THE SACRED ROMANCE (Drawing Closer to the Heart of God) Brent Curtis & John Eldredge

Remembering Toward Heaven

The road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it been.

Now far ahead the road has gone,

And must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way.

J.R. R. Tolkien

The sacred Romance calls to us every moment of our lives. It whispers to us on the wind, invites us through the laughter of good friends, reaches out to us through the touch of someone we love. We’ ve heard it in our favorite music, sensed it at the birth of our first child, been drawn to it while watching the simmer of a sunset on the ocean.  It is even present in times of great personal suffering---illness of a child, the loss of a marriage, the death of a friend.  Something calls to us through experiences like these and rouses an inconsolable longing deep within our heart, wakening in us a yearning for intimacy, beauty, and adventure. This longing is the most powerful part of any human personality. It fuels our search for meaning, for wholeness, for a sense of being truly alive.  However we may describe this deep desire, it is the most important thing about us, our heart of hearts, the passion of our life. And the voice that calls to us in this place is none other than the voice of God.

We set out to discover if there is in the wide world out there a reality that corresponds to the world within our heart. Hopefully, we have helped you see in new ways that Chesterton was right: Romance is the deepest thing in life; it is deeper even than reality. Our heart is made for a great drama, because it is a reflection of the author of that story, the grant Heart behind all things. We’ve seen how we lose heart when we lose the eternal Romance, which reminds us that God sought to bring us into his sacred circle from all eternity, and that despite our rejection of him, he pursues us still.  The Arrows and the Haunting both find their place in Act III of that drama, in which we now live. But, this act is drawing to a close. Our lover has come to rescue us in the person of Jesus; he has set our heart free to follow him up and into the celebration that begins the adventures of Act IV.

Where do we go from here? “This life,” wrote Jonathan Edwards, “ought to be spent by us only as a journey towards heaven.” That’s the only story worth living in now. The road goes out before us and our destination awaits.  In the imagery of Hebrews, a race is set before us and we must run for all we’re worth. Our prayers will have been answered if we’ve helped to lift some of the deadweight so that your heart may rise to the call, hear it more clearly, respond with “eager feet.” Our final thoughts echo the advice found in Hebrews 12:2-3:

Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.  Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

This marvelous passage is familiar to many of us, so lets we should become dull to its power due to its familiarity, consider Eugene Peterson’s translation from the message:

Keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this race we’re in. Study how he did it. Because he never lost sight of where he was headed---that exhilarating finish in and with God---he could put up with anything along the way: cross, shame, whatever. And now he’s there, in the place of honour, right alongside God. When you find yourselves flagging in your faith, go over that story again, item by item, that long litany of hostility he plowed through. That will shoot adrenaline into your souls!

Jesus remembered where he was headed, and he wanted to get there with all his heart.  These two themes, memory and desire, will make all the difference in our journey ahead. Without them, we will not run well, if we run at all. We have tried to do honor to the riches of memory and desire in the preceding chapters of this book. Let me (John) explore them more deeply now, as a man goes through his essential belongings one last time before setting out on a long and dangerous quest.

                                       Living from Desire

Jesus ran because he wanted to, not simply because he had to or because the Father told him to. He ran “for the joy set before him”.  To use the familiar phrase, his heart was fully in it.

THE SACRED ROMANCE (Drawing Closer to the Heart of God) Brent Curtis & John Eldredge

GOD THE AGELESS ROMANCER

So long as we imagine it is we who have to look for God, we must often lose heart. But it is the other way about---He is looking for us.           Simon Tugwell

In my sophomore years in high school I (John) fell in love with a beautiful junior named Joy. Our first dates were romantic, exciting, and full of adventure. I gave her my heart. One day several months into the relationship, I was trying in vain to thumb a ride home when I saw her car approaching. My heart leaped with anticipation, but Joy whizzed past in her convertible with another guy at the wheel. Adding insult to injury, she waved gaily as they rushed by. I felt the fool, which is what we often do when we feel betrayed. And I never gave her my heart again.

Everyone has been betrayed by someone, some more profoundly than others. Betrayal is a violation that strikes at the core of our being; to make ourselves vulnerable and entrust our well-being to another, only to be harmed by those on whom our hopes were set, is among the worst pain of human experience.

