The Lover Awakened

Too many men hide behind reason and logic. A man must grow beyond mere reason, or he will be stunted as a man, certainly as a lover. No woman wants to be analyzed, and many marriages fail because the man insists on treating her as a problem to be solved, rather than a mystery to be known and loved. David was a cunning tactician as a warrior, but he was also a poet of the first order. Jesus could hold his own in any theological debate, but he is also an artist (the Creator of this world of Beauty) and a poet (by whose Spirit David wrote the Psalms) and a storyteller. When he says, “Consider the lilies of the field,” he does not mean analyze them, but rather, behold them, take them in, let their beauty speak, for “Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are” (Matt. 6:29 NLT). He appeals to their beauty to show us the love of God.

The lover is awakened when a man comes to see that the poetic is far truer than the propositional and the analytical, and whatever physiology might say, I’ve seen it happen in many men.

I came to Christ not because I was looking for a religion, but because I was looking for the Truth, and, having found it, I knew it must be true across the realms of human culture. I yearned for an intellectually defensible case for Christianity, and I found it first in Schaeffer and then in the Reformed writers, to whom I remain very grateful. There are reasons to believe. My head was satisfied, but my heart yearned for something more. While I found logic in my theology (and went to war against my philosophy professor), I was being wooed by Beauty in the mountains and deserts, in literature and music. Why did they bring me closer to God than analysis? Why did the dissection of systematic theology cut all life out of the living Word? Then I discovered writers like Oswald Chambers, C. S. Lewis, and his sage, George MacDonald. Smart men, all of them, quite capable of making a good argument. But that is not the essence of their glory. They speak to the mind, but also to the heart. More so to the heart.

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