Can someone tell me when we began “falling in love with Jesus”? I was recently emailed an article from Radiantmag.com. The article never really made a real point as far as I could see. Maybe the point was quit watching chic flicks, which I am in 100% agreement. Now I know I am not the most touchy feely guy in the world, but didn’t falling in love come from the same warped thinking as making love? When did our relationship with Christ become something as worldly and trivial as falling in love? If you can fall in love then you can fall out of love, right? I don’t see how you can fall in love anymore than you can make love.
The world has such a warped view of love and the emotions attached to it. I am not talking about attraction. I am talking about biblical love. From a worldly perspective love is not a decision to be with someone. Love is not a commitment to that person. Love is a feeling that must be constantly renewed, and like a drug it takes more and more “romance” to keep that feeling. Women have already embraced such an unreal and unbiblical expectation of love no one, not even Jesus can live up to it. (and on top of everything I find out today that Harlequin has a Christian romance line)
So much of the Christian music and lingo that has infiltrated the church, especially our teenagers, is filled with this worldly mindset of falling in love. God help us; not only have we twisted the biblical view of marital love now we have twisted our love for Christ.
I recently heard a song, which I won’t name, that just repeated the words I love you over and over again. I wonder if the Father is in heaven shouting back at us ”Is that the best you’ve got” “All of Scripture at you disposal to write a song, and all you can say is that you love me. You don’t tell me why you love me. You don’t say why I am worthy of love. If you really love me don’t stand there telling me go do what I told you to do”
This notion of falling in love with Jesus is detrimental to Christianity, because it is rooted in psycho babble and emotional drivel that can in no way be backed up with Scripture. God help us to love Christ biblically.
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36 year old husband, father, pastor, singer, musician, reader, eater, rider, watcher,
The best way of seeing how Christian songs should be written can be found in the Bible, specifically the Psalms and some of the songs we see recorded in the epistles.
It’s not that I’m saying we should only sing Psalms (strange hyper-calvinistic Presbyterians think this), nor am I saying that the lyrics should be directly from the Bible. What I am saying is that 1) The lyrics are biblical (ie their meaning is reflected in biblical teaching), and 2) The lyrics speak not just to God but recount his deeds and his character.
There’s a song we sing in our church here in Australia that I am concerned about and I’ll probably take up with our Session at some point. The problematic lyrics go like this:
Like a rose, trampled on the ground,
you took the fall,
and thought of me
above all.
The two problems are:
1) The idea of Jesus as a nice pretty rose that smells nice and that is trampled on the ground is an interesting image, but not one that is biblical. Yes Solomon says “I am a rose of Sharon” in Song of solomon 2.1 but that’s actually the woman speaking (as per the translators of the ESV who say “The translators have added speaker identifications based on the gender and number of the Hebrew words”)
2) When Jesus “took the fall” he took on the sins of the world, but I’ve always thought that Jesus thought about nothing except the Father as he died on the cross. Yes he did say “Forgive them Father…” but most of what Jesus says about his death on the cross is directed towards his obedience to the Father (reference from John’s gospel needed at this point!).
So the lyrics of this song encourage us to see Jesus in a romantic light (the rose image) who dies for us because he loves us so much (Jesus thus fulfilling the role of a romantic hero). Sounds nice… but it is unbiblical.
BTW the song is “Above all” by Paul Baloche and Lenny LeBlanc (1999). I think Michael W. Smith did a version of it from my internet search.
Scott,
Are you sure that’s not a 70′s rendering of Jason in that photo?