Sometimes the way God treats us feels like betrayal. We find ourselves in a dangerous world, unable to arrange for the water our thirsty souls so desperately need. Our rope won’t take the bucket to the bottom of the well. We know God has the ability to draw water for us, but oftentimes he won’t.  We feel wronged After all, doesn’t Scriptures say that if we have the power to do someone good, we should do it.  (Prov. 3:27)? So, why doesn’t’ God?

As I spoke with a friend about her painful life, how reckless and unpredictable God seems, she turned and with pleading eyes asked the question we are all asking somewhere deep within: “How can I trust a lover who is so wild?” Indeed, how do we not only trust him, but love him in return? There is only one possible answer: You could love him if you knew his heart was good…………

Does God have a good heart? In the last chapter Brent spoke of God as the Author of the story, which is how most people see him if they see him at all. And, as Hamlet said, there’s the rub.  When we think of God as Author, the Grand Chess Player, the Mind Behind It All, we doubt his heart. As Melville said. “The reason the mass of men fears God and at bottom dislike him is because they rather distrust his heart and fancy him all brain, like a watch.” Do you relate to the author when reading a novel or watching a film? Caught up in the action, do you even think about the author? We identify with the characters in the story precisely because they are in the story. They face life as we do, on the ground, and their struggles win our sympathy because they are our struggles also. We love the hero because he is one of us, and yet somehow rises above the fray to be better and wiser and more loving as we hope one day we might prove to be…………..

In the story that is the Sacred Romance begins not with God alone, the Author at his desk, but God in relationship, intimacy beyond our wildest imagination, heroic intimacy. The Trinity is at the center of the universe; perfect relationship is the heart of all reality. Think of your best moments of love or friendship or creative partnership, the best times, with family or friends around the dinner table, your richest conversations, the acts of simple kindness that sometimes seem like the only things that make life worth living. Like the shimmer of sunlight in a lake, these are reflections of the love that flow among the Trinity.  We long for intimacy because we are made in the image of perfect intimacy. Still, what we don’t have and may never have known is often a more powerful reminder of what ought to be.

“God does not need the Creation in order to have something to love because within himself love happens.”

THE SACRED ROMANCE (Drawing Closer to the Heart of God) Brent Curtis & John Eldredge

THE MESSAGE OF THE ARROWS

I cried when I was born and every day shows why

George Hebert

There are only two things that pierce the human heart, wrote Simone Weil. One is beauty. The other is affliction. And while we wish there were only beauty in the world, each of us has known enough pain to raise serious doubts about the universe we live in. Form very early in life we know another message, warning us that the Romance has an enemy.

The psalmist speaks of this enemy and tells us wee need not fear it:

He [God] will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence.

He will cover you with his feathers,

And under his wings you will find refuge;

His faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.

You will not fear the terror of night,

Nor the arrow that flies by day. (Ps. 91:3-5)

Yet we cannot deny that the Arrows have struck us all, sometimes arriving in a hail of projectiles that blocked out the sun, and other times descending in more subtle flight that only let us know we were wounded years later, when the wound festered and broke.

One of the first Arrows I (Brent) remember came on a fall morning when the green choruses of summer were no longer there to comfort me.  I happened upon my mother standing by the stove one morning before school began, stirring oatmeal. She had been crying and the tears shed in anger or even pain due to a momentary spat with my father. They were not due to some recently delivered message about illness or death in the family.

They were the tears of a frightened girl in her mid-twenties who could fin no meeting place between the life she found herself living as wife and mother and the needs of her own wounded heart that never felt the connection with mother and father so necessary to living with courage and hope. I couldn’t have put that into words back then, but I felt the fear as a palpable enemy that needed to be quickly defeated. If there was an adversary of the heart that even adults did not know how to handle, my world was much less safe than I had thought. I moved quickly to help my mother vanquish this foe in the bst way I know how………………………………….

I remember feeling a sharp pain in my chest that I silenced with cold anger. I thought what a fool I had been all these years to believe in the summer message of this place. Laid out before me in the light of day was obviously the reality that had always been there. It was time I stopped believing a lie. The mysterious Love and Lover that had come to me in my childhood were frauds.

I know now I placed that last Arrow in my heart that day and shoved it cleanly through. I did it to kill the tears of mourning inside that would have insisted that there was something I had lost. Yet the Haunting was still there that day on the bridge. I only understood years later that it was I myself who killed it or tried to. If I had allowed the loss I felt to flow in the waters of my own tears, the haunting call of that long-ago summer would have remained. It was in placing a dam of hardness over the ache I felt inside that I refused to acknowledge the Haunting and even misinterpreted the message of autumn: Something Lost and Again Coming.

