When you're in love...

...it's not burdensome

...it's not a chore

...it's not miserable

When you're in love, you're willing to go to great lengths for the one you love. Travel long hours just to be with them. Stay up late just to hear their voice. Spend a small fortune just to see them smile. Jump at every opportunity to be together. Think about them all the time.

Yet, why does my relationship with God feel like a “duty” or a “sacrifice”?

Why am I unwilling to go to great lengths for my Love?

Answer: I don't love God.

Simple as that.

I am lukewarm and mediocre. I've been feeling so unfulfilled and dissatisfied. I haven't been enjoying God or basking in His love. And, I've been trying to pretend and play perfect.

God doesn't desire a picture-perfect pretentious relationship. He knows that I don't love Him the way I should. And He knows that I can't love Him.

Unless He changes me.

So, I laid it on the table; I told Him how I feel.

I told Him that He isn't the most important thing in this life to me – and I'm sorry.

I told Him that I've been lukewarm and chosen trite things over Him time and again – and I'm sorry.

I told Him that I want for Him to change me – I long to genuinely enjoy Him.

I told Him that I want to love Him more than anything on this earth – but I'm not strong enough to love Him and walk with Him on my own, so I need His help.

I told Him that I want to be willing to give up everything for Him – that He is absolutely worth it.

I told Him that I want Him. And even when I don't, I want to want Him.

I told Him that I surrender.

I think that A. W. Tozer put it well in his book Pursuit of God when he wrote,

 “O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need for further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, so that I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul, 'Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away.' Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long.”

That is my honest desire. My constant need. My continual prayer.

One step at a time,

Rachel

To Love, or Not to Love...

That really isn't the question.

Matthew 22:37–39 
Jesus said to him, 'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'

1 John 3:16 
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.

1 John 3:18 
Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.

Clearly, God commands us to love.  First, we are called to love God.  Secondly, we are called to love others.  Practically speaking, this is not carried out through our words alone (although those do have a place), but through our actions of selfless service and in honesty and truthfulness.  

I understand that.  

But I want love to be perfect; selfishly, I want for it to satisfy me. Thus, when I am faced with the blaring fact that love is hard and requires sacrifice and risk, I want to run the opposite direction!  

In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis warns:

Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as “Careful! This might lead you to suffering.”

To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities.…

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

Am I willing to risk in order to love?
Am I willing to be obedient to God and choose to love?

My prayer is that God will strengthen me and give me the grace I need to step out and love.

One step at a time...
Rachel

The Cross

Good Friday. A day to reflect on Christ's redeeming work on the cross -- God's plan for freeing me from the guilt and punishment of my sin. 

The cross contrasts the extremes between a sinner such as me and a holy, awesome God.  At the cross, I have come to discover both the depths of my depravity and the heights of God's amazing love for me. I witness both the terrifying intensity of God's just wrath for sin and His unspeakable mercy and love for me.

In the book When God Weeps, Steven Estes and Joni Eareckson Tada give the following account of Christ's death. As you read, refuse to let the scene be familiar. Let its reality shock you and break your heart.

The face that Moses had begged to see – was forbidden to see – was slapped bloody (Exodus 33:19-20). The thorns that God had sent to curse the earth's rebellion now twisted around His own brow. . .

“On your back with you!” One raises a mallet to sink in the spike. But the soldier's heart must continue pumping as he readies the prisoner's wrist. Someone must sustain the soldier's life minute-by-minute, for no man has this power on his own. Who supplies breath to his lungs? Who gives energy to his cells? Who holds his molecules together? Only by the Son do “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). The victim wills that the soldier live on – he grants the warrior's continued existence. The man swings.

As the man swings, the Son recalls how He and the Father first designed the medial nerve of the human forearm – the sensations it would be capable of. The design proves flawless – the nerves perform exquisitely. “Up you go!” They lift the cross. God is on display in His underwear and can scarcely breathe.

But these pains are a mere warm-up to His other and growing dread. He begins to feel a foreign sensation. Somewhere during this day an unearthly foul odor began to waft, not around His nose, but His heart. He feels dirty. Human wickedness starts to crawl upon His spotless being – the living excrement from our souls. The apple of His Father's eye turns brown with rot.

