Inspired by “You Are a Soul”, a sermon by Bill Dogterom at Garden Church (Abundant Life series).
When I walked into AA in 1995 and shared how I felt, I was told, “Only God can fill that hole.” I said, “Who the heck is that?” They told me to pray, so I did. On October 8, 1995, I met someone who could answer my questions and meet me right where I was, and I gave my life to Jesus. My understanding has been growing ever since. “God as we understood Him” started out small for me. I thought love was a feeling God had about me on my good days. Scripture says something much bigger.
God is love, not the other way around. John says it twice (1 John 4:8, 16). Bill drew a distinction that stuck with me: God is love, but love is not God. We tend to get that upside down and make idols out of all kinds of things. If love is the highest thing and God is just one example of it, we end up worshiping our feelings, our relationships, or our own idea of what’s loving. But God, in His essence and in how He expresses who He is, is love. He is the definition, and everything we call love reflects Him.
Spoken into existence. If God is love, then His speaking you into existence was love. Genesis 2:7 says God formed man from the dust and breathed His own breath into him, and the man became a living soul. Dust has nothing to offer. It can’t earn or deserve anything, and God leans in close enough to breathe. The text doesn’t use the word love there, but I can’t read it any other way. Bill said that at your core, you are a particularly lively expression of God’s love. I’m not an accident. I began as a breath of His own life.
One piece of the image. Bill said we’re created to be the image of God, male and female, and that God is neither. It takes all of us, in a collaborative, cooperative, relational community, to image Him. You are not the image of God, but you are part of it. When you fail to be fully yourself, the image is compromised to that degree on the planet. In effect: I need you to be you, so I can be me, so together we can image God.
I’ve sat in a lot of rooms where that was true. Nobody in recovery gets sober as a spare part. Everyone in the room carries a piece of the picture, and when someone goes missing, we all see a little less of Him.
The same love, shared. The love that brought us into existence is the same love we’re meant to share with our brothers and sisters. The moment we slide into competition and comparison, we lose track of the unique love of God. That’s exactly how my sickness works. Comparing is how I start believing I’m either better than you or less than you, and either way I’ve stopped receiving love and stopped giving it.
Chesed. English doesn’t have a word for this. When Miles Coverdale translated the Bible in 1535, he coined “lovingkindness” because nothing else would do, though most of the time even he fell back on “mercy.” Translators have been patching it ever since with kindness, loyalty, steadfast love, and faithfulness. None of them hold all of it. Chesed (H2617) isn’t a mood. Its root likely means to bend or bow, to incline yourself toward someone. It’s a posture: the one with every right to walk away bends down, binds himself with a promise, and stays.
God introduces Himself that way to Moses in Exodus 34:6, “abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” In Hosea 2:19, He betroths His people to Himself forever, in righteousness, in justice, in steadfast love and mercy. Psalm 136 says “His chesed endures forever” twenty-six times, as if the language kept running out of room. Maybe that’s the point. We’ve lost the vocabulary because we’ve lost the expectation. The original writers expected a God who stays.
Ruth. Ruth shows chesed when she tells Naomi, “Where you go, I will go,” with nothing to gain. Boaz calls it chesed (Ruth 3:10) and answers with chesed of his own, redeeming her. God’s staying love moves through people who choose to stay.
Mephibosheth. My favorite picture of chesed is in 2 Samuel 9. David is finally king, and in that world a new king wiped out the old king’s family. Instead, David asks whether anyone is left from Saul’s house to whom he can show “the kindness of God.” One man is: Mephibosheth, crippled in both feet, hiding in a place called Lo-debar, a name that means “no pasture.” He has no claim and nothing to offer. David brings him to the king’s table and sets him there to eat for the rest of his life, for the sake of a covenant David made with Jonathan years earlier. Mephibosheth didn’t earn that seat. Someone else’s promise gave it to him. Writer Lana Christian points out that this is what makes chesed different from being nice: it rests on a covenant. I know what it is to be carried to the table for a reason that wasn’t my doing.
Jesus. John says Jesus came “full of grace and truth,” which echoes the Hebrew pairing of chesed and faithfulness. The father running down the road to the prodigal is chesed in motion. The cross is chesed at its most costly, the covenant kept at God’s own expense. Jesus doesn’t just tell us God is love. He shows us what it costs.
What this means for me. “Who the heck is that?” is where I started. Thirty-one years later, I understand love like never before, and it isn’t because I got better at loving. It’s because I finally understood who was loving me. Staying sober wasn’t my strength. It was chesed, a love that kept showing up when I couldn’t, and it sent a person to meet me where I was and answer my questions without making me pretend I already knew. I’m still learning to receive it, and to give it to people who can’t repay me.
So here is God as I understand Him: the one who spoke me into existence, breathed life into dust, kept His promises through every failure, and set a crippled man at His table. Love isn’t His mood. It’s who He is.
Further reading on chesed: Kurt Struckmeyer, “Some Thoughts on Loving Kindness“; Trinity Lewes, “(C)hesed Loving Kindness“; Kenneth Frank, “Digging Deeper: Lovingkindness“; Lana Christian, “Seeking Kindness; Finding Checed.“