Jealousy: Needed and Necessary

     Yesterday I went up to DC with my fellow Sub30 Interns (Katelyn Smith, Michael Adams, Elizabeth Everett, and Cheyenne Self) to go to National Community Church. The site we went to was their Ebenezer location. Basically the site there is a Coffee Shop with a church downstairs. The idea is absolutely awesome and it’s done very well.

     The message at NCC was absolutely amazing and Mark Batterson was the man to bring it. It was aimed toward love, but in the sense of jealousy. Mark pointed out that God is jealous FOR us, and not jealous Of us.  He then went on to describe his own jealousy for him Wife’s love and his children’s love. Last night it hit me that God is extremely Jealous FOR our love and I realized it in a deeper sense. I had always heard the standard, “ohhh yeah man, God loves you so much he died for you,” but I never really internalized that he is absolutely Jealous for our love. His love for us is the kind of love that when you wake up, you begin thinking of that person, the kind of love that turns your stomach inside out just thinking about them, the kind of love that is between a husband and wife, the kind of love that is Jealous for their full love.  

     Because God has jealous love, He wants all of us which sometimes means we have to get rid of those things in our life that take His rightful place, a.k.a. our idols. Last night Batterson talked about Ezekiel 8:12 where God reveals that each of the seventy elders from the house of Israel had shrines to their Idols. Today while we do not carve out little things of wood or gold and worship them, we have become “sophisticated sinners” and worship the sins in our lives and leave out the “graven images,” but are nonetheless Idols. If we claim we truly love God, we need to cut out these idols that sometimes fill the place of God. ‘Nuff said.