Lavished

Brennan Manning died this weekend. I paged through his most well-known work, The Ragamuffin Gospel, late Saturday night and was reminded how hugely influential this man was on my faith early on.

The book shows marks of wear. My copy is stained, water-damaged, and marked up on every page. Mostly because I carried it around in my backpack for the better part of a year in college. Not because it took me a long time to read it (I devoured it), but because I wanted to always have the book on hand to share, encourage, and remind myself of the message.

Brennan was my earliest teacher of the nature of the Christian life. Namely, that we grow by realizing God's greatness and holiness is far greater than we ever dared imagine and that our sinfulness and depravity is far worse than we ever feared, but that His grace and love has made the way. And further, that this way is not just a door we walk through or a prayer we pray, but it is the way and the path we are called to pursue with our entire life.

Brennan imagined a situation where we might flippantly come before Jesus, thinking we know the answers, and ask him to "Lay a new word on me. I know the old one.":

And God answers, That's what you don't know. You don't know how much I love you. The moment you think you understand is the moment you do not understand. I am God, not man. You tell others about Me--that I am a loving God. Your words are glib. My words are written in the blood of My only Son. The next time you preach about My love with such obnoxious familiarity, I may come and blow your whole prayer meeting apart. When you come at Me with studied professionalism, I will expose you as a rank amateur. When you try to convince others that you understand what you are talking about, I will tell you to shut up and fall flat on your face. You claim you know I love you.
Did you know that every time you tell Me you love Me, I say thank you?
When your son comes to you asking, "Do you like Susan more 'cause she skates better and she's a girl?" are you grieved and saddened over your child's lack of trust? Do you know that you do the same thing to Me?
Do you claim to know what we shared when Jesus withdrew to a deserted place or spent the night on a hillside alone with Me? Do you know from where the inspiration to wash the feet of the Twelve came? Do you understand that, motivated by love alone, your God became your slave in the Upper Room?
Were you grieved by the divine command to Abraham that he slay his only begotten Isaac on Mount Moriah? Were you relieved when the angel intervened, Abraham's hand was stayed, and the sacrifice was not carried out? Have you forgotten that on Good Friday no angel intervened? That sacrifice was carried out, and it was My heart that was broken.
Are you aware that I had to raise Jesus from the dead on Easter morning because My love is everlasting? Are you serenely confident that I will raise you, too, My adopted child?

Ephesians 1:7-8
In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding.

1 John 3:1
How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!

Praise God that our brother Brennan is right now in the very presence of Christ, fully experiencing his adoption, security, and belonging to his Father in a way that far surpassed any experienced of this lavished love he knew here. Praise God for a life redeemed. I pray that we would press in and experience ever-deeper this God who is unspeakably, head-over-heels in love with these created beings who can't do anything to fix our estate.