Being the Bride

²⁵ Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ²⁶ to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, ²⁷ and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. ²⁸ In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹ After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— ³⁰ for we are members of his body. ³¹ “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” ³² This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.

I love being the Bride of Christ. We as the church are his bride. In our culture we get  misconceived view of what that means, especially being a guy. When many people think about being the bride of Christ, the idea of being in a wedding dress and looking absolutely ridiculous and weak comes to mind. People see it as a loss of masculinity and confidence. But that couldn't be farther from the truth. Being the bride of Christ means walking fully into who Jesus has called you to be. Both men and women alike. When i think about being the bride, I picture myself completely covered in the golden armor of Christ, walking out in complete confidence that I am going to conqueror any situation i come up against because i am completely protected by the King. And all of that confidence comes from a place of intimacy with Jesus. 

I feel we as the church are compared to the bride of Christ because it's the only humanly possible way to show how deep of a love the lord has for us. Obviously his love is sooo much deeper than a husband can love a wife, but he uses this example to show what our relationship should look like with him. Husbands protect their wives, care for them, and will do absolutely everything in their power to make sure the wife knows that she is loved. A husband would sacrifice himself for the life of his wife, and that is exactly what he did. 

"God SO loved the world that he gave his only son, and whosoever believe in him shall not parish but have everlasting life." 

God doesn't just love us, he SO loves us. When we are SO in love with someone,  we will do absolutely anything for them. We will drive 24 hours across the nation just to see their face for 5 minutes. It's written in every love song of this world. We'd catch a grenade for someone etc. You get the idea. Our whole entire world will stop and we will put our lives on hold, just out of a completely surrendered heart for that person. Sound familiar? That's exactly what Jesus did. He said, I am gonna going to leave my perfect home in heaven, lose all my powers as God and become a man, and die for all the bad things you have ever done just because I soooooo love you. He put everything on hold to give us an opportunity to be with him. So when he calls us a bride, I think he means it. 

And as the bride, what can we do to show Jesus our appreciation? Love him. Love him just as he loved us. As we learn to love Jesus and spend time with him, we start to become more like him. And when you become more like Jesus, things of this world won't get in your way because you are only focused on your love for him. All sin disappears in his love. I struggled with so much sin all the time because I didn't have a deep revelation of how much he loves us. I didn't realize that being the bride was my identity. But when I learned to set a goal of loving Jesus 100%, sin disappeared. Yes I still sin everyday in some way, but it's weight gets less and less as I learn to love Jesus and become more like him. So lets not focus on containing sin, but focus on our love for Jesus and all problems of the world will fade away. When we hangout with our friends, we start to become more and more like them. I can anticipate almost everything my friend Daniel says and does and he the same with me because we know each other and have so much in common as we spend more time together. It's the same with Jesus. Spend more time with him and you'll only be interested in what he is doing! 

To conclude, The book of Hosea shows such a great depiction of our relationship with the Lord. Hosea was a king and God ordered him to marry basically an adulterous woman . Why would a King marry this woman? Why would someone who rules everything and can have whatever he wants want anything to do with someone who is unfaithful and turns her back to him? Sound familiar again? God wants to win our hearts, regardless of where are hearts are at. It's his love

In Hosea 2:14 it says 

"therefore I am now going to allure her;
    I will lead her into the wilderness
    and speak tenderly to her.
¹⁵ There I will give her back her vineyards,
    and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she will respond as in the days of her youth,
    as in the day she came up out of Egypt.

¹⁶ “In that day,” declares the Lord,
    “you will call me ‘my husband’;
    you will no longer call me ‘my master."

God is going to do what it takes to get our hearts. We might have to be in a desert place in our lives for God to speak to us. We dig ourselves in holes and Jesus comes right there and picks us up. Then he brings restoration to us and we realize a life with him is so much better than what we were living. And my favorite part. He isn't our master, he is our husband. Jesus isn't a demanding boss who tells you to do things and out of obligation we do those things. He is someone who we love and would do anything for because our hearts burn to see him delighted. He SO loves us, so I wanna live a life where I daily SO love him.

 African Elephants in the Nile in Uganda. ( doesn't have anything to do with the post, but i really like this picture haha)