John Eldredge - Eldredge 3 in 1: Sacred Romance; Waking the Dead; Desire

THE SACRED ROMANCE

DESIRE

WAKING THE DEAD

JOHN ELDREDGE

The Sacred Romance 1997 by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge
Desire 2000 and 2007 by John Eldredge. Formerly published as The Journey of Desire: Searching
for the Life Weve Only Dreamed Of.
Waking the Dead 2003 by John Eldredge

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Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NLT are from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation. 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are from THE NEW KING JAMES VERSION. 1982 by Thomas Nelson Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked The Message are from The Message by Eugene H. Peterson. 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NRSV are from the NEW REVISED STANDARD VERSION of the Bible. 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE. The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the KING JAMES VERSION.

Scripture quotations marked Moffatt are from The Bible: James Moffatt Translation by James A. R. Moffatt. 1950, 1952, 1953, 1954, by James A. R. Moffatt.

ISBN: 978-1-4002-8018-6

Printed in the United States of America
08 09 10 11 12 QW 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

The Sacred
ROMANCE

CONTENTS

DESIRE

CONTENTS

Waking the Dead

The Sacred
ROMANCE

Drawing Closer to the
Heart of God

The Lost Life of the Heart

Thirsty hearts are those whose longings have been wakened by the touch of God within them.

A. W. Tozer

SOME YEARS into our spiritual journey, after the waves of anticipation that mark the beginning of any pilgrimage have begun to ebb into lifes middle years of service and busyness, a voice speaks to us in the midst of all we are doing. There is something missing in all of this, it suggests. There is something more.

The voice often comes in the middle of the night or the early hours of morning, when our hearts are most unedited and vulnerable. At first, we mistake the source of this voice and assume it is just our imagination. We fluff up our pillow, roll over, and go back to sleep. Days, weeks, even months go by and the voice speaks to us again: Arent you thirsty? Listen to your heart. There is something missing.

We listen and we are aware of... a sigh. And under the sigh is something dangerous, something that feels adulterous and disloyal to the religion we are serving. We sense a passion deep within that threatens a total disregard for the program we are living; it feels reckless, wild. Unsettled, we turn and walk quickly away, like a woman who feels more than she wants to when her eyes meet those of a man not her husband.

We tell ourselves that this small, passionate voice is an intruder who has gained entry because we have not been diligent enough in practicing our religion. Our pastor seems to agree with this assessment and exhorts us from the pulpit to be more faithful. We try to silence the voice with outward activity, redoubling our efforts at Christian service. We join a small group and read a book on establishing a more effective prayer life. We train to be part of a church evangelism team. We tell ourselves that the malaise of spirit we feel even as we step up our religious activity is a sign of spiritual immaturity and we scold our heart for its lack of fervor.

Sometime later, the voice in our heart dares to speak to us again, more insistently this time. Listen to methere is something missing in all this. You long to be in alove affair, an adventure. You were made for something more. You know it.

When the young prophet Samuel heard the voice of God calling to him in the night, he had the counsel from his priestly mentor, Eli, to tell him how to respond. Even so, it took them three times to realize it was God calling. Rather than ignoring the voice, or rebuking it, Samuel finally listened.

In our modern, pragmatic world we often have no such mentor, so we do not understand it is God speaking to us in our heart. Having so long been out of touch with our deepest longing, we fail to recognize the voice and the One who is calling to us through it. Frustrated by our hearts continuing sabotage of a dutiful Christian life, some of us silence the voice by locking our heart away in the attic, feeding it only the bread and water of duty and obligation until it is almost dead, the voice now small and weak. But sometimes in the night, when our defenses are down, we still hear it call to us, oh so faintlya distant whisper. Come morning, the new days activities scream for our attention, the sound of the cry is gone, and we congratulate ourselves on finally overcoming the flesh.

Others of us agree to give our heart a life on the side if it will only leave us alone and not rock the boat. We try to lose ourselves in our work, or get a hobby (either of which soon begin to feel like an addiction); we have an affair, or develop a colorful fantasy life fed by dime-store romances or pornography. We learn to enjoy the juicy intrigues and secrets of gossip. We make sure to maintain enough distance between ourselves and others, and even between ourselves and our own heart, to keep hidden the practical agnosticism we are living now that our inner life has been divorced from our outer life. Having thus appeased our heart, we nonetheless are forced to give up our spiritual journey because our heart will no longer come with us. It is bound up in the little indulgences we feed it to keep it at bay.

Losing Heart

The life of the heart is a place of great mystery. Yet we have many expressions to help us express this flame of the human soul. We describe a person without compassion as heartless, and we urge him or her to have a heart. Our deepest hurts we call heartaches. Jilted lovers are brokenhearted. Courageous soldiers are bravehearted. The truly evil are black-hearted and saints have hearts of gold. If we need to speak at the most intimate level, we ask for a heart-to-heart talk. Lighthearted is how we feel on vacation. And when we love someone as truly as we may, we love with all our heart. But when we lose our passion for life, when a deadness sets in which we cannot seem to shake, we confess, My hearts just not in it.