“For I feel a divine jealousy for you, since I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ. But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.” 2 Cor. 11:2–3
Recently, I finished a wonderful book by Octavius Winslow entitled Consider Jesus… a compilation of some of his teaching on… you guessed it… our relationship with Jesus. Anyway, the above text kept coming up in his work. A text that I would not even have considered on this matter of relationship with Christ. But after seeing it so often in the many ways he used it, I began to see (had to hit me over the head with a 2 x 4) how important this text is to our day to day.
So in this text, two things are unmistakably clear. The first thing we see is Paul saying, we belong to Jesus as a washed, dressed, cherished Bride, “I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ.” If this doesn’t “fire us up,” it is like a saying I heard recently, “We don’t have wet firewood, we have dead hearts.”
The second thing is just as clear as the first, Satan hates the “first thing.” He’ll do anything to diminish, divert, and destroy our delight in our bridegroom/husband. (Interestingly, this is the same way he attacks Christian marriages.) He abhors God’s love for us, and fears that God is our “first love” and any outward affection we show to Him causes him to work overtime… because he hates a witnesses that shows God in a positive manner… so like he did with Eve (and Adam, by the way, since he was standing right there) he begins very simply to deceive, “Did God really say?”
Whether through condemnation or persecution, seduction or suffering, busyness or laziness, his strategy is the same—to seek to steal our hearts away from Jesus. Ultimately, he can’t do that to the believer but he can weaken our witness and make life pretty miserable when we don’t love our Lord properly. The devil doesn’t care if we admire and appreciate God, as long as we’re not sold out and committed… (a can’t live without… kind of commitment)… our bridegroom. That is bad for his business… to have a bunch of committed Christians running around.
So let’s pray this morning that the Lord will wake us from our slumber… since there is always something bent on deceiving us in this life. Ask Him also, to make His love for us the most compelling and consuming reality in our lives through the work of His Holy Spirit. Also, ask Him today to restore to us the love that keeps on growing… never staying the same but stronger with each passing day. In the end, nothing else really matters. And lastly, ask Him to give us a revived sense of our connection to Him and to those in our family, for we can’t love Him and we can’t stay undistracted without one another.
One more thing: thank Him today for being the kind of husband, who knew our needs, who clothes us in the wedding-garments of His righteousness, and for loving us right now as much as the Godhead loves itself… a steadfast love that never ends! Soli Deo Gloria!
God Bless y’all today.
In His Grip,
Pastor Mike
