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Post thoughts.

“God wants you to fall out of love with him. Because in order to be in love, you must first fall out of love.” . . .

There is a difference between loving someone and being in love with someone.

A marital relationship offers a perfect parallel. Initially, a marital relationship is filled with intoxicating emotive highs, and a relationship with the father is most often no different. It’s initially highly emotive, and it should be. It is only natural for your emotions to get rocked should you begin to truly grip who God is and what he has done for you. It is a love like no other. It is a love beyond all reason. And upon first hearing word of this love, your insides should swell with devotion and your heart should erupt with thankfulness that’s impossible to contain. The kind of thankfulness that has the power to make Kimbo Slice lose all consciousness of self and for a moment become a child, dancing in the street with praise coming off the tip of his tongue like a trigger happy crack addict.

However, in a marriage and likewise with God, those emotional highs soon die down, become less intense and more infrequent. Not because the love isn’t there anymore, but because it’s maturing into something so much more. No longer is it a puppy love, or what I refer to as a crush on God.

This is the necessary falling out of love in order to be in love - a love that is not primarily an emotion, but an act of the will. In a Christian sense, love is primarily a verb. Jesus taught us to love our neighbors, not by responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling, but by being willing to work for their well-being, even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end.

In his book Screwtape Letters (letter VIII), Lewis (writing on an entirely other idea) suggests this process of falling out of love as one God intentionally initiates, and then defines true love as faithfulness. (Read the whole letter and you’ll find yourself extending the thoughts I’ve written into all kinds of other places.)

“He will set them [us] off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish… Our [Satan’s] cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy's [God’s] will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”