A Cry for the Gospel

It.............has been a while.

Haha. I've actually had several blog ideas in mind for quite some time; I just haven't taken the time to sit down and compose them. I'm hoping to do that over the next few days. For today, my thoughts are fairly simple.

{photo source}

Saturday morning I was listening to Mumford and Sons' "Sigh No More" album while getting ready for the day, and although I've enjoyed the title track more than 30 times (according to my itunes play count) and even blogged about it once before, the last few lines of the song suddenly captured my attention in a way they never had before:

Love, it will not betray you, dismay or enslave you, it will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be 

There is a design, an alignment, a cry of my heart to see
The beauty of love as it was made to be

After spending vast amounts of time this year pondering the Gospel as told in its entirety through the simple elements of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration, it finally occurred to me that these final lines of "Sigh No More" seem as though they could portray a cry for the Gospel.

Only in Christ can we find a love that does not betray, dismay, or enslave us but rather truly sets us free and makes us more like the people we were made to be. Or to put it in different terms, Christ's love is the sole thing that can transform us as human beings and restore us to God's original design -- that which only Adam and Eve ever experienced after God created them, before they rebelled and sin marred (not erased, but marred) the image of God in humanity for the rest of history.

In the final lines I'm reminded of the longing all mankind has for transcendence, for something greater than what we experience in our current reality. I believe God has designed us this way, giving us an intrinsic desire to experience love the way it was meant to be, which we somehow know is not the sort of human love we experience now -- even the very best of human love. It is this longing that only the Gospel can fill.

Was this what Mumford and Sons had in mind when the song was written? I highly doubt these were their exact thoughts. I believe most artists prefer to leave interpretation up to the listener, and I happen to greatly respect that, so I would never claim that I've figured out "what they really meant" when they wrote these lyrics. But I do believe I see reflected here a glimpse of the desire God has built into each one of us, the desire that will only ever truly be filled through the Gospel.