The Sacred Romance Drawing Closer To The Heart Of God

One of the most poisonous of all Satan’s whispers is simply, “Things will never change.” That lie kills expectation, trapping our heart forever in the present. To keep desire alive and flourishing, we must renew our vision for what lies ahead. Things will not always be like this. Jesus has promised to “make all things new.” Eye has not seen, ear has not heard all that God has in store for his lovers, which does not mean “we have no clue so don’t even try to imagine,” but rather, you cannot outdream God. Desire is kept alive by imagination, the antidote to resignation. We will need imagination, which is to say, we will need hope.

The point is the love story. We live in a love story in the midst of war.

The true story of every person in this world is not the story you see, the external story. The true story of each person is the journey of his or her heart.

We describe a person without compassion as “heartless,” and we urge him or her to “have a heart.” Our deepest hurts we call “heartaches.” Jilted lovers are “brokenhearted.” Courageous soldiers are “bravehearted.” The truly evil are “black-hearted” and saints have “hearts of gold.” If we need to speak at the most intimate level, we ask for a “heart-to-heart” talk. “Lighthearted” is how we feel on vacation. And when we love someone as truly as we may, we love “with all our heart.” But when we lose our passion for life, when a deadness sets in which we cannot...

Faith looks back and draws courage; hope looks ahead and keeps desire alive.

We would like to picture goodness as being synonymous with safety.

Our lives are not a random series of events; they tell a Story that has meaning.

The truth of the gospel is intended to free us to love God and others with our whole heart. When we ignore this heart aspect of our faith and try to live out our religion solely as correct doctrine or ethics, our passion is crippled, or perverted, and the divorce of our soul from the heart purposes of God toward us is deepened. The

For above all else, the Christian life is a love affair of the heart.

… always making sure I was present when anything was going on. I feared that if I missed any opportunity, the magic would come while I was not there and I would miss it forever.

Most Christians have lost the life of their heart and with it, their romance with God.

Our hearts are telling us the truth—there really is something missing! The

(Satan's) first goal, of course, is to make sure we never meet the Prince who is Jesus of Nazareth or experience a taste of the Great Ball, But once we have, Satan's second and lifelong purpose with each of us is to make sure we never know who we really are; indeed, to keep us living the life of a cellar maid rather than a princess. Even though we who are believers have tasted the Ball and the love of the Prince in beginning ways, the voices of the stepsisters continue to speak to us in tones varying from whispers to shouts, and like Cinderella, each of us has our own years as a "cellar maid" that the enemy can whisper to us about, causing us to wonder if this isn't who we really are after all.

Who am I really? The answer to that question is found in the answer to another. What is God's heart toward me, or, how do I affect him? If God is the Pursuer, the Ageless Romancer, the Lover, then there has to be a Beloved, one who is the Pursued. This is our role in the story.

Our smaller stories are constructed along the plot lines of control and gratification. Once we begin to live by this false self, Satan and his minions sabotage the story to make sure we are exposed. Then he mocks us for our foolishness and hypocrisy for hiding behind such a facade in the first place. Other times, he simply leaves us to die in costume.

I began to notice that when I was tired or anxious, there were certain sentences I would say in my head that lead me to a very familiar place. The journey to this place would often start with me walking around disturbed, feeling as if there was something deep inside that I needed to put into words but couldn't quite capture. I felt the "something" as an anxiety, a loneliness, and a need for connection with someone. If no connection came, I would start to say things like, "Life really stinks. Why is it always so hard? It's never going to change." If no one noticed that I was struggling and asked me what was wrong, I found my sentences shifting again to a more cynical level, "Who cares? Life really is a joke." Surprisingly, I noticed by the time I was saying these last sentences, I was feeling better. The anxiety had greatly diminished. My "comforter", my abiding place, was cynicism and rebellion. From this abiding place, I would feel free to use some soul - cocaine - a violence video with maybe a little sexual titillation thrown in, perhaps having a little more alcohol with a meal than I might normally drink - things that would allow me to feel better for just a little while. I had always thought of these things as just bad habits. I began to see that they were much more; they were spiritual abiding places that were my comforters and friends in a very spiritual way; literally, other lovers.

In one of the greatest invitations ever offered to man, Christ stood up amid the crowds in Jerusalem and said, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever

All of us are partly living our story line the enemy offers us. Most of us, perhaps, live in not a terribly evil place in the moralistic sense of the word. We simply live where busyness, or apathy, or struggle with circumstances that won't change occupies most of our energy. And the enemy is perfectly happy to leave us in such a place practicing our religion.