Day 4: Love with Bethany Allen

Let love find you.

This year, more than any other, I have wrestled with the love of God. I have longed to know it more fully and more deeply. And in that I have struggled to understand how it can be both painful and redemptive, how it can break you open and heal you at the same time.

Love, it turns out, isn't something I understand as clearly or as fully as I thought.

It is one thing to know that you are loved. But it's another thing entirely to live as though it’s true.

Love takes center stage in this season that we call Advent. Advent, as you'll hopefully remember, is not merely a time of remembrance; it's also a time of re-entry. It's a time when we, as the church, return and re-enter the story of God's coming, the moment when God entered into our chaos and redefined our understanding of hope, peace, joy, and love.

Chapter 5 of the book of Micah represents a crescendo moment. Yahweh has been speaking to the people about the redemption he will one day bring. And then he says in verse two, "But you, Bethlehem, Ephrathah, though you were small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be a ruler over Israel, whose origins are from old, from ancient times."

Bethlehem was the place where King David was born. It's here in this first verse that Micah subtly hints at the kind of king he would be: humble, hidden, and emerging from the place you'd least expect. Bethlehem was far from a place of prestige. It was obscure, even insignificant. And yet from this unremarkable town would come the Messiah, the one who would change everything.

Next, Micah shifts to an even more unsettling reality: Israel's present situation. They are abandoned, suffering, and waiting. Here, Micah begins to make a connection between the hope of the coming king and the painful reality that Israel was experiencing. The people would know a time of abandonment, not as a final rejection, but as a part of God's larger plan for restoration.

And we see that highlighted in the next line, "Until the time when she who is in labor bears his son." It's here that we find the convergence of both the pain of Israel's current situation and the hope of new life that would emerge from it.

Then Micah moves from describing this coming Messiah as a son to describing him as a shepherd, which is a striking image, especially for a king. This king — he would not simply rule with power and decree, he would enter into their story and into their struggles.

And this relationship is perfectly captured in the final statement of our text, which is verse 5a. It says, "And he will be our peace." In the biblical sense, peace or shalom goes beyond the absence of conflict. It refers to the ideal state of flourishing, where everything is in right relationship. Our relationship with God, our relationship with one another, and the world around us, its wholeness or completeness, and a restoration of what was broken. The Messiah prophesied about would also create a new way of relationship, a new way to experience and know God and his love for us, a new way to know love fully, completely, like we were always meant to.

Let love find you.

That is easier said than done.

And while that's hard, it is necessary because only by actively and regularly receiving God's love can we truly understand the depth of what he has made available to us.

What does receiving love do for us?

First, receiving love fuels our relationship with God. When we truly receive God's love, it is what keeps our relationship with him from becoming a mere religious exercise. Love, instead, transforms our relationship into something deeply personal and dynamic and real.

Second, receiving God's love also frees us to see ourselves rightly. It radically changes how we viniew our own identity, which changes how we show up the world. Receiving God's love helps me hold rightly to who it is that He has made me to be, and it gives me the gift of living into that dignity and offering it to others as well.

And finally, receiving God's love forms us. When we can receive God's love, we will always, always, always be changed by it. It orders in us what is disordered. His shalom meets our anxiety, and it casts it out. His perfect love pushes out all of the fear that lives in you, your mind, body, and imagination, and it is able to flood you with peace. His love is a force that changes us.

The love of God is a reality we are meant to know and meant to be changed by, day in and day out. We are meant to experience it over and over and over again.

So how can we receive this gift of love?

First, through surrender. To receive love is to surrender to something. It is yielding and letting go of what we cannot control, and yielding to the one who is offering love to us. It is the regular practice of releasing the ways we protect ourselves from pain, or the fear of it, and giving up to God our assumptions about what that will or could be. It is an invitation to be dependent, to set aside our self-reliance and self-sufficiency, and to open ourselves to the possibility of receiving something we cannot create on our own.

Second, through vulnerability. That means letting go of the walls we've carefully built to protect ourselves from being hurt. Love can't be received if we don't allow ourselves to be seen for who we truly are. Not just the parts of us that are polished or presentable, but the messy and broken parts too.

Finally, through trust. To trust is to believe that the other has our best interest at heart, that they will not harm us, but rather meet us where we need them most. In the context of receiving God's love, of letting his love find us, trust means believing that he knows us completely, that he sees our flaws and brokenness, that he still chooses to love us without any reservations.

Receiving God's love is more than a theological idea. It is an active, life-changing invitation to become the people we were always meant to be and to experience the life we were meant to live.

This is the heart of the Christmas story. From the prophets to the gospel writers, from Genesis to Revelation, we hear a constant refrain, a divine invitation.

And this year it sounds like, “let love find you.”

So this Advent, may we open our hearts wide to the love that finds us, that calls us, and changes us. Let love find you and let it make you whole.

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Bethany Allen is an Elder and Associate Pastor at Bridgetown Church in downtown Portland.