Cultivating a Love Language [Video]
Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion. Let this become the most important thing in your life.
– Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child
When we excavate our layers of defenses, we find a longing for more. C. S. Lewis put words to this deep longing in The Weight of Glory:
“In speaking of this desire…I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both…The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
To be fully known and fully loved is perhaps the deepest desire of the human heart. What if so many of the conscious and unconscious choices we make throughout a day are shaped toward its fulfillment, and our gladness or despair the fruit of how it is all playing out?
Is there a different way forward, a path to a reliable Source of being known and being loved? What if our deepest need could be met by the One whose great gladness is to know us and engage with us in every moment of our lives?
Friends, I invite you to pause. To be still, to be seen, and to receive a glimpse into the promise that we are indeed each God’s favorite.
You are.
Enjoy this video from a recent teaching I offered.
For the Kingdom,
