5-18-09

Tonight, some dear friends shared with me the story of their coming to America. She was a highly-sought child physician at the most prestigious hospital in the world, Beijing Children's Hospital. He decided he needed to take them to the United States for a superior education in Health Economics. How do I know such excellent people? In response to his leadership, she left a job that all of her med school classmates envied her over, at the most renown hospital in Asia, to accompany her husband to America, to a small city on the Eastern seaboard, at a school not many have heard of, and not even to work. She wont be able to regain her position if they were to return. This woman left the job of her dreams, and a presigious one by anyone's estimate, to follow her husband. I asked him what kind of pressure that laid on him, to guarantee that this was the right decision. He said it was immense. But she did this in love, without demanding an equitable return ("we'll have more wealth this way in the long run"), she loved him and would follow him wherever he went. Pressure should he feel not, but love. And his response to her will be in love, as they journey, as he labors at the new school, all in love. Were it in duty or even a spirit "needing to make it up", resentment and distance and death would have occured. For how could he put a price on her great sacrifice for him? His acting out of duty would and should be a grotesque offense to her, to attach that as the price of her sacrifice, doubly so, as she did it in love and not for repayment. Be this friend of mine YOU and me - all who are in Christ.. may we live out of love for what Jesus Christ did for us, and truly see the abomination we try to live in our hearts when we seek to live as repayment. We live as worship, as people ENABLED to worship, DESIRING to worship by the Holy Spirit, our eyes on Jesus. NOT as compelled to worship. Loving the God Who would send the Lamb to suffer the terrible wrath of God against sin, to reconcile us to Himself. Oh to know this love! Only in the cross! What did Christ do for me? Jesus - through whom the heavens and the earth and ages were made - came in the form of a sinful man and humbled Himself to the point of death? How could I ever rightly respond to that ?? Love. And love only possible by responding to the love of the sacrificial Giver for me. There is no other basis in the universe for such affection for anything.

As far as my friends, we are also the wife. Christ is leading us away from all we ever wanted in life, had invested in, and were capable of. He may be leading us to what seems so much less glorious, and we follow because we love Him.

Father thank You for this analogy, for Christ and the church and how marriage is a picture of it. Father oh for grace to love Jesus. Father oh for grace to behold His glory in the Gospel, more now than when I first beheld it in some way. I love you, please help me to love you. Oh for a mortal heart to love the immortal God.