When You Are in Love

I am currently reading through a book by Francis Chan, Crazy Love, and it is beating me up right now (challenging my soul). While this is not a book review, I wanted to share a few brief notes from the beginning of a chapter entitled: When you’re in love.

The opening paragraph is a quoted prayer from A.W. Tozer in, The Pursuit of God, in which I am relating to and also longing for right now in my life journey. Here is the prayer:

” 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 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 They 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.”

We all love something. We love people, we love things, we love ourselves.

When you are in a love relationship, you do what ever you can for that person. You enjoy being with that person. When you are apart from them, it hurts.

The tough but important question in this chapter (and really in the whole book and I haven’t even finished it) is this:
Are you in love like this with God? Are you utterly and desperately in love with Christ?
Do you crave this relationship with God as you crave all genuine love relationships?

The point to note in the prayer above is that when people have really tasted and experienced the love of God, they long and thirst for more. On the other hand, there are those who have been satisfied by this love, yet often have wandered off and lacked a desire to continue in this love.

Why? Maybe, because they have never truly experienced this love. Or they decided to love and cherish other things and people more.

I am realizing that I don’t love God as much as I think I do, as much as I say I do, as much as I should, as much as He is worthy.

When you are in love, it changes the way you think, what you do, and what is important in life.

Longing to love more.

C.Harv