It’s that time of year again. Yep. Wedding bells are ringing, florists are overloaded, event venues are getting wealthier, DJ’s and bands are in high demand and credit cards are getting maxed out. But let’s back up to what started all this neurotic frenzy and binge-spending (according to one source, the average wedding in 2025 will cost more than $75,000.00!). What began as a glance, a shiver, an enjoyment of another’s company, gradually grew to a desire to make a lifetime commitment to this other person. Love. It’s been referred to over the years by a great many adjectives and expressed in similes. Despite all the effort, love remains that elusive, many-splendored thing that inspires artists like musicians and poets and filmmakers and sculptors and more. There is a terse definition recorded for us: God is Love. To many, being honest, that statement asks more questions than it answers. It, just like He, remains intangible (can’t be touched, has no physical substance, can’t be seen, has no monetary value).
God’s love is expressed to us through His Spirit. Isn’t that great?! Something intangible belonging to Someone intangible, expressed through another Someone intangible! Just the thing the Western mind accepts with ease! More than that, the strong, bonding provisions of this ‘love’ we’ve recently talked about from John chapter 14 are all, well, intangible, too. Those provisions are: intimacy, union, desire, rejoicing.
The key, then, for our discipleship in the 21st Century is believing faith. We get nowhere stubbornly insisting on growing in Jesus on our own terms, in our own timing, according to our own ‘brilliant’ sense of what is true and right. If you’re reading this, you probably know as well as I, how unfruitful the much vaunted ‘my way’ really is (despite how well he croons it). It’s a train wreck. And painful. Derailing. Inevitably humbling (which, of course, elicits lavish mercy and forgiveness and restoration). But what an excruciating detour!
There’s a Plan. Just one. Perfect in execution. Fully available. Critically important. And urgent. So urgent! (the whole earth is groaning in its waiting for us). Awaiting our full-hearted YES! How then shall we live? PD
