Chapter 4 - "Face to Face with Love"

This chapter in the book I am reading, it talks about growing our desire to fall in love with Christ. Dana brings in the story of Cinderella and how the Prince loves Cinderella no matter who she is, what she looks like or who her family is. No matter what our past looks like, God is in love with us and he desires us to have an intimate relationship with him. In return we need to accept his love and desire more of it. In order to have that growing desire, we need to fill ourselves completely with him. She says "And this is a progressive journey for we can only receive as much as our hearts are enlarged to take in."
An example I thought of was when someone eats. When a person is eating excessively, their stomachs are enlarged and over time, they can take in more food because their stomachs grew and they have a bigger desire to eat. Now I'm in no way saying that overeating is what we need to do. I am simply saying that we need to treat our hearts like the stomach. As we take in Gods love and grow in his word, our hearts will have more capacity to love and to share what we have learned with others.
Something else that this chapter talked about was our willingness to come close with God. That is extremely important to realize. Recently I was talking with a guy that I was interested in but we had a talk about God and I asked this guy if he was involved in a good christian group and he said no. You could just tell how apathetic he was and was not in the state of committing to God. He wanted to just have fun. It clicked in my head that there was no way I could be with him and I could not force him to get close to God so we could try to date. Forcing someone into a situation that they are not wanting to be in is only going to draw them further away and our purpose as believers is to give them advice, love and support. We cant make them feel bad for not doing something. That's not a good witnessing tool. Let them do things when they realize it needs to be done. If they go only for you or for somebody else, its pointless and a strain on them and all they will want to do is run.
So that chapter was really informative for me and I am really enjoying this book. Please go get this book if you have not read it. Dana Candler "Deep unto Deep". It is a challenging read but its totally worth it!