The Love We Were Made For

The summer before Sharon and I were married she was living with her parents in Auburn Hills and I was living with mine in Romeo. That wasn’t a great distance but it felt like it! When we were apart, the twenty or so miles that separated us might as well have been a thousand. Our busy work schedules kept us apart most days of the week and I waited impatiently for our next opportunity to be together. Like anyone in love, I yearned for her presence and, coming up on thirty four years of marriage, I still get impatient for her return when she is away. Her presence had become, and still is, essential to my sense of well-being.

Just as our hearts yearn for our lover, and are thrilled by the realization that they yearn for us too, God has made us so that we will yearn for him. He is the lover of our souls, our very life, and he invites us into a relationship that is so essential to our well-being that we have the same yearning for him that David expressed in Psalm 63: “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you…Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you…My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods…On my bed I remember you, I think of you through the watches of the night. Because you are my help, I sing in the shadow of your wings. My soul clings to you.…”

Many of us fail to discover the joy of being swept up in the love of God. Our theology is correct; we believe Christ died for us and we accept what he did on our behalf, but this does not get us as far as God wants us to go. It is not only what he did for us, but who he is to us that God wants us to know. Christ endured the cross to open the way, closed by our sin, into the very presence of God, but too often we stand in the doorway. The door was opened so that we would come in, not only to eternal life, but to an intimate relationship with the maker and lover of our soul. In fact, as Jesus has taught us, the two are one and the same: “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (Jn. 17:3). It astounds me that the creator of the universe would want that kind of relationship with me. Is there any love that is greater or richer, or more wonderful than this? The group, Tenth Avenue North, sings a song entitled “Control,” which reflects on that truth. The refrain says,

You want me

Somehow You want me

The King of Heaven wants me

So this world has lost its grip on me

My prayer is that each of us will find that to be true of ourselves. That the thrill of knowing we have a God who wants us will beckon us to venture beyond the doorway of redemption into the wonders of knowing God. There we will discover that he is even more than our gracious savior. He is our soul’s desire, our joy, the love we were made for! This world has nothing to offer us that could possibly compare!

Pastor Jon Enright

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