Authors-choice: Hope & Revival

There is a song from a famous Broadway musical about a poor Jewish family living in Russia in a small village in the early 1900s. The man and his wife are in the middle of seeing their five daughters marry and go off to start their own families. One day they are alone in the house and the man in the midst of his nostalgia at saying goodbye to his daughters, asks his wife, if she loves him. She is exasperated by the question and tells him to go inside and lie down. But he insists, he keeps asking: do you love me? But she won’t give him an answer. Finally she sings:
“For twenty-five years I’ve washed your clothes,
Cooked your meals, cleaned your house,
Given you children, milked the cow,
After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?”
Then they banter back and forth, and he keeps insisting, and finally she muses to herself:
“Do I love him? For twenty-five years I’ve lived with him, fought with him, starved with him… If that’s not love, what is?”
It’s an entertaining song, but it contains a deep truth. True love is more than feelings, true love is about giving oneself. The same goes for our love for Christ. If we want to become mature Christians and grow in wisdom and grace, it needs to become a real love that engages and affects our whole lives. To love Christ means to work hard building up his Kingdom. To love Christ means to work hard conquering our selfish, self-indulgent tendencies. To love Christ means to roll up our sleeves and get down to business.