Some of us have hearts that are made by God to love a little extra and to need love a little extra. That’s not wrong. But what is unhealthy is chasing love when we should be chasing God.
Photo by Jad Limcaco
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
John 4:10
Addicted
This week, fresh off of Valentine’s Day, we felt it was timely to take a look at love from God’s perspective. In a world saturated with chocolates and massages and relationships and romance, what is it about love? Why do we long for it?
We can’t really unpack love without first understanding worship.
Our society worships love and romance. We have glorified love to the point of being consumed by it, and if we’re not careful about guarding our hearts and our minds, love can consume all of our headspace, too.
Worship is “the feeling or expression of reverence and adoration for a deity (for God).” By definition, worship is reserved for God, and it becomes misplaced when our expressions of reverence and adoration for [insert thing/person/desire here] move to the position reserved for God in our lives. When this happens we can become sick. Lovesick. Heart sick. Broken.
Sometimes, we can want a thing so much that it’s all we can think about. I’ve been there and you probably have, too. It’s the human condition.
Yet, other times, our desire for that thing can go beyond a healthy point and we can desire something so much that we become obsessed and worship the very thought of it.
Worship, after all, is what we think about, and it is what we give our attention to. In short, we are worshiping anything we desire above and before God himself.
So, here in this very vulnerable space of published written words, I confess that I am a sex and love addict. Let me be clear that I’m not talking about an obsession with sex. This addiction has everything to do with my desire… for love.
Friends, my desire for love runs DEEP. For years, I watched friends around me proceed in life unencumbered by depression and living happy and purpose-filled lives. I always wondered why I struggled to find real joy and real peace. I didn’t understand what was so different about me.
Looking back, year over year, I always chose love over my dreams, and that repeated choice for love led me down paths I never wanted to be on.
This is not to say that love and dreams are incompatible; they are in harmony for so many people. I am simply saying that my desire for love extended to that unhealthy point of obsession. It is what filled my headspace, and it also became the object of my worship.
In fact, my desire for love became so ingrained in my self-concept that I wasn’t even aware it was happening. It took months of mentoring and counseling to learn and to fully understand this addiction that had consumed my life. When I read these words in the Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous handbook, I was pierced:
True surrender of a sex and love addiction meant not only being willing to take ourselves out of the painful situation at hand. It meant, most importantly, being ready to be free of our whole life strategy of obsession with and pursuit of love and sex.
How had I missed this? My whole life strategy had been built around the obsession with and pursuit of love.
When the bomb dropped, I took myself out of the dating game for over a year, and I checked into the library where I raced through books on new topics and found new inspiration. I also took the time to be still with God and to love Him above all- as my first love. I found a single tribe to do life with who were seeking God first, too. And I got baptized.
Thirsty
Here’s the thing friends: God is the only one who can fill the vast emptiness in our hearts. We’re all made with God-shaped holes that groan for eternity while we pass transiently through this life. We search for fulfillment in relationships and love and romance, and we’re hurt when the people we allow to become close to us cannot fill that aching hole.
The fact of the matter is that no human love can fill that aching. Only God’s love can fulfill our deepest desires because we are made with His imprints and we are made to worship Him alone.
When I gained control of my thought life and didn’t focus on finding a man, I found…. myself. And I’m sharing this message because I think it’s so important.
Some of us have hearts that are made by God to love a little extra and to need love a little extra. That’s not wrong. But what is unhealthy is chasing love when we should be chasing God.
The world will tell us to chase love. But just like alcohol for some people, chasing love, for us, is a slippery slide to addiction and we have to disconnect who we are from what we seek. We need to do the hard and exciting work of finding ourselves first and, most importantly, to discover who we are in Christ.
In Christ, we are infinitely and unfailingly loved. While no earthly desire can fulfill our longing, God’s love is sufficient to fill our hearts to overflowing, and if we really understood the depth of His love in any moment, we wouldn’t be so thirsty for love.
I think this is what Jesus means when he meets the woman at the well in John chapter 4.
Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John— although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.
Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.
When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”
Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
Jesus offers us living water. The kind of water we have thirsted for and not yet tasted. The water that quenches our thirst for love and fills us to overflowing.
God, we confess that our hearts are searching for the kind of love you talk about in John 4, but that we look for it in worldly things and we look for other people to complete us when you have already offered a spring of living water. Help us to see and to know your true agape love for us that completes us and fills our God-shaped holes. Quench us with your living water and forgive us for ever getting lost looking for love.
Amen.
We are all made with God shaped holes that long for eternity…
I think this blog covers so many things and the best one yet.
It makes you long and thirst for Jesus’ living water.
Well done.
thanks Pam!!