A Love to be Fit For
When you find the one whom your soul loves, it will not feel like any love you’ve had before. It will be a love you are desperate to be fit for. Every day, your earnest prayer, your heart broken before God, is that you would be equipped to love them rightly.
Your inability to do this will drive you to you knees and break your heart in the best way. You are imperfect, flawed, and will inevitably fail at some point. This love will require a strength, a sustenance, a lifeline outside of yourself.
“She can be a good wife only by being a good woman and she can be a good woman in the true sense only by being a Christian woman. Nowhere save in Christ can she find the wisdom and strength she needs to meet the solemn responsibilities of wifehood. Only in Christ can she find that rich beauty of soul, that gemming and empearling of the character, which shall make her lovely in her husband’s sight when the bloom of youth is gone, when the brilliance has faded out of her eyes and the roses have fled from her cheeks. Only Christ can teach her how to live so as to be blessed and a blessing in her married life.” —J.R. Miller, “Home-Making”
Praise God! It is Christ alone in all things. No man may boast. We are not left to our own strength, our own devices. We do not draw love for others from our own well. We love because He first loved us. O for more grace to walk humbly with our God. He has promised to lead us, to guide us, to make His paths known to us.
The Lord loves us not because we are fit to receive His love, but because He is our merciful savior. We love others not because we are fit to do so on our own but because we are strengthened in our inner being by the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 3:16) to love as Christ loves us.
“For as out of death came forth life, so out of weakness came forth strength. This is strength, not for one thing, but for everything. It is strength for activity or for endurance, for holiness as well as for work. He that would be holy or useful must keep near the cross.” —Horatius Bonar, “God’s Way of Holiness
“We can do nothing of ourselves, but we can do everything by the help of our God…” —Charles Spurgeon
Do you feel your crushing inadequacy to love those in the way you desire to? Look to Christ. It is only in Him that you will find fitness to love, tender compassion and strength to carry on when you fail.
“Nothing in this world is sadder than to compare love’s early dreams, what love meant to be, with the too frequent story of the after-life, what came of the dreams what was the outcome of love’s venture. Why so many sad disappointments? Why do so many bridal wreaths fall into dust? Is there no possibility of making these fair dreams come true, of keeping these flowers lovely and fragrant through all the years? Yes, but only in Christ.” —J.R. Miller, “Home-Making”
Yes, but only in Christ.