Christianity of roses and glory only. We like to lay claim to our position as sons and daughters of God with the reasoning that the Son of God cannot be on the cross. “If you are the Son of God”, we often say to Him, “save yourself and save us”. “If You know You are God enough bring me down from this cross of pain and sickness, misunderstanding and embarrassment, loneliness and lowliness”.

Of course He has the power to bring us down just as He had the power to come down from the cross Himself. But if He decided to hang on there and die, it is because there must be certain situations where coming down from the cross is directly opposed to going up to heaven, where our material comfort and temporal satisfaction is detrimental to our spiritual good. In such cases, it is infinitely more profitable to be saved on and by that cross than to be saved from it.

This truth may sound strange to some people because it supposes that there are instances where suffering and unpleasant situations are more beneficial than their removal. Well, it may be better to look at it this way. Our Lord Jesus saved us by His life and love which incidentally involved suffering and death. And since that day when He died on the cross, suffering, disappointment and even death have gained an additional meaning. By dying on the cross, the Son of God gave a new status to the crosses of men. That which was formerly and purely an instrument of suffering and shame and death, can become in Christ a means of salvation and exaltation.

Now don’t think I am proposing that one must do nothing to alleviate suffering and inconveniences in oneself and in others, or worse still that one should go in search of sufferings. No! What I’m saying is that if there are certain troubles you must bear, then bear them profitably by bearing them in union with Christ just as the Good Thief did. We often speak of offering them up to Christ. It’s all part of carrying our crosses after Him.  

Lord, if my being taken down from this cross will cost me my being taken up to you, I prefer to stay and die on it. Amen.

Have  a good day and God loves you.

TRUE LOVE BY TU FACE – An Ultra-dimensional Remix

It is interesting to realise how much human love reveals and shades light on the unsoundable mystery of God’s love. The other day I was listening to TuFace Idibia’s ‘True Love’… I don’t know how it happened: my ear was hearing one thing and my mind was hearing a different thing. These two parts of me were operating on different frequencies. One was in the realm of rhythm and rhymes, the other was busy trying to decipher spiritual truths. In the meanwhile, there was this constant interaction between human love and divine love, and I will like to share the result with you. But first let’s listen to the rhymes and wordings of the original.

LINE 1: You see true love she used to live here before, but I got messed up and threw her out the door. Now I don’t feel airy like I used to before, all the things we used to say, all the way we used to dey, how we used to play. Now there’s an emptiness inside of my soul, and it seems my unmanliness is start to show. And God knows I cannot take it no more that’s why I am asking you how do I come up with you.

REFRAIN: See, I’m looking for someone that satisfies me, looking for someone that loves me completely, looking for someone that shows me true love. And I’m searching for a kind of possibility, someone that truly loves me for me, someone that come and be my true love...

LINE 2: Now loneliness is the order of my day. Since she’s gone I feel like fading away. Lord, na die I dey, Oh God. See, na she bin dey mek my head bin dey swell; now that she’s gone I feel like jumping in a well. Oh! I cannot take it no more, that why I am asking you how do I come up with you.

True love, True love, True love, where’s my true love? True love, True love, True love, where’s my true love?

The first observation we would like to make is that the “True Love” of the song is unidentified, that is to say, she is not named. We are only told that “she used to live here before”. The song-writer goes ahead to give us a picture of what life is without his True Love (see line 1 and 2). In the refrain, he tries a qualitative description of True Love. Then he concludes by asking an inviting riddle-like question: “where is my true love?” It was as if TuFace was asking: “From the information and description I have given above, can any of you guess who and where my true love is?” The answer we propose to this riddle is, GOD IS OUR TRUE LOVE.

To justify this position, let us go back to our song, to the description of True Love that we have in the refrain. Four main definitions of True Love can be deduced: True love is (a) Someone that satisfies me (b) Someone that loves me completely (c) Someone that shows me true love (d) Someone the truly loves me for me. Now, in the first place, we ask the question: who is that person that really satisfies me? My parents? My girlfriend? My boyfriend? My wife? My best friend? My child? No, nobody can truly satisfy me. My parents may satisfy my material needs by providing me with all the money and provision I need but they may not be able to satisfy my need for independence or for knowledge. My girlfriend may be able to give me all the emotional comfort and physical pleasure I need but would that really satisfy me? No! Experience shows that this kind of satisfaction is momentary and ephemeral. The tensions experienced even in the most rosy relationships attest to the fact that they are not satisfactory. My best friend can be as caring as he or she can be disobliging. So in the final analysis, the truth remains that only God can truly satisfy me. “How do you mean?”, you may ask. Well, the truth that it is only in God that we find true satisfaction is a certitude of faith and only with an attitude of faith can it be fully appreciated and experienced. But it is not an assertion that is unreasonable. If it is true that it is God who made us, who made us the way we are with our insatiable heart, then it follows that He has got the resources to fill in that space of all our longings for love. People normally make budgets according to the size of their revenue. You never see a Coca Cola bottle that is filled to the brim; there is always this empty space between the neck of the bottle and the cork. The producer intentionally leaves the space though he always has enough of the Coke drink to fill it. Of course anyone can fill the space perhaps with water or any other drink whatsoever, but if you want to get the unique and authentic Coca Cola taste, you would have to go to the Coca Cola producer. Human beings are like Coke bottles, we are never full, never satisfied, and never really satisfiable except in and by God, our Creator. Any attempt to satisfy us outside God is only superficial. This is what the venerable and well-informed St Augustine meant when he asserted: Lord, our hearts were made for you and they are restless until they rest in You. God is that Someone that satisfies me.

