As I look back on my life, every once in a while my musical tastes will wander back to listening to that wonderful style of music that most people love to hate, but that I came to love in High School: country music.
The time has come and my dial has been turned back to a local country station just a-blaring on the radio!
Sorry for all of you who don’t like the simple 3 chord songs that sing about a simpler world where everything is black and white, God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy…
(I swear I am going to stop making song references here in a second.)
Every time I come back around to the country ways, there is a song or two that catches my ear for the first time and something in it gets my head to thinking. This time around it has been the song, “The Difference” by Tyler Rich.
The basic idea of the song is that this guy wants to make sure that this girl knows that he doesn’t want to just be a friend, but rather that he actually does love her. The end of the chorus is,
Yeah, there’s a hell of a difference in saying three words or kinda just meaning two
And there’s a difference in “love ya” and “I love you”
For some reason this song has worked its way into my thinking and made me consider how I interact with the One whom I should love the most. Do I really love God? Or do I just limp my way through a relationship with Him because I know that it is the best thing for me? Is my relationship with God about how much I care for Him, or is it just based off of what I can get out of this whole thing? Do I take the words of Deuteronomy 6:4-5 as if they are something that I can make a reality in my life, or do I just think they are nice words to say and hear?
4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.
Do I really love God with my everything, or do I just limp through in a “love ya” type relationship?
In Matthew 13:44 Jesus tells a story about what the Kingdom of Heaven is like:
44 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.”
I want to have the kind of Joy that would cause me to go and sell everything I have for the sake of getting God. I want to Love God with all of my being. I want my life to be built on something extraordinary. And so, I am going to continue to search out who God is that I may fall more in love with Him; I am going to look for the Kingdom of Heaven where darkness has reigned that I might find joy in discovering another place where God is working; and I will mean what I say when I close a prayer with these five words: We love you, Jesus, Amen.