Day 30 | What is God's Currency?

 

What is the currency of God?  What medium of exchange does he operate in?  Matthew 25 lays out three compelling stories from the lips of Jesus which talk of valuable commodities; oil, silver, and livestock.  All three were the measures of wealth in the time of Jesus’ presence on the earth.  We all have ways of substituting our own agendas into these stories, but I have to ask when I read these,

“What currency does God deal in?”

 Consider Love.

Think of it.  Five of the ten bridesmaids have a love relationship with the bridegroom.  They may all fall asleep, but when they finally awaken at his return, their love for him is still sustained, still burning, and still desiring him.  They are invited into fellowship with the object of their desire, because they know him, and he knows them!  The others, who simply have an intellectual assent to his love for them, but have never entered into intimate fellowship with him, he simply looks at them and says, “Who are you? I don’t know you.”

In the next parable, two of the three servants have understood the desire of the Master for them, they have entered into a loving intimacy with him and they, in turn, “invest” that love they have received from him into others.  The disarming love from the Master flows through them and produces a great harvest which doubles their respective “investments”.  The other servant simply acknowledges the Master’s love for him, but doesn’t reciprocate.  He bottles up the Master’s love and keeps it contained so nobody else benefits from it.  Then he simply attempts to give it back to the Master upon his return. 

In the third parable in Matthew 25, it distinguishes between sheep, who are notoriously dependent upon their shepherd and live in community with each other, and goats which are obstinate, stubborn creatures who are fiercely independent and difficult to manage.  The shepherd comes and separates the sheep, who know and love the voice of their shepherd, from the goats, who are indifferent to his call.

How do we learn to become “lovers of God”?  How do we learn to receive his love for us and to allow it to change us?  He pleads with us all throughout his word to know him!

 

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.                                                                                                                        Deuteronomy 6.5

 

“Oh, that we might know the Lord!   Let us press on to know him.  He will respond to us as surely as the arrival of dawn or the coming of the rains in early spring.”                                                       Hosea 6.3 

This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies says:  My love for Mount Zion is passionate and strong; I am consumed with passion for Jerusalem!                                                                                   Zechariah 8.2

 

Lord, teach us to deal in the currency of your Love.  Make us rich with it, then grant us generous hearts to risk it all for your glory.  Allow us to delight in your pleasure over us as we learn to be as lavish in our love for you and others as you are with yours for us.  Place in all of us a curiosity which compels to seek you with a new determination to truly know you.

 

-Doug Bishop