Day Twenty Three: The Time Has Come To Love
What do you love? It’s an important question for Christians to ponder because whatever it is that you love will form you.
Your loves have the potential to bring great joy when they are realized and great bitterness when they are denied to you. But simply chasing after our loves, whether they are realized or not, without examining them, can destroy you.
They will destroy you because what we love masters us; it drives us to worship. The novelist David Foster Wallace recognized this truth when he famously said in a commencement address, “If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.”
Many of the people in the crowds that surrounded Jesus believed themselves to be committed to him. Our text even says that many of the authorities believed him, but at the end of the day, their fear of the Pharisees outweighed their love of Jesus. As the Puritan theologian William Gurnall wrote, “We fear man so much because we fear God so little.”
John 12:43 says that the root cause of this was a greater love that was forming them: “They loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.” With this in mind, we might ask, how can we form a greater love for God’s glory than man’s?
The philosopher James K.A. Smith says that the answer is worship. “Worship is essentially a counter-formation to those rival liturgies we are often immersed in, cultural practices that covertly capture our loves and longings, miscalibrating them, orienting us to rival versions of the good life. Your love is a kind of automaticity (Smith, You Are What You Love).”
The crowds who were listening to and watching Jesus saw miraculous signs (John 12:37) and even heard a voice from heaven (John 12:28-29), but still, they did not believe in him.
When you were a teenager, perhaps a parent said to you, “Don’t tell me you love me. Show me you love me.” What we see in this text is that neither showing nor telling brought about belief in the hearts of these people; what they needed was to love.
So again, what do you love? If you are someone who struggles with faithfulness or doubt, perhaps your greatest need is not to read a new book or seek more evidence (though it might be a help), perhaps your greatest need is to grow in love.
Consider beginning or ending your day with this prayer today by Eugene Peterson: “O God, when my faith gets overladen with dust, blow it clean with the wind of your Spirit. When my habits of obedience get stiff and rusty, anoint them with the oil of your Spirit. Restore the enthusiasm of my first love for you.”
Your loves have the potential to bring great joy when they are realized and great bitterness when they are denied to you. But simply chasing after our loves, whether they are realized or not, without examining them, can destroy you.
They will destroy you because what we love masters us; it drives us to worship. The novelist David Foster Wallace recognized this truth when he famously said in a commencement address, “If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.”
Many of the people in the crowds that surrounded Jesus believed themselves to be committed to him. Our text even says that many of the authorities believed him, but at the end of the day, their fear of the Pharisees outweighed their love of Jesus. As the Puritan theologian William Gurnall wrote, “We fear man so much because we fear God so little.”
John 12:43 says that the root cause of this was a greater love that was forming them: “They loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.” With this in mind, we might ask, how can we form a greater love for God’s glory than man’s?
The philosopher James K.A. Smith says that the answer is worship. “Worship is essentially a counter-formation to those rival liturgies we are often immersed in, cultural practices that covertly capture our loves and longings, miscalibrating them, orienting us to rival versions of the good life. Your love is a kind of automaticity (Smith, You Are What You Love).”
The crowds who were listening to and watching Jesus saw miraculous signs (John 12:37) and even heard a voice from heaven (John 12:28-29), but still, they did not believe in him.
When you were a teenager, perhaps a parent said to you, “Don’t tell me you love me. Show me you love me.” What we see in this text is that neither showing nor telling brought about belief in the hearts of these people; what they needed was to love.
So again, what do you love? If you are someone who struggles with faithfulness or doubt, perhaps your greatest need is not to read a new book or seek more evidence (though it might be a help), perhaps your greatest need is to grow in love.
Consider beginning or ending your day with this prayer today by Eugene Peterson: “O God, when my faith gets overladen with dust, blow it clean with the wind of your Spirit. When my habits of obedience get stiff and rusty, anoint them with the oil of your Spirit. Restore the enthusiasm of my first love for you.”
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