TuFace also presented True Love as “Someone that loves me completely”. The key word here is ‘completely’. It means perfectly, absolutely, totally, utterly and thoroughly. Who on earth can boast of loving someone completely? Who can boast of being loved completely? As a matter of fact, human love is by its very nature fractioned and rationed. We usually have many objects of our love; nobody loves just one thing or one person. We normally ration out our love to various persons and interests. For example, I love my mother, I love my sister and brothers, I love my dad, I love my friends, I love football, I love philosophy, I love plantain chips, and of course I love myself. You see how I shared out my love to various people, interests and things? I can’t therefore love anyone completely simply because I don’t have a complete love. This is true for every human being. The case is simple: (1) Only someone who is perfect can love perfectly, absolutely and completely, for you can not give what you don’t have. (2) No human being is perfect. (3) Therefore no human being can love completely. If like TuFace you are looking for “someone to love you completely”, I have a suggestion: God. Who is God? God is Love (1John 4:8) God=love. God is love, love is God. He is perfect and complete love, the only One capable of loving completely. He loves each individual uniquely and completely as if that individual soul is the only person in the world. Interestingly, His complete love does not get exhausted because it is eternal and infinite as He Himself is eternal and infinite. God is that Someone that loves me completely.

We go to point 3: Someone that shows me true love. The logic is the same – only someone who has true love can show true love. So I will leave you to reason it out yourselves. First and foremost, you need to find out what true love really means, and then see if that can be applied to any human being in the strict sense of the word. I bet you will discover that though human love can be sincere and true to a certain extent, only God can really show true love. The erudite apostle, Paul tried to express this point when he wrote: “For Christ, while we were still helpless, yet died at the appointed time for the ungodly. Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:6-8). So just sit and count your blessings, beginning from the gift of life and you will immediately realise that God is that Someone that shows me true love.

The fourth definition is as follows: True Love is Someone that truly loves me for me. Here again the stakes are really high; let’s see who can attain it! Can any human being reach it? Well, it has been observed that we human beings usually place conditions and give reasons for loving another. Listen to this everyday (voiced or unvoiced) expressions of love and you will understand what I mean: I love you because you are so beautiful; the reason why I love mom is that she hardly gets angry; (I love you because) you make me feel good about myself; (I love you because) I guess my life will be incomplete without you; (I love you and like staying around you because) you have a very good sense of humour; (I love you because) it feels good to love and to be loved; I love hardworking people like you; I love you because we are brothers; I love you just because of God; I just love children (i.e. I love you just because you’re a child); I love you just the way you are (in other words, I love you because though you are hot tempered, you can control you anger, though you are not so pretty, you are caring, though you can be very annoying, you are so unpretentious and sincere; in short, I love you because you have a mixture of good and bad qualities that is OK with me) and we can go on and on. You see, we always place conditions to our love for others. For this reason, no one can say he truly loves another person solely for that person’s sake. In other to find that Someone that truly loves me for me, we have to look somewhere else, we have to look up, up to heaven. God is that only Someone. He loves without condition; He gives no reason for loving. Remember we said He is love, i.e. it is in His very nature to love, He cannot but love, He cannot be without loving because He is love. So He loves naturally, spontaneously, freely, without distinction or discrimination, without condition or consideration. It is He who “makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” (Matthew 5:45). And even as His murders were hammering nails into His hands and feet, he still loved them with all His heart, and He said this sincere, heart-felt prayer for them: “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.” The conclusion is that God is that Someone who truly loves me for me because He is the only one really capable of loving unconditionally.

