What would happen if you took all the time you spent daydreaming about a romantic relationship, all the affection you wish you could poor out there, longing, waiting, desire, and expectation for that and instead directed it toward your relationship with Jesus? Would your life change? These are the questions I have to ask myself. Because if I haven’t tried loving Him with my whole heart, not really, then I have no grounds on which to complain about my relationship with Christ feeling like not enough.
When David says in the Psalms, “For my soul longs, and even faints for you,” have you ever pursued that deep longing for Christ like you have for earthly relationships? Do you give yourself over to Him in all your thoughts and actions as often as you would when you have a crush on someone? Do you take the kind of risks for Him that you would take for somebody that you were in love with? Because if what He says is true, then what He promises us is much greater than earthly romantic relationships. In fact, I really believe those relationships cannot be satisfying apart from knowing that far superior love of Christ.
And let’s be clear here,
God’s not saying, ‘be okay with singleness so you can have a husband or wife.’ God is saying, ‘be okay with singleness so you can be okay with singleness.’ God does not just want to get me through singleness so I can get to the thing that is better in store for me. He is my very best.
And if you are single (or ever have been), have you ever protested in your prayers, “God, I’ve been so good and so faithful! WHY am I not in a relationship?!”
First of all, let’s be real. God doesn’t owe us anything. A real Christian doesn’t obey God to leverage Him. Second of all, when I consider all of the blessings I already have in Christ, to be upset over what I do not have is outright ludicrous. If we are trying to get into a relationship because we think that THAT is what God has to offer us, we are sorely mistaken.
And here’s why: Because Jesus IS the reward.
And here’s another thing that’s good to come to terms with. We are not going to be married in heaven. If that idea makes you upset or uncomfortable, you might want to reconsider your idea of what your relationship with Christ has to offer. In the end, if He is all you have, would He be enough?
And if we take a good look at what the relationship between husband and wife is meant for in the Bible, we find that they are a picture for us to fathom what the relationship with Christ is like with His Church. That’s us—collectively. And when God said, “it is not good for man to be alone” He created not just this one kind of relationship, but every possible type of human relationship. We just have to keep in mind that these loves are not the real thing—these relationships are not the ULTIMATE. I think this is why Paul sticks in these verses smack in the middle of while he is talking about relationships in Corinthians 7:
“But this I say, brethren, the time has been shortened, so that from now on those who have wives should be as though they had none; and those who weep, as though they did not weep; and those who rejoice, as though they did not rejoice; and those who buy, as though they did not possess; and those who use the world, as though they did not make full use of it; for the form of this world is passing away.”
Okay, I’m going to take back what I said about not being married in heaven. Because as the bride of Christ, we will all collectively be married to Him. That sounds weird, and it is, I don’t get it. I’m not even going to pretend that I fully understand that.
But still, even if we can grasp that concept a little, it creates a really uncomfortable tension between the mindset locked on the eternal and thinking about the needs that we have now. But I recently had a friend explain it to me as kind of being in a long-distance relationship. We have letters we can hold on to, a lot of examples we can look to of His love, and a future we can look forward to when we will be with Him forever, but for now it’s really hard and downright painful at times.
And I’m going to close with another quote from C.S. Lewis because I think he wrote out this concept so much more beautifully than I can try to convey it. This is from the book, “The Four Loves,”
“The dream of finding our end, the thing we were made for, in a Heaven of purely human love could not be true unless our whole Faith were wrong. We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, loving-kindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love. It is not that we have loved them too much, but that we did not quite understand what we were loving. It is not that we shall be asked to turn from them, so dearly familiar, to a Stranger. When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of love. All that was true love in them was, even on earth, far more His than ours, and ours only because His. In Heaven there will be no anguish and no duty of turning away from our earthly Beloveds. First, because we shall have turned already; from the portraits to the Original, from the rivulets to the Fountain, from the creatures He made lovable to Love Himself. But secondly, because we shall find them all in Him. By loving Him more than them we shall love them more than we now do.
But all of that is far away in “the land of the Trinity,” not here in exile, in the weeping valley. Down here it is all loss and renunciation. We are then compelled to try to believe, what we cannot yet feel, that God is our true Beloved.”
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