An Utterly Realistic Love



My heart often wanders from
the One I love





Wanderer...

 I am a wanderer.


As I was praying this morning, I began to get frustrated with how quickly my heart wanders from a desire for my God. I am in his presence, but my mind and heart are elsewhere. And then I realize it, and regain my focus. And then, before I know it, I am a-wandering again. And I wonder why this is the case, that my heart is so prone to wander and desire other things. But I think it only points to a deeper issue. Often I find my heart flirting with and longing for other things. My desires are not too strong. They are too weak. As C.S. Lewis aptly quipped,

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

This is the state I find my heart in.

I have been reading through the book of Hosea. I am struck, not with an indignation for Gomer, but with an extremely uncomfortable connection with her. I see me in her. This story is spelled out as a true story that resembles God's relationship with his people. So I easily find myself understanding Gomer more than I would care to admit. When I am honest with myself, I must admit that my heart is exactly like hers. It is an idol factory. As John Calvin is known for saying,

The human heart is a factory of idols…Everyone of us is, from his mother’s womb, expert in inventing idols.

My heart is an idol factory, and I commit spiritual adultery with my idols incessantly - like Gomer with her lovers. YET...God loves me passionately. He knows me completely (cf. Psalm 139:1-4). And as J.I. Packer said in Knowing God,

What matters supremely is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it — the fact that he knows me. I am graven on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind. All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me. I know him because he first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is not a moment when his eye is off me, or his attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when his care falters. This is momentous knowledge. There is unspeakable comfort — the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not enervates — in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good. There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.

His love for me is "utterly realistic." This is amazingly crazy!!! As as we see in the book of Hosea, his love is never half-hearted.

I challenge you to let yourself grasp this today. God knows you completely and realistically. But he loves you passionately. His love for you is never half-hearted.