His Father! He must face His Father like this!

From heaven, the Father now rouses Himself like a lion disturbed, shakes His mane, and roars against the shriveling remnant of a man hanging on a cross. Never has the Son seen the Father look at Him so, never felt even the least of His hot breath. But the roar shakes the unseen world and darkens the visible sky. The Son does not recognize these eyes.

“Son of Man! Why have you behaved so? You have cheated, lusted, stolen, gossiped – murdered, envied, hated, lied. You have cursed, robbed, overspent, overeaten – Fornicated, disobeyed, embezzled, and blasphemed. Oh, the duties you have shirked, the children you have abandoned! Who has ever so ignored the poor, so played the coward, so belittled my Name? Have you ever held your razor tongue? What a self-righteous, pitiful drunk – you, who molest young boys, peddle killer drugs, travel in cliques, and mock your parents. Who gave you the boldness to rig elections, foment revolutions, torture animals, and worship demons? Does the list never end? Splitting families, raping virgins, acting smugly, playing the pimp – buying politicians, practicing exhortation, filming pornography, accepting bribes. You have burned down buildings, perfected terrorist tactics, founded false religions, traded in slaves – relishing each morsel and bragging about it all. I hate, loath these thing in you! Disgust for everything about you consumes me! Can you not feel my wrath?”

Of course, the Son is innocent. He is blamelessness itself. The Father knows this. But the divine pair have an agreement, and the unthinkable must now take place. Jesus will be treated as if personally responsible for every sin ever committed.

The Father watches as His heart's treasure, the mirror-image of Himself, sinks drowning into raw, liquid sin. Jehovah's stored rage against humankind from every century explodes in a single direction.

“Father! Father! Why have You forsaken me?!”

But heaven stops its ears. The Son stares up at the One who cannot, who will not, reach down or reply.

The Trinity had planned it. The Son endured it. The Spirit enabled Him. The Father rejected the Son whom He loved. Jesus, the God-man from Nazareth, perished. The Father accepted His sacrifice for sin and was satisfied. The Rescue was accomplished.

The great Rescue accomplished here was for me. For you. Christ bore the punishment for our sin – the punishment we deserved. Do you feel His passionate and specific love for you? He was condemned and cursed so that you could go free – He was forsaken by God so that you would never be forsaken (Hebrews 13:5).

The cross humbles us. 

The only way God could give us right standing before Him was to transfer our guilt to Jesus and in exchange give Jesus' perfect record to us.

Now we are clean. We are totally forgiven. We are His.

Our past has no claim on us; God has made us new.

Let us never forget it. Never doubt it. Never stop rejoicing in the miracle of God's grace.

One step at a time...

Rachel <><

[[[***Note: This post is a compilation of selected quotes from Chapter 10 of Joshua Harris' book Boy Meets Girl.***]]]

True Love

What does it mean to truly love someone? I keep asking myself that question. Working with Sophia has proved to be quite a challenging blessing. While I want to do everything in my power to see her succeed, I have also been having to re-evaluate what success truly means. Is it in Sophia's best interest to hold her hand through every challenge and never let her experience downfalls? Is that truly loving her? I've been realizing more and more each day what true love entails.

--True love means putting aside my own thoughts and desires to care for someone else.

--True love means staying up late and getting up early, even when I'm exhausted, to pour my time and energy into someone.

--True love means giving everything I have for someone else's benefit, even if I never get anything in return.

--True love means confronting someone when they're in the wrong to help them find the best way, even if they don't always appreciate it.

--True love means distancing myself from someone and letting them find their own way, even when it hurts.

And that's the kind of love that God has been teaching me to have – towards Sophia, my homestay hosts, and others I come into contact with each day. True love is sacrificial; true love is HARD; true love comes only from God.

“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” (1 John 4:7-12).

Please pray that God's love would overflow from my heart and be apparent to everyone I come into contact with.

One step at a time...

Rachel <><