Nuggets from An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith—Too Wonderful to Believe | thebereancall.org

Dave Hunt

At the heart of this relationship is a fact so astonishing that most Christians, including those who have known the Lord for many years, seldom live in its full enjoyment. It is not that we do not believe it intellectually, but that we find it too wonderful to accept its full implications into our moment-by-moment experience of daily life.

We are like a homely, small-town girl from a very poor family who is being wooed by the handsomest, wealthiest, most powerful, most intelligent, and in every way most desirable man who ever lived. She enjoys the things he gives her, but is not able fully to give herself to him and really get to know him because she finds it too much to believe that he, given the choice of all the far more attractive women in the world, really loves her. And to leave the familiar surroundings of her childhood—the friends and family that have been all she has known and loved—to go off with this one who seems to love her so much and to become part of another world so foreign and even inconceivable to her, it is all too overwhelming.

Some of us grew up as children singing “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so,” and found a certain amount of childish comfort in its simple assurance at the time. We never matured in that love, however, because we were not taught to do so. Meanwhile, other loves entered our lives and were given priority over the love of God. In his classic, The City of God, Augustine declares that man has become earthly minded and lost his heavenly vision because of a “wrong order of loves”—self has replaced God:

These two cities were made by two loves: the earthly city by the love of self unto the contempt of God, and the heavenly city by the love of God unto the contempt of self.

 To be sure, we still read the love chapter (1 Corinthians 13) now and then and sing lustily (and at times even with great feeling) such classics as “The love of God is greater far than tongue or pen can ever tell….” But we are no longer children, and the simple fact that “Jesus loves me” has somehow lost its power for us. Not because it is intellectually too shallow, but because its deeper implications, which we now begin dimly to perceive, are spiritually and emotionally too wonderful.

Like the small-town girl, each of us finds it very difficult to believe that Jesus really loves us. While we appreciate His blessings, we find it difficult to become intimate with our heavenly Suitor, because it seems so inappropriate that the Lord of the universe should be wooing us. That He loves everyone and that we are included in that great love is intellectually accepted, but that He has singled me out personally as an object of that love is too marvelous. My response falls far short of the joy that He intends for me.

Thus the essence of the Christian life—its true source of joy and confidence and power—is missing in so much that calls itself Christian. Many preachers attempt to entice the world to “come to Christ” with the popular offers of health, prosperity, an improved society, and long life upon earth, when the real essence of salvation is to know God and to be partakers of His love and life.