Celebrating with God

As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so your God will rejoice over you. Isaiah 62:5, NASB

I love to give my wife surprises. And she loves to give me surprises. Today is my birthday :) And last night Kayla took me to this really nice restaurant, Benvenuti's. It's this modern southern Italian place downtown. The food was incredible. And not too expensive either. It's the kind of place where you can get expensive, if you want. Or you can be comfortable at $30 a couple if it's the week to send out the bills. Well, we got expensive. I got the fillet. My steak was wonderful. Kayla got this really incredible pasta. The sauce on it was amazing. The atmosphere is fun and light, but at the same time intimate and romantic. I found out that five of my old classmates from high school worked at the restaurant (odd, huh?). And one of the guys I had in my AP Physics class my senior year in high school was our waiter. It was such a nice date. And that was pretty much all I asked for my birthday. A nice, quiet, sweet date with Kayla. When you're a parent, getting a date with your spouse is gold.

I was just thinking about celebrating. I think one of the hardest concepts for Christians is that God wants to celebrate you. And that's not him just standing up out of his throne and clapping as we enter heaven saying, "Well done! Well done!" It's not like a medieval king knighting us because of our good deeds. He wants to celebrate us personally, privately. The Spirit took the intimacy of a bride and her new husband as the image of how Jesus wants to rejoice over us. What do a bride and a bridegroom do? Well...after the reception, that's not too difficult to imagine! They go home or to a fancy hotel and give new meaning to the words "passion" and "joy" and then they run off to a Hawaiian beach or a gorgeous condo in the Rockies and continuing rewriting the fun words of the dictionary. And those are the definitions God is using in celebrating us. God is the beginner of romance (he is the Alpha and the Omega) and he wants to romance us, celebrate us. He wants to whisk us off our feet to a romantic date and delve into our eyes, knowing our every thought. He wants to have intimate conversation over a glass of wine or a cappuccino while the cute music plays in the background and the place is lit just by candle light and the sun setting in the background. He wants intimacy with us that makes the passion of newlyweds on their wedding night look like a 60 year old couple sitting on the couch watching Antiques Roadshow (which, btw, is an awesome show!).That's the desire of his heart, because it's the desire of our hearts and we are his image so then we must be imaging what he desires and feels for us. And we can have this intimacy now. Right now! Because we have the Holy Spirit inside of us. Our very bodies are his temple (1 Corinthians 6:19). That's how close he wants to be to us! I love Peter Kreeft's comments on this intimacy with Jesus:

This spiritual intercourse with God is the ecstasy hinted at in all earthly intercourse, physical or spiritual. It is the ultimate reason why sexual passion is so strong...that is why we tremble to stand outside ourselves in the other, to give ourselves, body and soul; because we are images of God the sexual being. (Is There Sex in Heaven? http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/sex-in-heaven.htm)

We have a God who is crazy in love with us, who desires to be our everything, to be our Lover. And if we just respond by making him our heart's desire, he will give us everything of him and a forever and ever romance in his arms (Psalm 37:4).