Valentine’s Day is tomorrow and as a single woman in the US,
I feel obliged to have some sort of response to the hyped-up commercial
holiday. My past with this day hasn’t been particularly pleasant but it hasn’t
been absolutely awful either. I’ve always been sort of ambivalent to the day
that falls almost exactly two weeks before my birthday, a day which holds much
more reason for celebration, love, and outright joy in my eyes than a day
created to sell cards and flowers. Like most girls I know, I’ve gone back and
forth on my opinions about Valentine’s Day depending on my relationship status
during the month of February. I’m as fickle and hypocritical as the rest of
them and I won’t deny that.
But
something that’s been weighing on my heart in the past few weeks as this
simultaneously dreaded and adored holiday approaches is the reality that for a
day dedicated to the celebration of love, Christians sure do some great
forgetting when it comes to Valentine’s Day. Particularly, Christian women get
wrapped up in the cultural pressure to find a guy around this time of year. If
they don’t or can’t or won’t succumb to this pressure they tend to opt for the
other culturally accepted reaction of bitterness and resentment toward the idea
of the love-loving day. I am, in every way, guilty of this and I’ve grown up
around strong believing, beautiful women of God who have fallen into this trap
as well. But that’s just it; it’s a trap.
We go
365 days of the year fighting culture, trying to be in the world and not of it,
trying to live out all the biblical lifestyle truths and sayings there are. But
when it comes to this one little day, it’s so easy to fall into the trap of
lies the devil has cleverly laid out for us. It’s easy to look around at our
friends who are pairing up or otherwise celebrating the romantic holiday and
base our worth on our singleness. It’s easy to let the guards of our
self-esteem and self-value drop when February 14th rolls around and
we find ourselves single. Even if we’re content to be on our own, it’s just too
easy to believe the lies of the devil’s “you’re-not-good-enough”
“you’ll-never-find-love” “you’re-not-worth-loving” propaganda.
What we need to keep in mind is that it’s just propaganda.
It’s all lies.
I’ve been single for almost a year now and the one thing
God’s been hammering into me is that my worth and value is not found in a
relationship. He’s teaching me that I can be completely content resting in Him
and His design for me, more so than I ever could worrying about the petty
issues that come in relationships.
Recently
I read Jeremiah 31:31-34 at my church’s college bible study and God wrecked my
heart over a truth I’ve known since I was young: God made me to be His bride.
That’s the kind of relationship He wants with us. He wants the total intimacy of
marriage. In verse 34, God says, “And no longer shall each one teach his
neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know
me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord.” We all have the access and ability to know
God personally and intimately and that’s what He created us for.
Not
only that but he continues saying “For I will forgive their iniquity, and I
will remember their sin no more,” ransoming us for himself. Isaiah 54:5 says
“For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name; and the Holy
One of Israel is your Redeemer, the God of the whole earth he is called.”
Redemption is something I’ve probably heard my whole life but am just now
beginning to understand. Someone explained the idea of redemption as ransom.
Say you have a king whom the entire kingdom adores. If he was taken captive in
war and held for ransom, wouldn’t the kingdom be willing to do whatever it
takes to get their beloved king back? But what if, hypothetically, the king was
your enemy. Not so willing now, are you? We were God’s enemy, living in sin
which is basically total rebellion against God. And He ransomed His own life to
give us freedom and restore us as His bride. What an unfathomable picture of
love! This is what we were created for!
This is why women have an innate desire
for a man to be hopelessly and selflessly in love with them! And why men want
to be strong and brave and respected (I’m assuming). We were built for this deep,
intimate relationship with God and everything in us yearns for Him. But when
Valentine’s rolls around, this Truth of our heart’s desire gets lost among the
chick-flick romances and candy-coated relationships around us. We forget the
most important relationship in our lives and focus on our inadequacies,
failures, awkwardness, or random “flaws.” We forget that this relationship is
with our Maker who knows our in’s and out’s, the very core of our being, and
who ransomed us anyway though our hearts were against Him. It’s the most epic
love story EVER TOLD and we just let it go to pity ourselves for not having a
date for one night!
So this
year, instead of celebrating a relationship or brooding on the couch in
singleness, remember your Maker, your Husband, and your Redeemer and the
beautiful celebration of love that is the Gospel. Be encouraged by the Truth of
God’s word and let it remind you how deep and incomprehensible God’s love for
you really is.
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom
every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of
his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in
your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith – that you,
being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the
saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the
love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with a ll the
fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all we
ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the
church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”
Ephesians
3: 14-21
Bravo! Truth beautifully expressed!
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