I’ll meet you halfway. It’s an expression most of us live out every day. We see our children going the extra mile on their chores, so we pitch in to help. An estranged friend tries to make things right, so we let her back into our lives.
Meet-Halfway Love says: You’re trying. You’re making some effort. You really want to change.You’ve at least done something, so I’ll do the rest. You did your ten percent, so I’ll do the other 90.
Meet-halfway Love is kind. It’s generous. It involves compromise. Neither party feels taken advantage of. It’s the sort of love we can wrap our minds around.
The problem is this is NOT the love of Christ.
There is a gloriously deeper love that stretches beyond comprehension. A love so infinitely above Meet-Halfway Love. To understand this love, we have to understand our original selves. We were born worse than sick. Worse than broken. Worse than lost. We were dead.
Ephesians 1:1-2 says, “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked.”
Dead in sin. Flatlined. In the tomb. Worshippers of self. Craving, lusting, slaves of our accuser, the devil.
We couldn’t lift a hand for help.
We couldn’t reason our way out.
We couldn’t tip the scales with good works.
We couldn’t seek for God.
The stench of death perfumed even our good works and left them like filthy rags before a holy God. We offered him nothing. Not a good deed. Not a good intention. Dead.
No Meet-Halfway Love could rescue us. We couldn’t take one step toward Christ on our own or even want to.
But praise be to God, He raises the dead! The love of Christ is an audacious glorious love because it goes to his children, who are dead, and it raises them to life. It is a sacrificial, grace-saturated, Whole-Way Love.
Ephesians 2:4-5 proclaims: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved.”
Before I could respond to him, he loved me. Before I had faith and repentance. Before I took two steps in his direction. When I couldn’t do anything, he loved me and made me alive.
This unmerited, Whole-Way Love is everlasting.
A.W. Tozer said, “No forgotten skeleton can come tumbling out of some hidden closet to abash us and expose our past… He knew us utterly before we knew him and called us to himself in the full knowledge of everything that was against us.”
God knew who he was loving when he loved me. Do you wonder about the love God has for you in Christ Jesus? He loved you dead- a love so wholly effective, that he has made you alive with Christ, if you are alive. Christ’s very life is bound forever with yours. Every one of your sins were placed on Him. He drank your death. His righteousness is forever applied to you. His love makes us alive.
Maybe you’re following a Meet-Halfway religion that will lead you to death. You can’t come halfway to God in your own strength. You can’t come one step. There is no compromise because you bring nothing to the table. You need the covering of Christ. You need the cross. You don’t need to be made into a better you. You don’t need to try harder. You need to be raised from the dead.
If we’ve experienced His love set on us, and we’ve been raised to life, how then can we not also love the dead around us?
Pondering the Whole-Way Love of God through Christ brings incredible peace in these trying days. Remembering what I did to earn God’s love (nothing) reminds me it will never leave me. What does the love of Christ mean to you?
He went the whole way to the cross. He can go the whole way to find you too. Respond to him.