Is Your Heart Crying Out For The Love Of Jesus?
No currency in the world can compete with the love of Jesus. He won the battle for wholeness. We need Jesus more than we realize at times.
Nestled in the heart of Oxford, the church, St. Aldates, welcomed our family weekly while we lived in England. There was never an end to the hustle of people scurrying by its doors on Sunday mornings: parents picking up their littles after the service, tourists snapping pictures of Christ Church across the street, and students huddled in the local coffee shop.
One Sunday, as I traveled the cobblestone streets between the main church building and the parish where the children are dropped off, I chatted with friends as I pushed the stroller ready to pick up my girls.
As I bent over to lay something inside, I heard a little voice scream at the top of her lungs, “I NEED JESUS!” Again, crying even louder, “I NEED JESUS!”
I stood up, surprised as I heard Zion, my then two-year-old, screaming in the middle of the street, “I need Jesus!”
Lest you think my two-year-old is ultra-spiritual, I soon discovered that Jesus’s head had fallen off her Sunday School craft. The only thing in the world that mattered to her at that moment was that she needed Jesus.
As I walked away, others laughing at the outburst, I thought to myself, “If only I were that bold.”
I wish my grown-up faith screamed my need for Christ like a two-year-old at the top of my lungs, not fearing what others thought.
Because the truth of the matter is I do need Jesus. I need Him more than my next breath.
A Cosmic Healing
Only Jesus is enough for every single ache my heart feels. Every unmet longing my soul craves. Every captive fear that my mind produces.
Heartache.
Unmet longings.
Fears.
Where does this kind of pain come from?
It comes from separation from God—the state of the entire world. The state of me. Our natural desire to return to wholeness makes our daily existence burn with the yearning to return to God’s presence again.
God feels this distance too. And set out to reclaim the children he lost to sin.
This is what the prophet Isaiah gets at in Isaiah 53:5 when he says that the Redeemer was “pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds, we are healed.” (ESV)
This healing? It’s a cosmic kind. It bathes our existence in the newness of Heaven. The salvation from sin.
Jesus healed every wound that sin created by taking it upon himself.
What kind of love is this? A love that takes every heartache, fear, and anxiety and drapes it upon Himself. No currency in the world can compete with the love of Christ. He won the battle for wholeness.
Those pains you and I encounter daily?
Betrayal, loss, bitterness, and death. Jesus swallowed them up at Golgotha.
And just like the spiritual wound of separation from God, Jesus also heals all our daily wounds brought on by the machinations of the world. We all face them. But Jesus gave His own life so we would have everything we need to face them.
When I heard Zion shouting, “I need Jesus!” my heart heard, “I need the love of Jesus.”
The Best Translation of Love
We cannot comprehend the breadth, length, height, or depth of Christ’s love.
My husband Tim talks about God’s four-dimensional love in his book, The Beauty Chasers:
“What is God saying when he says he loves me? I believe it is something I don’t quite know or understand. I may never know this side of heaven. He speaks of a love that spans eternity. A love that existed before time, before the foundations of the cosmos were set. When he says, “I love you,” he is speaking as one from whom love itself comes. He is the Fountainhead of love, the Originator of love …It is a love that makes me lovely to him. It possesses the power to change me.”
The love of Jesus changes us.
How?
Because it possesses a movement, it quickens our spirits, causing us to push further into Him, who is Love itself.
And so that little voice screaming unabashedly, “I Need Jesus!” mixes with my own voice, and together we join the rocks and the mountains the hills and the valleys to create a melody of praise that all creation echoes and cries aloud,
“I Need Jesus!”
In His Word
Read through Isaiah 53 today. Remember what His gift of love did for you.
In Your Life
What wounds has the world thrown at you recently? How can the knowledge of God’s love heal those wounds? Spend some time acknowledging your need for Jesus, thanking Him for His perfect translation of love.
We Recommend
The Beauty Chasers by Timothy Willard, Christine’s husband. This new release shows how the cosmic Lover of the universe is the heart behind the beauty we see. Beauty will change us if we let it, and enable us to confront our wounds with the love of God.
Let’s Connect
For inspiration on pursuing the Way of beauty in life and home, follow Chris on Instagram. She also writes weekly devotionals through her Mend membership newsletter on Substack.