“I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me.” Song of Songs 7:10
Lord Jesus, if this Scripture was just a simile, analogy, or metaphor suggesting how you love us, it’d still be wonderful. But, hallelujah, it’s more literally true than we know and believe. You DO love us with this degree of intensity and delight. Your focus and affection ARE set upon us. To affirm these wondrous affirmations isn’t to privatize or sentimentalize the Gospel; it’s to take you seriously—to take you at your Word.
Jesus, take all the over-the-top Biblical statements, descriptors, verses, and images about your love for us and make them experientially, undeniably, unavoidably real to us. We ask this for several reasons. First, it is to your glory that we are alive, “lit up” and astonished by your love (Eph.3:18-19). Secondly, since you have created and redeemed us to know you intimately and to abide in and be transformed by your love—if we don’t take these irrepressible longings to you, we WILL take them somewhere. Help us. Free us. Rescue us, Jesus.
We don’t want to settle for substitutes or counterfeits. And we don’t want to take your good gifts of marriage, parenting, and friendship and put on them the burden of fulfilling our deepest longings for intimacy, connection, and relational wonder. Forgive us for under-believing the Gospel, and over-believing our fears, lust, and loneliness. We’re all tempt-able, vulnerable, and capable of relational insanity.
Jesus, dazzle us afresh with your beauty, goodness, and truth. Only your love is better than life. Only your love is enough. Only your love will never let go of us. Only you are worth our next and last breath—our whole love and the rest of our lives. So Very Amen