Igniting A Burning Love

on the heart of true renewal

Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
John 1:29

There’s a lot of noise in the church today. A lot of talk about how we should be in this moment—about culture, the arts, about practice and theology, about how we, as the church, should go about being ourselves. We have become professional self-critics. There is now a vast industry exploring every which way the church should respond to the events of the time.

All this is great until it becomes the main thing. Until thinking and talking become more natural than praying. Until it becomes our spirituality in totality.

Because it shouldn’t be. We, the bride of Christ, exist for one primary reason—to behold the ascended, cosmos-filling beauty of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, forever. To awaken our yearning for him, to set our hearts and vision on his Person, to make him and nothing else the treasure in the field of our lives and hearts.

This adoring and yearning isn’t optional; it’s not an add-on to the Christian life—it is the Christian life. The Burning Heart from which all other life and living flow.

There’s only one way to access this kind of life, and it’s to gaze upon the reality of this Love in the depth of ourselves until we’re so transformed by him—our appetites so inflamed by his presence—that we become forever yearning. This is the life of prayer. We can’t stoke adoration of Christ ourselves; only a revelation of Christ can do that. A revelation that comes from communities that continuously declare and reveal him in everything they do and wait on him to show himself more personally to us.

Christ is the fire that lights all fires. The degree to which we elevate him, as his bride, is the degree to which we will burn with his powerful love.

But it goes the other way too. The less we draw the vision of the soul to the ascended, glorified Christ and his love, the less we burn. Morality, ethics, cultural relevance, mission, church building—all this is wonderful underneath the bright sun of unceasing union with God. When beholding and experiencing Christ is smaller, and we forsake the mystical heart of love that was so central to the New Testament preaching and writings of John the Baptist, John the Apostle, and Paul, our activities become tasteless and weary, and—dare I say—powerless.

Because love is depth, and love is fire. It’s a burning, aching wanting of God—to drink him deeply and for that drinking to set us alight for work in the world. Unless we’re really burning like this, how can we ever be truly alive?

We can pray for renewal as much as we want; we can try every new method for practical transformation, but as long as we diminish the fire of love for the person of Christ, who is seated in heaven, clothed in perfect eternal glory and who is the burning heart of all things, we will not truly accomplish eternal things. It must be both.

There is no renewal without Christ. Unless our appetites are stirred for God himself, we’ll experience brief moments of bliss in a long, slow journey into spiritual numbness. Christ is the vision that empowers and motivates every other action.

A tiny Christ equals a tiny church. A vast, burning Christ equals a vast, burning church.

I feel so deeply that Christ is calling the eyes of the church back on him again. To remember the cross, to behold it and live it. To experience the new life of resurrection and ultimately to gaze upon the ascended Christ of heaven, who is “before all things and in [whom] all things hold together.”¹

This renewed burning for speaking Christ over every other thing will lead to a genuine burning within us again—the kind that is willing to sacrifice its own preferences, to love our Christian brother and sister purely, to be effective in the world, to come alive to prayer as the place of communion with the living God.

Any other thing as the main motivator will become the roof of our love. What happens when we get what we want—a renewal in our times, a turning of the cultural tide, churches filling, leaders returning to the local church? We will become bored because we made them the main thing when it should have been Christ.

The only true great motivation for the church is him. He is the highest end. Set hearts on Christ and they will burn for life.

When adoration of the cross returns to the weekly pulpit, when the church’s eyes are lifted up to Christ enthroned at the right hand of God, ruler over all nations and kings, and as we see his beauty as John did on Patmos and make him known to our communities, we will see a new church burning in this world of complexity and trouble.

In that first moment John the Baptist saw his cousin Jesus Christ, he cried out, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”

That simple cry has been our mission ever since.

May we, in remembering the power and
simplicity of adoring and beholding
Christ Jesus the Son of God, be so caught
up in his burning love that we would want
for nothing of this world again.

Amen.

1. Colossians 1:17