pedo mellon a minno

The Heart of the Bride
Excerpt from Chapter 4, Rekindled Flame by Steve Fry, Multnomah 2002

Worship is not an end in itself. It is meant to take us somewhere. Worship sensitizes us to God's presence. But even then He wants us to know the security of His presence for an even deeper purpose: intimacey with Him. As important as worship is, it is but a pathway to communion with God, the means by which we tether our hearts to His. Our call to worship has nothing to do with giving us an opportunity for some carthartic release- it has everything to do with elating God's heart by expressing our hunger for Him.

Worship is about intimacy with the Father and His Son, Jesus, about nestling in His everlasting arms, about being romanced by the Ultimate Lover, about bringing joy to the One whose heart absorbs the sting of rejection every second of every day.

It is about being His bride...

Cultivating a heart for Jesus like that of a bride for her bridegroom radically shapes our motives- the ministries we launch, the priorities we set. Our lives can be motivated out of fear or anger, and both can masquerade as competitiveness or drivenness. But a bride responds not out of fear or anger, nor even a sense of need, but rather out of love for her bridegroom.

Bridal intimacy is cultivated in worship. For our worship is not prepared liturgy alone, nor is it an incidental exercise designed to set the stage for a preacher's sermon. It is a moment of holy embrace. When we lift our hands, we receive His embrace. When we close our eyes in worship, it's like that moment just before two lovers kiss. When we hear the Scriptures preached or nourish our souls as we meditate on its precepts, it's as if the very seed of His Word impregnates our hearts.

I know it's tough for men to buy into such romantic imagery, especially when it calls us to think of ourselves in feminine terms. But heavenly romance is the polar opposite of the tawdry trash served up by Hollywood. Genuine bridal devotion to Jesus suggests a strength of conviction, a durable commitment to sacrifice, and a steadfast grit in the face of adversity that comes only from the heart's fount of love. It is a "muscular" devotion to the Lord that does not demur when its will is crossed by the Bridegroom's commands and is quick to contend for His glory....

Here [Song of Solomon], it is the Bridegroom's turn to express longing for His beloved. To think that the King of the Universe finds our hearts alluring and the sound of our voices pleasurable! This boundless love of Christ if masterfully captured by C. S. Lewis when he says that His love is "...not the senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes."

Worship is as much an expression of lovesickness as it is the awe of His majesty. And sometimes God allows us to walk through the dark corridors of life where we have no answers and do not sense His care. Sometimes the path to realizing the depth of His passion takes us through the valley of the shadow. Somehow, though we don't always see it during those dark nights of the soul, God does a deep, hidden work in us, bringing us into a kind of intimate knowledge of Himself.

Those times when questions loom large and answers are hollow produce a depth of understanding that can be cultivated no other way.... When we are blind to what we can figure out, when we cannot see logically, we are forced to touch Him, smell Him, and hear Him much more acutely. When we have been stripped of all else, we can know that He is all that satisfies.