Jesus My Valentine (Hardcover)

The greatest gift the world has is God's love for us. The love God has for us precipitated God sending us Jesus to bring us back into a loving fellowship with him. With all the hate, evil, and pain that exist in the world, humanity cannot forget the power of love and the sovereignty of God. God is love, and since God is sovereign, love still reigns not only in the hearts of men and women but in the heart of God, and it is inextricably interwoven within our salvation story. Our Christian salvific story is one of love; it is a narrator of love. We were made to love and made to be loved. We were made in the image of God, and God being love denotes we were made to love, be loved, and desire a relationship with those we love. God desires a relationship with us because he loves us. The love of the Father is manifested through the deeds of Jesus Christ in the Father's desired to be back in relationship with his creation. The love God has for his creation must be dramatize and visualized in how we love one another and relate to those we love. God's will need to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Henrietta Hunter's Jesus My Valentine explores how interconnected the love we experience in our personal lives (i.e. romantically, platonically) to our love for God. She demonstrates this by outlining how the love and passion that the lover in Songs of Solomon possesses for his love is an extended analogy to God's love for us and how God's people ought to pursue him as their lover. Her work calls readers to experience God's love through the way we experience love with others; reciprocally, the way readers experience love with one another is the same way readers are to experience being in love with God. Henrietta introduced the magnitude of love on a horizontal level, which is eye level, a level reader can grasp and then raise our spiritual conscious to above-eye level, which is a vertical love. Jesus My Valentine argues both are necessary to truly make Jesus our valentine. It is when Jesus become our valentine that we come to know true love and the true meaning of true love, realizing it is impossible for Jesus to be your valentine without the love of people and the people without Jesus being your valentine is not possible. Henrietta's journey within Jesus My Valentine takes us from the historicity of Valentine's Day to the evolution of how we contemporarily celebrate Valentine's Day. She matriculates from a historical view of Valentine's Day to a theological view of Valentine's Day, moving from an anthropocentric (human) view of love to a theocentric (God) view of love. Jesus My Valentine calls readers to replicate the wooing they extend on Valentines for their lovers to how readers approach and love on Jesus. Henrietta outlines how readers are to love Jesus and make him their valentine in very practical ways. If you asked Henrietta how to make Jesus your valentine? According to this text, she would suggest it is like the way a wife knows her husband and the way a husband gets to know his wife. It is a love that comes from a knowledge that is only generated by living together, by responding to each other's daily interests and by the needs, and by listening and being present.