John Ortberg - Life-Changing Love: Moving Gods Love from Your Head to Your Heart

Resources by John Ortberg

An Ordinary Day with Jesus

(curriculum series, with Ruth Haley Barton)

Everybodys Normal Till You Get to Know Them

(book, ebook, audio)

God Is Closer Than You Think

(book, ebook, audio, curriculum with Stephen and Amanda Sorenson)

If You Want to Walk on Water,
Youve Got to Get Out of the Boat

(book, ebook, audio, curriculum with Stephen and Amanda Sorenson)

Know Doubt

(book, ebook, formerly entitled Faith and Doubt)

Life-Changing Love

(book, ebook, audio)

The Life Youve Always Wanted

(book, ebook, audio, curriculum with Stephen and Amanda Sorenson)

Living the God Life

The Me I Want to Be

(book, ebook, audio, curriculum with Scott Rubin)

Old Testament Challenge

(curriculum series, with Kevin and Sherry Harney)

Soul Keeping

(book, ebook, audio, curriculum with Christine M. Anderson)

When the Game Is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box

(book, ebook, audio, curriculum with Stephen and Amanda Sorenson)

Who Is This Man?

(book, ebook, audio, curriculum with Christine M. Anderson)

ZONDERVAN

Life-Changing Love

Formerly Love Beyond Reason

Copyright 1998 by John Ortberg

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, 3900 Sparks Dr. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

ePub Edition April 2015: ISBN 978-0-310-34245-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ortberg, John.

Love beyond reason : moving Gods love from your head to your heart / John Ortberg.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-310-23449-4 (softcover)

1. Love Religious aspects Christianity. 2. God love. 3. God Worship and love. 4. Christian life. I. Title.

BV4639.078 1998

231'.6 dc21

98-26062

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from the New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Interior design: Sherri L. Hoffman

First printing March 2015

To

Ian Pitt-Watson,

David Hubbard,

Lew Smedes, and

Rich Mouw

this book is gratefully dedicated

CONTENTS

I AN PITT-WATSON WAS THE first preacher Id ever heard who was also a poet, an artist. When listening to other preachers I often felt informed, convicted, or inspired. When listening to Ian it was sometimes as if a veil had parted, and I suddenly wasnt sure if I was sitting in a classroom in Pasadena or in first-century Jerusalem. To listen to Ian preach was often to find yourself suddenly, mysteriously, hopelessly immersed in the presence of God to your own surprise most of all. Two of the great gifts of my life were the gifts first of his teaching, then of his friendship.

Maybe his greatest sermon was the story of two kinds of love the love that seeks value in its object, and the love that creates value. Ian never published it, except a few bits to illustrate the craft of preaching. But it provides the central idea for the first chapter, the metaphor of a rag doll. The stories and experiences I tell in the first chapter are my own. Pandy really exists and is doing quite well in San Diego. But the inspiration came from Ian.

I also want to thank several people who read parts or all of this manuscript: Ruth Haley Barton, Gerald Hawthorne, Rich Mouw, Lauri Pederson, Scott Pederson, Lew Smedes, and Jodi Walli. Jack Kuhatschek was again a great help and friend as an editor, and Jim Ruarks diligent efforts added clarity where it was sorely needed.

To my wife, Nancy, for her candor and encouragement, and to Laura, Mallory, and Johnny, I owe the unpayable debt of all those who are loved despite their raggedness.

Love slays what we have been that we may be what we were not.

ST. AUGUSTINE

H ER NAME WAS PANDY. She had lost a good deal of her hair, one of her arms was missing, and, generally speaking, shed had the stuffing knocked out of her. She was my sister Barbies favorite doll.

She hadnt always looked like this. She had been a personally selected Christmas gift by a cherished aunt who had traveled to a great department store in faraway Chicago to find her. Her face and hands were made of some kind of rubber or plastic so that they looked real, but her body was stuffed with rags to feel soft and squeezable, like a real baby. When my aunt looked in the display window at Marshall Fields and found Pandy, she knew she had found something very good.

When Pandy was young and a looker, Barbie loved her. She loved her with a love that was too strong for Pandys own good. When Barbie went to bed at night, Pandy lay next to her. When Barbie had lunch, Pandy ate beside her at the table. When Barbie could get away with it, Pandy took a bath with her. Barbies love for that doll was, from Pandys point of view, pretty nearly a fatal attraction.

By the time I knew Pandy, she was not a particularly attractive doll. In fact, to tell the truth she was a mess. She was no longer a very valuable doll; Im not sure we could have given her away.

But for reasons that no one could ever quite figure out, in the way that kids sometimes do, my sister Barbie loved that little rag doll still. She loved her as strongly in the days of Pandys raggedness as she ever had in her days of great beauty.

Other dolls came and went. Pandy was family. Love Barbie, love her rag doll. It was a package deal.

Once we took a vacation from our home in Rockford, Illinois, to Canada. We had returned almost all the way home when we realized at the Illinois border that Pandy had not come back with us. She had remained behind at the hotel in Canada.

No other option was thinkable. My father turned the car around and we drove from Illinois all the way back to Canada. We were a devoted family. Not a particularly bright family, perhaps, but devoted.

We rushed into the hotel and checked with the desk clerk in the lobby no Pandy. We ran back up to our room no Pandy. We ran downstairs and found the laundry room Pandy was there, wrapped up in the sheets, about to be washed to death.

The measure of my sisters love for that doll was that she would travel all the way to a distant country to save her.

The years passed, and my sister grew up. She outgrew Pandy. She traded her in for a boyfriend named Andy (who, oddly enough, was even less attractive than the doll Pandy).

Pandy had not been much of a bargain for a long while, and by now the only logical thing left to do was to toss her out. But this my mother could not bring herself to do. She held Pandy one last time, wrapped her with exquisite care in some tissue, placed her in a box, and stored her in the attic for twenty years.

When I was growing up I had all kinds of casual playthings and stuffed animals. My mother didnt save any of them. But she saved Pandy. Want to guess why? (When I was younger I thought it was perhaps because my mother loved my bratty little sister more than she loved me.)

The nature of my sisters love is what made Pandy so valuable. Barbie loved that little doll with the kind of love that made the doll precious to anyone who loved Barbie. All those tears and hugs and secrets got mixed in with the rags somehow. If you loved Barbie, you just naturally loved Pandy too.