Yes. Love always pines and yearns when the beloved is absent, and we-as those who love Jesus in the time between His advents-are in every way subject to such longing. Yet this brings us to a dilemma-a difficulty with a certain sting to it. The dilemma is that though our minds know He was here and then taken up to heaven-and our mouths may give testimony to being His Bride awaiting His return-the longing of our hearts for Him is disproportionate to the time we are in. The difficulty is that though we claim deep love for Jesus, the degree of our satisfaction in the way things are indicates we might be guilty of a grave error in the laws of love. Yes, we do love Jesus. But if we love Him so, shall we not also miss Him greatly in His absence? Shall we not long for His appearing because He is the one we can’t live without? The sting that we must receive comes when we put this question to ourselves: could it be that our lack of mourning for Him might be significantly tied to our lack of truly knowing Him?
The fact is that we long for proximity and despise estrangement from those we love. If we truly love another, an aching and mourning must accompany any separation from that beloved one. Otherwise, there might be good grounds for questioning if it was truly love at all or if we actually know the one we “love.”
If we are willing in humility to bring our own hearts into question, we might find that we are the ones violating love’s laws. The very thing that Jesus searches for, the very thing that He refuses to come back without, is a rare find in all the earth. It is the heart of a yearning Bride in deep affection for an absent Bridegroom and in continual longing for His appearing, not just occasional pining.
In his book, Systemic Theology, Wayne Grudem articulates this dilemma well:
Do Christians in fact eagerly long for Christ’ return? The more Christians are caught up in enjoying the good things of this life, and the more they neglect genuine Christian fellowship with Christ, the less they will long for His return…To some extent, then, the degree to which we actually long for Christ’ return is a measure of the spiritual condition of our own lives at the moment(1093).
Just something to think about.