When life gets hectic and really busy, I can tend toward a trap of falling into "friendship" with God. And by this I mean not worshiping him completely, passionately in my soul and heart. Jesus is my Best Friend, but he's my God too. Sometimes I'll replace intimacy with pedestrian conversation. Eg our conversations tend more towards banal absurdity (to employ an oxymoron) of the conversation of "Hey what's up? Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Hmm really?" than the passion and the romance of something like John of the Cross' The Dark Night, "I abandoned and forgot myself, laying my face on my Beloved; all things ceased, I went out from myself." Now, I love the usual conversation and talking with God, but if we don't have intense worship and intimacy with Jesus, we are just talking. God is holy and by holy I mean reserved to be special. It is the exact same concept with my wife except taken to the nth degree. I take our time to be very special, it's set apart, it's holy. I tell her I want to pursue her and only her by setting aside our time together to make her my complete center of attention. And she loves that. So does God. It's one of the ways women embody the image of God is in the desire to be pursued. By us making God holy in our hearts, we essential set him aside above everything else to pursue him above all things.
Jesus most definitely desires us to want him, desire him, to crave him, and to day dream about him all day long. He wants to be the object of our affection. Exactly as a lover wants to be his beloved's always. And when I don't pursue him, it's usually due to one of two things: 1) I completely forget him or 2) I'm way too lazy to pursue. (Shame on me for both of those things, I feel terribly about them both). Jesus writes about our dilemma with him in the Song of Songs
"I slept by my heart was awake. Listen! My lover is knocking: Open to me my sister, my darling...I have taken off my robe-must I put it on again? I have washed my feet-must I soil them again? My lover thrust his hand through the latch-opening; my heart began to pound for him...I opened for my lover, but my lover had left; he was gone." 5:1,3-4,6 (NIV)
We have these minds that just don't want to be with God, think about loving on Jesus, and just want to zone out, or focus on small things, all when we are faced with the possibility of true joy and pleasure in the romantic embrace of Jesus Christ. How could we say, why should I get up and go to him? After all that we know, after all the joy and happiness and pleasure experienced in the torrid love affair with God? We truly are in a battle against ourselves! We need eyes to see and ears to hear the romance with God, always. We need time every day where we don't just have the normal conversation with God throughout the day, but we have a time of embracing with Jesus' Spirit, where we can worship him fully, bare before his eyes and enjoying Jesus' touch. We need ecstasy, we need rapture, we need it every day. And not only to make our relationship with Jesus flourish, but also as an act of spiritual warfare against our own flesh and as a protective barrier against Satan and his angels' attacks.
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