At some point we all face the same decision-what will we do with the Arrows we’ve known? Maybe a better way to say it is, what have they tempted us to do?..................................... The result is an approach to life that we often call our personality. If you’ll listen carefully to your life, you may begin to see how it has been shaped by the unique Arrows you’ve been known and the particular convictions you’ve embraced as a result. The arrows also taint and partially direct even our spiritual life.

My own spiritual journey with Christ “began” (I’ve since come to know the beginning was long before I was born) when my first prayer to God since I was a boy escaped from my heart one morning at work………… One morning almost without my bidding, my heart cried out from its own depths, “God, help me, because I am lost”.  And God answered with lavish faithfulness in those “first love” years. I began reading the Bible and it came alive in my hands and heart. A friend I knew from high school came by and told me he had ‘become a Christian.’ He invited me to attend classes with him at Philadelphia College of the Bible, where I drank in everything I was taught with hungry joy and anticipation. At night, Ralph and I would go listen to a speaker, or simply out at a diner talking about God, life, girls, and the abundant living we were sure was ahead. That fall, I went to a retreat in the mountains of Pennsylvania and met a longhaired girl whose heart God had recently courted and won. We sat for hours, talking about our personal longings and fears. We even prayed out loud together, a totally new concept to me.

Becoming a Christian, however, does not necessarily solve the dilemma of the arrows, as I was soon to realize. Mine were still lodged deep and refused to allow some angry wound inside to heal.

I chose those words from this chapter of the book for two reasons: 

1)      As Brent had his first encounter with Our Lord and Saviour which caused him to become TRULY a BORN AGAIN Christian, my heart skipped a beat and all I could say “this is the God that I know and the God who taught me why the church is filled with believers who are not born again because they believe in their beliefs. They became Christians, through leaders and evangelists selling a watered-down gospel. They are the perfect pictures of Matthew 23:15 and Matthew 15:13-14. I am not criticizing or judging rather, I am stating a fact that any Christian living a spiritual life, any Christian walking in spirit, and any Christian who is abiding can see it clearly through the eyes of the spirit of God. It is painful to know what I know, yet being so powerless to make a dent in this mess out there. I found comfort in knowing that even Christ could not and would not do anything about it. Just like He let the rich man go without forcing him or tried to manipulate the situation. Just like the Pharisees, were lost, only very few got to become Christians after Christ ascension to heaven.

The spiritual side of Ephesians 4:15 is about loving enough to tell the truth of God like it is in order to provoke a reaction from those who are not growing and walking with Him. Believe it or not, it is not easy, and it is a lonely path. Not too many out there say yes to God when we are called for this kind of ministry.

2)     Brent said: “Becoming a Christian, however, does not necessarily solve the dilemma of the arrows” That is so true, because receiving salvation in our heart and soul is just the beginning. But, only those who are His, will be able to go forward “INWARDLY” to be transformed by the word of God. You do not go forward because you are better than someone else, you can do it because of God’s promise in Philippians 2:13. You can do it, because you have been TRULY SEALED WITH THE SPIRIT OF GOD as a deposit for what is to come.

 WHAT IS TO COME THEN? Well, even our transformation where heaven comes down into our heart as we abide in Him and drink of the water that gives life. Our transformation as we are no longer compartmentalized, we are healed, made whole and freed from the bondage of our past that shaped us.

THE TRUE GOSPEL IS SO POWERFUL, SO BEAUTIFUL, SO PAINFUL AND SO TASTEFUL AT THE SAME TIME. We don’t have to wait to reach heaven to know the riches of this life God has in store for us.

ARE YOU ABLE TO GO FORWARD INWARDLY? That is your proof and mine that we don’t have a defective salvation. That’s our proof that we belong to Him and we are His heirs.  Anything else is an illusion, man-made salvation, good behavior, wishful thinking and the power of our emotions, of a life lived in the flesh.

Anyway…. I have to force myself to stop here.

BIBLE VERSES QUOTED

Matthew 23:15 "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.”

“Matthew 15:13-14 He replied, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. Leave them; they are blind guides. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”

 

Ephesians 4:15 “Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.”

Philippians 2:13 “for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.”