Are You in-love with Jesus?
Are you in-love with Jesus? I know that this may seem like an odd way to word it, but the answer to this question is at the core of our relationship with Him. It is the essence of our walk with Him. The Bible talks about the Church being the bride and Jesus being the bridegroom (Revelation 19). If this is so, then doesn’t it stand to reason that we, the Church, should be in-love with our bridegroom?
I’ve been faced with this question myself yet again recently: Am I in-love with Jesus? The answer is “yes”, but the truth of it is the intimacy of that relationship has waned. The fire I felt in my soul for Christ now feels like an echo of another time in my life…a time when my passion for Him was palpable.
I used to spend hours talking to Him, thinking about Him, and having conversations about Him. I couldn’t wait for certain times in my day when I knew that I could slip away and just sit with Him and be in His Presence.
I drank of His Spirit and ate of His Word, wanting to know Him and everything about Him. I wanted to be like Him in every way. He was at the center of my every thought and my every breath. Jesus was everything to me. So then, what happened? Honestly? A good old-fashioned dose of distraction…actually, a number of them subtly creeping in back-to-back…a tactic of the enemy, I’m sure, and a failing in my flesh. These distractions begged for and demanded my attention, and I took my eyes off of Him. And as time went on, I gradually “forgot” my first love.
This does not mean that I stopped loving Jesus but just that He wasn’t at the center anymore…He became more of an accessory, an addition to my life, and truthfully, in retrospect, because He wasn’t at the center of my thoughts and desires anymore, I can see now that life then became much harder because of it. I didn’t stop serving God, but my relationship with Him became distant and my daily life more rocky.
In Revelation 2:4-5a, Jesus says to the church at Ephesus: “But I have this [charge] against you, that you have left your first love [you have lost the depth of love that you first had for Me]. So remember the heights from which you have fallen, and repent [change your inner self—your old way of thinking, your sinful behavior—seek God’s will] and do the works you did at first [when you first knew Me]…” (AMP)
Lately, I feel the calling again…a drawing beckoning me to come back to intimacy—not just relationship but intimacy…to come back to my first love…not just going to church, praying “bless them” prayers, reading a daily devotional, scheduling in “God time”, but the kind of intimacy that means I enter the “inner courts” of my relationship with Christ.
Today, let this chorus be your anthem and I will do so, too: “Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in his wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.”
Katie Botello
FBC Aztec Member