Jesus as Wife / Jesus as Life

I have been doing a lot of thinking over the past week & a bit. It's an easy thing to get into doing, when you find yourself cooped up in a hotel room, with nothing but a "policies & procedures" manual to distract you, Quite nice, actually. Thinking is fun; synthesising information is great. Making sense of contradictions is rewarding.

I have discovered lately, that I am largely a contradiction.

In my heart and foundational to my soul is the belief and desire to know God, love Him completely and to serve Him without reservation. On the contrary, I find that in my day to day reality, such statements hardly surface into existence. It is sad. I don't really like this, and since I have identified a contradiction in my beliefs & actions, I am seeking to rectify this disparity.

The very nice thing about having a University education in the dramatic arts is that one learns boatloads about examining motivations and action. These two concepts are irrevocably linked, and by studying one, you can usually uncover the other. Where there exists a conflict between two or more motivations (or desires), character is born, and the ultimate choice of which motivation prevails over the other(s) reveals who a person truly is.


I have been thinking a lot about love and a lot about authority, since the two biggest uses of my time right now are work & God. At work, I am training to become a retail store manager, which entails a whole pile of administration and interpersonal leadership. With God, my desire is to know Him & love Him more--in everything that I do. As a result, I've come up with some interesting discoveries about who I am and how I should be living because of it.

So, I say that I love God. Every good Christian makes that claim. However, how much do I love God, and how important is God (and my love for Him) to me? I made some depressing discoveries, when I compared how I would treat my future wife in comparison with how I treat God.

Consider this: if Jesus were your wife or husband, would you treat Him the same way as you treat Him now?

If someone used your spouse's name as an object of slander, would you let it slide?
If someone made fun of your husband or wife, would you sit back and smile?
If you knew that people hated your spouse, would that cause you to try to hide the fact that you are married to him/her?
Would you be ashamed of your spouse, or would you try to minimise the amount of people who knew that you eagerly desire to spend time with him/her?
Would you knowingly & willingly do something that benefits or pleases you, but that greatly upsets your husband/wife?

or...

Would you parade around the fact that you are madly in love with your spouse to everyone around, regardless of their opinions?
Would you make every effort to introduce your friends & associates to the love of your life?
Would you sing your husband/wife's praises to everybody around?
Would you defend your spouse's honour, regardless of the cost?
Would you choose to forego personal pleasure or gain to honour and uplift your spouse?

It's got me thinking. And I've been thinking about it a lot. I must confess that up until I actually stopped to think about it, I never realised how little I express my love for God. I typically have tried to minimise the amount of people in my daily life who know that I am associated with Christ, so that my daily life would go more smoothely. In the past, on more than one occasion, I have received both physical assault and verbal abuse because of my allegiance to Jesus Christ. Such experiences strongly effected me, and I've since sought make my life easier and less pain-wrought by not announcing to all around that I belong to Christ. As a result, I would let people who abuse His name do so without so much as blinking at such slights. I've graciously smiled when people have made fun of my Lord, so as not to cause a disturbance. I've let people disparage my God and His actions/character freely without so much as even trying to voice the fact that I have been largely offended.

Jesus has been my secret lover, my forbidden joy, my hidden hope. This is not acceptable. Why? Well, the implications here are that my love for God come second to my pesonal comfort, security and safety. I would rather sit easily by as Jesus becomes an object of slander, ridicule and deprecation. No, not good. Unacceptable. If I would consider such reticence to be a glaring atrocity in a marriage relationship, how, then, am I able to rationalise it within my relationship to God? I cannot. I will not. I would never treat my wife with such unsavoury disrespect, and I would rebuke anyone who did; how, then, can I treat Jesus in such a manner? I can not. I will not. No longer. A change is mandated, a stand is called for, and rectification in in order.

My claim and my expressed cental motivation is to love the Lord my God with all my heart, strength, soul and mind. If this is so, then my actions must reflect such motivation. The heirarchy of what drives me to do things must be shaken. Personal comfort and selfish desire be damned. It is Christ's entitlement to rule. I love Him dearly, moreso than any woman I could ever meet, and therefore, He deserves greater respect, love and honour than the She I hope to marry. If I would not sit back and allow my wife to be dishonoured, disrespected and slandered; if I wouldn't blatantly dishonour my own wife for personal gain or satisfaction, how much more then, should I do likewise for Jesus Christ, my first love, the saviour of all I am?

Today, I stand. Never again shall I back down; and if by chance I do, someone please kick me in the head.