Day 12 Daniel Fast Devotional - The Pain Of Love - by Josh Christophersen

“If it doesn’t break your heart it isn’t love. If it doesn’t break your heart it’s not enough.”
(Jon Foreman)

Love is risky business.

The more you give your heart to someone, the more power they have to hurt you.

And that’s what keeps so many away from love. The pain of love is hard to take.

When we give our heart to someone, and they rip it out, throw it on the ground, and stomp on it, we wonder if it’s really worth it. The pain says, “I’ll never open up my heart again. It’s too dangerous.” And yet something inside us knows that to love any other way just won’t cut it.

It’s not enough.

As much as it hurt, we know that our heart was never more alive than when we loved with it wide open.

Trying to play it safe, keeps us from the only thing that is truly enough to satisfy. It keeps us from real love.

We’re faced with the fact that love hurts. Love is painful. True love will eventually break our hearts.

But the deeper we go into love, and the more our heart breaks in the process, the closer we get to the heart of God, whose heart breaks daily for mankind. No one in the history of the world has had his love rejected more than Jesus. When we love to the point of a broken heart, we enter into a different kind of fellowship with God, one that the bible calls “the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings” (Phil 3:10).

Never forget that there’s purpose in your pain.

“For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” (2 Cor 4:17)

And some day our love pains will come to an end. They’re momentary.

And even if they don’t seem worth it today, some day, when the final trumpet blows, when we see him face to face, and we hear that we’ve loved well, it will all be worth it.

“You’ll come again with a shout,
like a thief in the night you’ll come riding on clouds
Finally the voice I have followed for life
has a glorious face that is lit up with light
And you’ll come for me,
No more pain, peace,
No more fear, release
just lost and consumed with my glorious King”
(Charlie Hall from the song “Come For Me”)

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” Ps 51:17

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