A Valentine's Day Prayer

Dear Lord Jesus, 

it’s Valentine’s Day—the day in our culture in which red hearts, overpriced cards, dark
chocolates, and cut flowers abound. For some, it’s a day of incredible kindness, sweetness, and gratitude. For others, it’s a day in which brokenness, loneliness, and emptiness are magnified. For all of us, it should be a day in which our deepest longings for intimacy and connection find their way home to you — the quintessential lover.

We each have our own stories of love gained and lost, of love being alive, and love being tested, strained and fractured. We’ve experienced seasons of incredible joy, connection and intimacy in our marriages —moments when we’ve wondered how heaven itself could be any richer, grander or fuller.

But we’ve also discovered time and again, that no one human being (or any number of them), no human romance story, no torrid love affair can possibly fill the vacuum in our souls that’s uniquely Jesus shaped. Even the best marriage is made of two broken people, two redeemed sinners who will ultimately not be enough for the other.

Lord Jesus, “grace” us with a deeper, richer current experience of belonging to you. You are the ultimate Spouse — the One we’ve always longed for. I believe this theologically, and I want to “know” it more experientially.

Our hearts are fickle and fragile — still capable of being sucker-punched by sin within, and susceptible to whisperings without. Most of the time I believe you greatly love, desire, and delight in me; but then I also have moments when I can be blindsided by unbelief, temptation and discontent.

Those are the times when I place unrealistic demands on other relationships, including marriage. Instead of living as a grateful servant, I can act like a grace-less orphan — over-expecting from others and under-believing of you. Forgive me and free me from all such nonsense.

Lord Jesus, increasingly, I want to love you (and others) as you love me, until the Day our betrothal to you becomes the Day of great banqueting forever — the Day we crave more than any other—the wedding feast of the Lamb. You are more than enough. So very Amen I pray, in your tender and tenacious name.

THANKS Scotty Smith, founding pastor of Christ Community Church in Franklin, Tennessee.

The Enjoyment of Wanton Sin

One of the most memorable sections of Augustine’s Confessions is his painful, prayerful recollection of an
event that had occurred 25 years earlier.

This account is worth some very serious meditation on sin, the nature of pleasure, stealing forbidden fruit, and the companionship of fools.

 Augustine says that as a 16-year-old, “I cared for nothing but to love and to be loved. . . . Love and lust together,” he writes, “seethed within me. In my tender youth they swept me away over the precipice of my body’s appetites and plunged me in the whirlpool of sin.” “I was . . . floundering in the broiling sea of my fornication. . . . The brambles of lust grew high above my head and there was no one to root them out, certainly not my father” (II.2).

Despite his lust-filled teenage years, he focuses most of his attention upon an act that many might dismiss as good old-fashioned rabble rousing: petty theft from a fruit tree. But note carefully why Augustine, looking back, sees the sinfulness of sin in stealing these pears:

There was a pear-tree near our vineyard, loaded with fruit that was attractive neither to look at nor to taste.

Late one night a band of ruffians, myself included, went off to shake down the fruit and carry it away, for we had continued our games out of doors until well after dark, as was our pernicious habit. We took away an enormous quantity of pears, not to eat them ourselves, but simply to throw them to the pigs.

Perhaps we ate some of them, but our real pleasure consisted in doing something that was forbidden. . . .

It was not the pears that my unhappy soul desired. I had plenty of my own, better than those, and I only picked them so that I might steal. For no sooner had I picked them than I threw them away, and tasted nothing in them but my own sin, which I relished and enjoyed. . . .

We were tickled to laughter by the prank we had played, because no one suspected us of it although the owners were furious. Why was it, then, that I thought it fun not to have been the only culprit? Perhaps it was because we do not easily laugh when we are alone. . . I am quite sure that I would never have done this thing on my own. . . . To do it by myself would have been no fun and I should not have done it.

—Saint Augustine, Confessions, Penguin Classics, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), II.4, 6, 9.

This is worth some serious meditation on sin, the nature of pleasure, forbidden fruit, and the companionship of fools.

Thanks to Justin Taylor