Friends! You may now agree with me that the cause of many frustrations and depressions in our today’s world and time is due to the fact that many people do not really know who their True Love is and where to find her. Guys generally think that True Love is found in the ideal lady: beautiful, shapely, sexy, tender, understanding, intelligent. Girls presume that True Love is Mr Right: Tall, brawny, rich, caring, generous, handsome and cool. The result of this kind of extrapolation is often disappointment. I am even persuaded to think that many of the failures in relationship may be God’s way of telling the couples involved that there is a higher and more perfect love than what they experience and to which they should also aspire. The truth is that human love is noble and ennobling, worthy to be sort after and enjoyable when attained. There is hardly anything as beautiful as the feeling of being in love. But, but, I will save you a lot of trouble by telling you that despite its merits, human love is always imperfect, incomplete and compromised by inherent tensions. God is our only true love and human love is true only to the extent that it corresponds and reflects the true love of God.

If you see TuBaba, tell him I have found his True Love, the True Love of the world, our True Love. You might have ‘messed up (by sinning) and threw Her out of the door’ of your lives. And now, you don’t feel peaceful like you used to. Perhaps you are now feeling this emptiness inside of your soul and your insecurity has become so blatant. May be you’re currently experiencing this deep loneliness that no-one or no-thing seems to be able to fill, and you feel like fading away, like jumping in a well. I’ve got a suggestion: Repent, go back to God, your True Love. He will welcome you it a big bear embrace and your life will once more be animated with peace and joy.

I WANT TO SPEAK IN THE TONGUE

According to Mark 16:17, speaking in tongues is one of the signs that are associated with believers. Paul names it in his letter to the Corinthians as one of the gifts of the Holy Sprit. In the fourteenth chapter where he valorises spiritual gifts as regards their relevance to the Christian community, he gives less importance to speaking in tongues saying that it would be much better for one to prophesy than for one to speak in tongues. Above all these, the apostle advises that we should make love our aim and aspiration for “if there are prophesies, they will be done away with; if tongues, they will fall silent” (1 Cor. 13:8) but love will last unto eternity. It is the perfection of all spiritual gift, and “once perfection comes all imperfect things will be done away with” (1Cor 13:9). So I would prefer to speak in the tongue of love than to speak in tongues. And what does it mean to speak in the tongue of love?

To answer this question, we first try to define what we mean by the tongue of love. The tongue of love is the language of God and the language of God is the Word of God and God has only one Word and that is love. The Word of God (which is identical with God – cf. John 1:1) that became flesh in Jesus is nothing but a personification of love. We can actually say that this love is the Spirit of God, His essence, and when He speaks, it is this Holy Spirit of His that communicates. We call the Sacred Scripture the Word of God and rightly so because though written by men, each word was written under the breath of the Holy Spirit. It was God who was speaking and the Holy Spirit inspired the human authors to put down in intelligible words the one Word of God. That is why, I think the Bible is that voluminous. Poor human beings with their limited faculties were trying to put down in human language the one-worded language of God. If God Himself were to write the Bible, the Bible would have been one little sheet with just one word on it – love.

How then does one speak in this tongue of God? We happen to have an example in the Scripture. It is narrated in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. On the day of Pentecost, we are told, after spending 9 days in prayer and expectation in the Upper Room, the apostles received the Holy Spirit. First there was a sudden violent wind that filled the room in which they were. Then there was a big fire which separated into flames and rested on the head of each of them. The fire got into them and became the ‘gift of tongues’. I don’t think they were speaking in tongues in the normal understanding of the expression. There were not speaking intelligible or mysterious words. They were speaking in their everyday language, perhaps Aramaic or Greek. What made the difference was that their words were backed up with the Spirit of God which transformed those words into the tongue of love, for they were saying nothing other than the good news of love, the love of a God who became man and died a shameful death just to save us from sin and death by His raising to life. It is not therefore surprising that everyone there, regardless of region and language was able to understand what they were saying. The language of love is a universal language which everyone understands.

The illustration above was a miracle. It doesn’t happen ordinarily. But there is an ordinary and everyday way of speaking in the tongue of love. The tongue of love is spoken more in act than in words. It consists in loving the other as Jesus loves us. Self-denial is one of the principle character for that is exactly how Jesus showed His love for us – “He emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming human as we are; and being in every way like a human being, He was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross.”(Phil. 2:6-8) “No one can have greater love than to lay down his life for his friends.”(John 15:13). So speaking in the tongue involves a kind of dying to oneself God’s sake, and no one can claim to love the God he does not see if he does not love the brother he sees. (cf. 1 John 4:20). In practical terms, it means being patient with the other, not being jealous or boastful, not being rude, always ready to sacrifice rather than seek one’s advantage or even one’s legitimate rights, not taking offence or storing grievances, never rejoicing in wrong doing, being zealous for the cause of justice and truth, and ready to make allowances, to excuse the other (cf. 1 Cor. 13: 4-7). As I said, this is the language everyone can understand, it is the language that God speaks, it is the noblest of all aspiration and that is why I want to speak in this tongue. I invite you to aspire towards the same perfection for that is the ultimate purpose of our being.