Fire in the Hole

 

“The song of songs, which is Solomon's.

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.

Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers: we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee.”   Song of Solomon’s 1:1-4

 

Someone recently asked me when it was that I had first decided to enter the ministry.  I don’t know that there is an actual instant in time that I can point to when I made any decision.  It just always was.

The closest thing I can relate it to is when I first saw Cindy.

We were having services every evening and twice on Sundays, so literally hundreds of people were passing through that little church, and I paid little attention to any of them other than that they were souls that needed salvation.  No one really stood out to me on a personal basis.  And then I saw her standing in the back of the congregation.

Although I tried desperately to dismiss it, not pay attention to it, and somehow get around it, the course of my life was set.  I was hooked.  And after 30 years of marriage, I am still hooked.

My relationship with God has been exactly the same.  From the point of salvation, the direction of my life was inalterably set.  I was in love.  I had become married to Jesus Christ, and my whole world had changed. 

Solomon understood what that was like.  He wrote about the greatest love affair the world has ever known – the love that God has for His Bride and her love for Him.  It is something that is all-consuming; something through which all the rest of your existence is measured.  You now look at life through a lens that colors every other thing in relationship to your love toward God.

Does anything else matter in your life?  Do you care if you become king of the world, or a janitor sweeping the church floor?  All other things – fame, fortune, and honor – kneel in subjection to your marriage to Him.  God becomes the love of your life.

So often, we see others who do not have that same depth of intensity in their Christianity.  They lay claim to salvation and go through all the motions of a wife keeping house for her husband, but the passion of love has waned and it becomes duty rather than desire.  How sad to see something so beautiful become so dull.

Church, without passion, can become a bland, tasteless porridge that is eaten without zeal.  We eat because we should, and the taste is, uh, okay, but the fireworks of a fiesta is gone.  It’s just, as I call it, “church as usual”. 

I want to be part of a church that is in love with a passion, so that it makes a simple meal a feast that is so exciting that you immediately want to invite everyone you meet to come to this great celebration and meet this wonderful husband to whom you are so much in love with that you can’t contain your excitement.

There is more to church than showing up at a meeting house, just as there is more to a marriage than cleaning the house and making the bed.  Salvation was meant to be the all-consuming passion of your life, so much so that it can only be related to falling headlong in love with the one of your dreams.  Anything short of that is missing the most wonderful thing in life.

“Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair;”