The Great Why and the Total Answer

In the 1960s Norman Grubb wrote a book called The Spontaneous You. The following chapters relate to evangelism as intercession:

"Now, having seen the three stages [infancy, adolescence, and adulthood], and the fact that, first reconciled and then united to God through Christ, we have passed into the third stage, we again ask: What does that mean?

"We are living: God and we are living. Why? Obviously the question to be answered is: Why does God live and therefore we in Him?

"Do we not return to where we began? To the one simple statement--God is love. And love means that other people's needs are more to us than our own. Life then, if it is love, is living other people's lives as our own. We saw that, in the revelation of God as the Three-in-one, in the begetting of His Son, God is reproducing Himself in love. The eternal love-stream is flowing, and the Spirit is the stream in the universe.

"We saw how the creation bears its own witness to the kind of person God is by the fact that it silently, though involuntarily, gives itself for us. The true life of the corn of wheat is not in the cornfield; it lives again in us. So with the rivers, truly flowing in our bodies as in all living things. So with the trees which furnish our homes, and so with the whole earth, filled with its glories and beauties, its treasures and substances, whose destiny is fulfilled in serving us.

"Christ gave Himself for us, and God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. John said that this was the essence of love. It meant and means that love cannot be hurt with what hurts it. It only knows one hurt, and that is the hurt of the hurter. It is not the killed who is hurt, it is the killer whose deed kills himself. So God who is love has only one hurt through history in the fall of the human race. Not the hurts we have inflicted on Him by our hates and sin and rebellion; but the hurts we inflict on ourselves, the eternal destiny of the damned. That has hurt God because He is love, and so hurt Him that He must save us.

"Our need is His concern; so Jesus came to meet our need and take our hurt on Himself. He called Himself bread, meaning that His real living would be by becoming our life. God really lives by living the life of others: Jesus as bread, Jesus as living water, Jesus as the light of the world, Jesus as the door of the sheepfold, Jesus as the good shepherd--all mean the same thing; that the person who is love finds the meaning of life in being identified with others, in meeting their need, in taking their place, in being them.

"Did not Jesus on Calvary so become us that it is said that when He was crucified, we were crucified, buried when He was buried, and risen when He arose? Is He not now our life? 'Christ lives in us', 'Christ who is our life'. 'In all our afflictions he was afflicted'. 'I was an hungered and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger and ye took me in . . . Lord, when saw we thee an hungered and fed thee? Or thirsty and gave thee drink? . . . Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me'. The identification is so complete that He is saying that hungry, thirsty, naked man is He.

"That is how far love goes, and God is love. It goes to the limit. It is a new interpretation of the meaning of life. We humans give our lives, maybe, for those we approve. God's love has no reservations: it is total, unconditional. So Paul said: 'Peradventure for a good man, some would dare to die. But God commendeth his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us . . . when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.' Christ gives His life for those He disapproves; for below their hate and guilt and rebellion, indeed, because of it, He gives Himself without limit to do it. That is a different quality of love, and only God is this kind of love. What is God's joy? What is His pleasure? How does He complete Himself or express Himself (for, as we have said, a self must have self-completion and self-expression)? What is life, this eternal life, in its ultimate meaning?

"The answer is given us in the God who has shown us exactly what He is in Jesus. It is in self-transcendence. God's life is others having life: God is blessed when man is blessed; God sorrows when man sorrows: God (in Christ) moves into man's earthly hell, to get him out of it: Christ lives His life in man, so that man in his turn now, through God in him, begins to live other people's lives. The gaiety of God, the seriousness of God, the joy of God, the sorrows of God, the song, the laughter, the eternal livingness of life, the total meaningfulness of eternal life--here it is.

"And then John quietly writes: 'For as he is, so are we in this world'. Not 'ought to be', or 'could be', but 'are.' Of course we are, this new life is He in us. So we are now the eternal love. Exactly what He is, we are. That is the end of our self-preserving selves! God unlimited is love. Man unlimited is love. If we forget we are only the negative in ourselves, we quickly say, 'Absurd. Impossible. We are self-lovers.' But we are not, for the real we is not we, but He. 'Love your neighbor as being yourself' is the command. If that command comes to us in our independent selves, it is hopeless. But it is to set the absolute inescapable standard, the sine qua non, of a new kind of man--God in a man, and man thus able to do this and doing it. We must do it, we do do it, because we can do it--through Christ.

"Paul did it. 'To the Jew I became as a Jew . . . to them that are without law, as without law . . . I am made all things to all men that by all means I might save some.' 'Now we live if you stand fast in the Lord', he wrote to the converts.

"Moses was so identified with the people of Israel as he led them through the wilderness that when he pleaded with God over their sin with the golden calf, he said, 'If thou wilt forgive their sin--and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.' He was they. What happened to them, must happen to him. He loved them as being himself.

"Stephen did it when bleeding and dying under the stoning of the Jews. His face was 'as it had been the face of an angel', but his heart was with his persecutors, not with himself in his dying agonies, not even with Jesus whom he saw standing at the right hand of God. Their need was where he was--in their hate and blindness, and his last prayer was, 'Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.'

"Without doubt that was what pierced Paul, equally blind but honest, and quick to recognize another quality of love which his religious faith did not give him (for his religion was really only the religion of all natural men, projected self-love, his God), and if Stephen loved like that, Stephen's Christ and God must be like that: and Stephen gave us the apostle Paul."