What It Looks Like to Love Him Back

A love this large cannot just sit still inside you. It has to come out. And it turns out God has given us all kinds of ways to let it.

The very last song in the book of Psalms is not a quiet meditation. It is nearly a marching band:

"Praise Him with the blast of the horn; praise Him with the lyre and the harp. Praise Him with the tambourine and with dancing; praise Him with stringed instruments and with flutes. Praise Him with loud cymbals; praise Him with clanging cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the LORD!" — Psalm 150:3–6 (NET)

Everything that has breath. Horns and harps and drums, loud and glad, with the whole body, dancing. God designed all of this. He is the One who gave the temple its singers and its players. He is the One who gave the very recipe for the incense that rose before Him. He made the ways we bring our love back to Him — the music, the sweet smoke rising, the lifted voice, the moving feet — and He made them because He wanted to receive them. He cares how we come to Him, because He is the One who built the coming.

And He does not merely tolerate it. Once, when the temple singers and players all sounded together as one voice, the house of God filled with a cloud so thick the priests could not stand up to do their work — the glory of the Lord had come down into the room. The praise pleased Him so much that He came into the middle of it. That is the God you are singing to. He comes into the song.

Even your prayers take a shape when they reach Him. John, in his vision, saw the throne of God, and around it elders holding harps and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God's people. Your prayers are the incense. They rise. They carry a fragrance. They are gathered into golden bowls and kept. You are not flinging words at a ceiling. You are sending up something He catches and treasures. And because of the cross, they rise to Him carried in the sweetness of what His Son did — you never come to Him empty, or alone.

And there is the woman with the jar. I love this one. She came to Jesus carrying a jar of pure perfume worth a whole year's wages, and she broke it open and poured every drop of it over Him. The people in the room called it a waste. He called it beautiful, and He said that as long as the good news is told anywhere in the world, what she did would be told too, in memory of her. Sit with that. She gave one jar. He gave her a place in the story forever. She held nothing back, and He answered by holding nothing back. That is not a trade. That is what an enormous love does when somebody finally gives it everything.

And there is a kind of praise that costs the most and means the most — the praise you lift when things are not going well. Anyone can praise on a good day; it costs nothing. But the praise you raise in grief, in sickness, in the long stretch where nothing changes and the prayers seem to come back unopened — the Scriptures call that a sacrifice of praise, and it is the strongest thing a human heart can offer. Because what it says is: I love You for who You are, not for what I am getting from You right now. That praise, lifted out of the dark, is the nearest you will come in this life to loving the Father the way His Son has loved Him forever — the way He loved Him from the floor of the garden, with the cup still full.

There was a country priest named George Herbert who died almost four hundred years ago, and he wrote a short poem that says all of this better than I can. It is a little conversation between Love — that is God — and a soul who feels too dirty to come in. Read it slowly:

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning If I lacked anything.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here: Love said, You shall be he. I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on Thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I?

Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame Go where it doth deserve. And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? My dear, then I will serve. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat. So I did sit and eat.

— George Herbert, "Love (III)" (1633)

The soul keeps insisting it is not good enough. Love keeps answering every excuse with kindness. And in the end the soul stops arguing and sits down and eats. That is what it looks like when you finally let yourself be loved — not earning your seat at the table, only letting the One who set it welcome you to it.