Romantic Love Is Not Enough

During his surf exploration in Bali, Ian met Annabel, a beautiful French girl. Caught up in what felt like ultimate love, he re-organized his trip around her. After an electrifying start, the romance all came crashing down a short time later. Annabel had personal issues, Ian reacted badly, and accidentally snuffed out the flame of love in Annabel’s heart. The loss devastated.

Ian who returned to his surf adventure licking his wounds. Ian’s story reminds us that romantic love tends to over-promise and under-deliver. But why?

Read John 4:4-18.

Yesterday we learned how we tend to replace God in our lives with lesser things. Here’s a woman who does just that. She has had a string of five serious love relationships (v16-18). She is looking for love in all the wrong places. Jesus skillfully uses her daily trip to the well as a metaphor of her insatiable soul-thirst, and then He points to Himself as the spring of water. He alone can satisfy her (v10-15). To drink from Christ is to have ‘a spring of living water bubbling up to eternal life’ (v13).

The modern world’s most popular idol, the place we most commonly turn to as a substitute for God, is romantic love. Of course romantic love is a gift from God, but the moment we put the weight of worship on it, it is doomed to let us down.

When we deify a person in our heart, we crush them under the weight of our expectations. The euphoria which so often boosts us into a new relationship inevitably subsides. The reality of our and their ordinariness and sinfulness inevitably returns. There’s no person who can truly complete and secure us, or satisfy the depth of our being. That is God’s ability alone. It’s as though Jesus says to the woman, and Ian, and to each of us, ‘Nothing and no-one but Me can satisfy the deepest chambers of your heart’.

Have you ever made the mistake of idolizing a person romantically? Why not take a moment to turn away from anything or anyone that may be a potential idol in your life by confessing it to God and worshipping him as your ultimate source?