The Big Let Down

I heard the most amazing statement today. At first, I thought I heard it incorrectly. Maybe, I thought I heard this, but surely not. It was too profound and yet it stopped me cold with its simplicity. As I was cruising through my friends’ updates on Facebook, I noticed a video post. The word my friend posted below it merely said, “Speechless.” Needless to say, I was intrigued. I clicked on the link that led to a video called, God’s Chisel. It was a very simple video, only two guys, one portraying God and one portraying, well, it could have been any one of us. The man cried out to God to make him more like Him. Then he confessed that he was afraid he couldn’t live up to being like God. He was terrified of letting God down. God said plainly, “You never held me up.” Wow! That’s when it hit me: when we cry out to God for forgiveness of our sins, we beg Him to forgive us for letting Him down. We attach human qualities and attributes to the love of God, as if He judges by the same pitiful standards that we do. We believe that by our sin, we’ve caused God to think less of us, feel less for us, or love us less. Impossible! There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can cause God to be ‘let down’ by us. The notion of being let down comes from the idea of holding someone up. We have never been the ones to hold God up and, therefore, cannot let Him down. We hold Christians, preachers, teachers, police officers, parents, children, friends and even some politicians to a higher standard on earth. We believe that these people are not allowed the luxury of failing and if they do, they cause us to doubt their passions and motives from the very beginning and disappoint us by their godlessness. We conceitedly and callously think they owe us something because they failed us. We forced them to a place that they were not ready or even willing to go and then we berate them for failing us. How completely backwards! Have we ever stopped to think that it is in those very moments of failure that it is our responsibility to look past the sin, the failure, the disappointment and reach out with love and tenderness to help restore our fallen to their proper place? No man, woman or child can survive forever under the scrutiny of living on a pedestal. We assign that position to them out of our own fears of failure. We believe that if we look up to them, they can show us the way. They can guide us better because they are higher above us and can see further down the path. This is a precarious position in which to live. You see, the higher the pedestal, the longer the fall from it. With so much heavy inspection, the pedestal will come crashing down, idol and all. When we assign someone–anyone—a place of such honor, we’ve replaced God with that person. We’ve committed idol worship. We’ve broken the First Commandment. No one, not our spouses, our children, our jobs, our churches, our ministries, our own bodies or our pursuits of happiness can replace God and there still be true worship for the Almighty God in our hearts, no matter how many songs we sing, hands we raise or Bible studies we attend. God’s love for us is unconditional. There was nothing that we did to earn it and consequently, there is nothing we can do to lose it. He loves me. He loves you. He loves each one of us right now as much as He ever has or ever will. His love has no beginning and no ending. It has no conditions. His love is perfect and complete. When we fall into the habit of trying to assign human characteristics of love to God, we don’t let Him down, we let ourselves down. We realize how little we know of true love, giving or receiving it. We believe it is a feeling that can change as easily as the direction of the wind. We forget that love is a verb. It is an action. It is a decision. It is a commitment. If we would learn to see the Cross as the definition of love, instead of what Hollywood and Hallmark would have us believe, we would begin to understand how to truly love. God decided to love us, committed to save us from our sin and acted by His death as our substitute so that we wouldn’t have to face death and condemnation. God is love. He is the living, breathing, acting definition of love. He isn’t waiting with a down turned frown and words of reprimand for us to fail, He’s waiting with open arms of love, waiting for us to get over ourselves and come back to where we belong, in His loving embrace, where He holds us up and will not and cannot ever let us down.