I’ve been reading through this book called The Sacred Romance, by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge. Eldredge is the man responsible for Wild at Heart and—with his wife—Captivating, two incredible books on Biblical masculinity and femininity. There’s no possible way for me to summarize the book briefly here. There’s so much spiritual “steak” that it might as well be a butcher’s. I think that more than anything I could say, the authors have a way of cutting straight to the source. They capture the heart of what God wants with us, who God wants to be to us, so vividly. They describe what they’ve called “the Romance” and its greatest adversary: the lies the enemy tells us all our lives, the ones we buy into and often build our lives around.
And, wonderfully, how the heart of the universe is still perfect love.
I found this in the book that I wanted to share with you. It’s an illustration from an existentialist named Soren Kierkegaard about the wild love of God. He wrote a hypothetical story about a king who fell in love with a peasant girl.
He knew that he could take her as his wife by force; he was after all, a supreme ruler. No one dared to resist him. They wouldn’t have a chance. But more than anything, the King loved this girl and wanted her to love him in return. He didn’t want a slave, but a lover, and no amount of power can force love. So he disguised himself as a beggar, renouncing his throne to pursue this girl.
And if I carry this metaphor even further, I have to imagine that there came a time when a great, evil dragon came and stole this girl away. The only way to save her was to reveal his identity as King and offer to take her place.
Because while this was just a girl—a not especially beautiful or intelligent or funny girl at that—he completely undone with love for her. His sacrifice overpaid for her life by 1000.
Did I mention that he did this before marrying her? Before she’d even decided to love him? It was a risky act of pursuit. He showed her what she was worth to him.
What a wild, untamed love this is. And since the King here is Jesus and we—you and I—are the peasant girls in this story, what a wild, untamed love He has for us.
We are so undeserving of it, yet He counts us as more than deserving, more than precious. He could have taken what was His by rights—we are, after all, the creation and not the Creator—and instead, gave us our freedom, another risky move of pursuit. He gave us the freedom to reject His love and decided to try to win us to Him instead.
When I think about that, when I sit and consider it, I am awestruck by the love He has for me. My heart stops in my chest. I have never in my life been loved so completely. What value does it place on my life that I am not only created, but chosen first, but loved completely, but awesomely romanced.
It is infinite.
How could I be content with any lover less wild than this untamed God?
The answer is simple:
I can’t be.
