How to Live with God: Fall in Love (Pt. 2)

What does it mean to live a life with God? To pursue discipleship? To grow as a Christian? This series explores the most basic answer I can provide to this question.

At its most fundamental, having a spiritual life, growing in Christ, becoming a disciple, living life with God begins with this: falling in love. As the previous entry in this series revealed, the end-point in Scripture’s great story is a wedding. What God’s working toward is the great matrimony between you and him. This whole thing is one big romance. Thus, discipleship is primarily about courtship and passion with God.

This is why James K. A. Smith writes in You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, “Discipleship…is a way to curate your heart, to be attentive to and and intentional about what you love.” (2).

This means recovering something which ancient Christians emphasized but which many contemporary Christians have lost. “Mystics” of the church both modeled and taught a spirituality that prioritized a deep and abiding love for God as the foundation for the spiritual life. They were so enamoured with God and Christ that reading their reflections today is sometimes a bit uncomfortable. Consider two examples.

Julian of Norwich was an English ascetic who devoted herself to prayer and spiritual counsel. Her first book Revelations of Divine Love (ca 1395) was one of the first books written by a woman in the English language. Notice Julian’s focus on love:

When I was thirty years old and a half, God sent me a bodily sickness in which I lay three days and three nights…
and on the third night I expected often to have passed away…
and being still in youth, I thought it a great sadness to die— not for anything that was on earth that pleased me to live for, nor for any pain that I was afraid of
(for I trusted in God of His mercy)
but because I would have liked to have lived so that I could have
loved God better and for a longer time (Reading Three Chapter Three)

I saw that He is to us everything that is good and comfortable for us.
He is our clothing which for love enwraps us, holds us,
and all encloses us because of His tender love, so that He may never leave us.
and so in this showing I saw that He is to us everything that is good, as I understood it. (Reading Eight Chapter Five)

God wishes to be known,
and He delights that we remain in Him,
because all that is less than He is not enough for us.
and this is the reason why no soul is at rest
until it is emptied of everything that is created.
When the soul is willingly emptied for love in order to have Him who is all,
then is it able to receive spiritual rest. (Reading Nine)

for truly our Lover desires that our soul cleave to Him with all its might and that we evermore cleave to His goodness,
for of all things that heart can think,
this pleases God most and soonest succeeds. (Reading Twelve)

and therefore we can ask of our Lover with reverence all that we wish,
for our natural wish is to have God
and the good wish of God is to have us. (Reading Thirteen)

The entire reason for living, and living longer, for Julian, is to love God better and longer. God’s love enwraps us like clothing. His love alone is sufficient for us and greater than all else to which we might cling. It is our greatest wish.

St John of the Cross was a Spanish priest who became a widely read author of several works. his Spiritual Canticle was composed when he was imprisoned and tortured in a tiny cell (1577). In it he writes poetically of himself in search of the great love of his life, Jesus:

11. Reveal your presence,

and may the vision of your beauty be my death;

for the sickness of love

is not cured

except by your very presence and image.

26. In the inner wine cellar

I drank of my Beloved, and, when I went abroad

through all this valley

I no longer knew anything,

and lost the herd that I was following.

27. There he gave me his breast;

there he taught me a sweet and living knowledge;

and I gave myself to him,

keeping nothing back;

there I promised to be his bride.

28. Now I occupy my soul

and all my energy in his service;

I no longer tend the herd,

nor have I any other work

now that my every act is love.

John was so enamored with Jesus that it was like a sickness–and only Jesus was the cure. Jesus was like a fine wine that John drank and drank–he consumed Jesus. John was so drawn to Jesus that he withheld nothing from Jesus. He gave his entire self to Jesus. And now every act done in the body was an act of love for Jesus.

This is the goal. This is the motive. This is the picture of life with God. It’s not rules and regulations. It’s not doctrine and dogma. It’s not church attendance and tithes. All of those things may have their places. But life with God begins with love. Romance. Courtship. It’s about nurturing a passion for God. It’s about practices that build and sustain a relationship with God that is fresh and alive and life-giving and fulfilling.