Today in our Thirty-three Day Challenge we continue to work on taking out the trash…

Day two:
Today I want you to put away the love stories, the romance novels… they. got. to. go. Yes, even Christian romance novels. I am a woman who loves books, so I won’t encourage you to dump these novels in the trash as I did the cheap magazines, but for the next thirty-two days I challenge you to put them out of sight. Don’t read them.

Then if after this challenge you can read the ones you have without grieving the Holy Spirit within you then by all means keep them, but if after this fast from them, you pick them up to read and your new starved and fresh eyes sees them in a different way… by all means trash them.

Now my beloved, we are women. Our hearts are drawn to the romance novel because we were created for love. We were created to be appreciated and honored and admired. We were “presented” to Adam in the garden by our Heavenly Father.

When we are married to our husbands we are presented to them. The doors are swung open and we step out into his view and we search his eyes for “that look”, you know the one… the one that says, WOW!!!

We were created to be swept off our feet by our knight in shining armor… to be fought for and desired more than any other… to be worth dying for… we yearn for another to love us like this… by choice… not because they are related to us.

So we read these romance novels and we picture we are the heroine and we get to create our man in our image…

There lies the problem.

“While most women don’t lust after men’s bodies (although there are certainly exceptions to this rule), we cross the line in sexual integrity in other ways. When we engage in emotional affairs, mental fantasies, and unhealthy comparisons,we are crossing the line of sexual integrity and undermining God’s plan to grant us ultimate sexual and emotional fulfillment with (our current our future) husband. We need to make a covenant with the eyes of our hearts not to look at other people (real or imagined) to fulfill our emotional needs and desires in ways that compromise our sexual integrity, whether we are married or single.”

~ Shannon Ethridge (quote from Every Woman’s Battle, pg 26)

Our God knows our desire. He created it. He is the ultimate lovesick fool… He is the One that has woven His whole love story into our lives. He is the One who willingly has come to rescue His bride… and yes He is the One who will come as our Knight in shining armor. He is the One who sweeps us off our feet and takes us in His arms and wisks us away to Paradise and showers us with undying love and devotion. He is the one who looks at us and goes, WOW!

 

If you want to read a romance story read the Song of Solomon.

There are three main characters in this book of Scripture, the woman, the man, and the chorus group 🙂 Read through the chapters of this book and discern who is speaking when.
I write in my Bible so I took a pink colored pencil and colored a circle over the number of the verses that was the woman speaking and used a blue for the man and green for the chorus group.

Spend today meditating on this verse

 

Oh precious one, your love is to be awoken by your husband or your future husband and all love before that belongs to Christ. It does not belong to a fictional male but female created characters. These romance novels introduce you to the body of a man with the mind of a female. You are putting expectations on your current or future husband that they will never be able to measure up to. This will cause you to be weighted down in false disappointment in them and in your relationship.

It’s a false expectation…
It’s deception… and whose the father of that?

I know first hand the destruction that can come from these type of books. I began with Sweet Valley High and then by late Jr High I was reading Harlequin Romance novels. I had in my mind and head how this experience was to be. I had awakened my mind to an emotion my body and heart was not ready for.

It led me down a road of heartache and destruction that almost killed me emotionally, spiritually, and physically… It began little… but a little sin never satisfies… it only makes you crave for more. You seek sin like an addict seeks their next hit. You hate it, you hate yourself, but you keep thinking, keep convincing yourself, that this time will be different… this time will satisfy… but it never does and it never will.

Truth is what is real.
Truth is what will satisfy.
Jesus is truth.
God’s Word is truth.

If you want to get caught up in a love story, get caught up in the one that will be told until all eternity.

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