Advent: Receiving and Radiating the Love of Christ

Have you ever known something to be true but not felt it or seen any meaningful change come to your life because you know it’s true? Of course, you have, we all have, this paradox is a part of the human experience. I often find myself experiencing this paradox when it comes to the love of God for me in Christ Jesus. I’ve never been more convinced about anything in my life. I mean no one has ever died for me, ya know?  Even still, sometimes feeling the love of God seems unimaginable.

What is it about the love of God that is so hard to receive at times in our lives? For many of us the reasons could be different. We may not feel loved because of sin either committed by us or committed to us. We may be so weighed down by guilt or by shame that we can’t imagine that God could love us in this state of being! Others of us may not feel loved because we’ve never known a love like the love of God. This one resonates with me. God’s love is perfect and no other love is. You may be surrounded by people during this holiday season that love very well, and yet that love is not a perfect love like the love of Christ.

When God came all those years ago birthed into a manger in Bethlehem as God with us, our Emmanuel, with Him came perfect love embodied in human form. As we look to the life of Christ we see what perfect human love looks like. All other love pails in comparison and leaves us longing for more. In many ways, that's the point and the intention. Human love is a picture that points us to the greater reality of love found in Christ and Christ alone. Human love even at its best leaves us longing for more love and more perfect love!

I’ve always found it fascinating that when Paul prays for the Ephesian people recorded in Ephesians 3 he prays that they would know the love of God. Of all things that he could pray for he prayed for them to know the love of Christ. Here is what he says in Ephesians 3:16-19, “that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”  Paul seems to both understand the importance of knowing the love of Christ richly and fully and offers up his reasoning for it, “that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”  Paul knew that the love of Christ wasn’t something that he did, it was who Christ was. Jesus was the embodiment of love. Jesus was love perfected! It’s in knowing Christ that we can know love.

The word “know” that Paul uses in praying for the Ephesian people in verse 19 isn’t just an intellectual knowing of Christ's love but an all-encompassing experience of Christ's love. A knowing with our heads, hearts, and hands. A knowing of Christ's love in our minds, emotion, and our bodies. I wonder if the paradox that we often experience in knowing that God loves us but not feeling the love of God is felt because we engage the love of God only intellectually and practice the love of God very little with our body? I’m not sure where this originated but I’ve heard it in many contexts, but we are not just heads on sticks. We can’t think our way through life alone. We are embodied human beings and Christ is the embodiment of love. Our bodies aren’t just minions under the control of our minds, doing whatever we think it into doing, our bodies are ways of knowing and ways of relating. There is a great book on this topic entitled, “The Body Keeps the Score: Body, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma” by  Besser van der Kolk. 

One of the more common ways that I experience this reality is the way that my body responds to people that have proven themselves to be an unsafe or anxious presence in my life. My body often knows things before my brain does. How have you experienced this? Are you paying attention to the things that your body knows that your mind may not yet know? 

When it comes to the difficulty I often find myself having in receiving the love of Christ I have found it helpful to incorporate some bodily rituals into my contemplating the love of Christ. I’m not going to pretend that I have it all completely figured out but I am learning more and more day by day what Paul was praying for the Ephesians when he prayed that they’d know the love of Christ. Often throughout the day In my regular spiritual discipline rhythms and sporadically as I feel disconnected from the love of God for me in Christ I pause and I imagine what it means to live in the love of God. 

Sometimes I sit in a posture that someone would sit if they were on someone's lap and being held by them. As I do this, I pray with words out loud, “ I receive Your perfect love, Christ” as I breathe out. As I breathe in I imagine Christ sitting on the chair or couch I’m sitting in and He is holding me. This invites my mind and my body into receiving the love of Christ and has been such a rich experience of Christ's love for me. 

The metaphor of floating in the current of God’s perfect love that I picked up in the book by Christian Psychologist David Benner entitled, “The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery” has also been helpful for me. Sometimes I lay on the ground as if I was in an inner tube or lean back in my chair in a very relaxed position and imagine floating in the current of God’s perfect love. As I do I pray with words out loud, “I receive Your perfect love, Christ” as I breathe out. This one is easy for me as I grew up tubing down the Pigeon River near Gatlinburg and still carry on this tradition with my family when we visit the Smoky Mountains. 

What may be a bodily ritual you could incorporate as a way of knowing the perfect love of Christ? What makes you feel most loved, and how could you establish a practice reminding you bodily and mindfully of God’s love for you in Christ Jesus? 

I often find that it’s easiest to radiate Christ’s love when it’s easiest to receive Christ’s love. Putting this into practice may seem a bit easier as we have more bodily opportunities to share the love of Christ with the people around us. Even still I have found this prayer based on 1 Corinthians 13 helpful in paying attention to Christ’s love radiating from my body. It’s a prayer I’ve heard several times while attending retreats with Crosspoint Ministries. The prayer goes like this:

 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love radiating from my body, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love radiating from my body, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love radiating from my body, I gain nothing.

Love radiating from my body is patient and kind; love radiating from my body does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;  it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love radiating from my body bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love radiating from my body never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

So now faith, hope, and love radiating from my body abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love radiating from my body.

My prayer for you as you continue reflecting upon the Incarnation of Christ this Advent is that you know the perfect love of God more deeply, more fully, more bodily than you’ve ever experienced it before. These practices and prayers listed above are not the end but means to the end pointing us to and helping us to mindfully and bodily receive the love of Christ and radiate the love of Christ through our lives and through our bodies. May the Spirit of God be with you as you celebrate the hope, the peace, the joy, and the love that we have in Christ Jesus, God with us! 

Submitted by: Matt Korte