I appreciate the music of “MercyMe.” I believe the band can relate to men with both lyrics and style, and their music affects me deeply. They have a new song out entitled, “Say I Won’t.” When I saw the word “rocket” in the lyrics and heard the song, the rest was history. Please listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2IHibLEYdI
The song opens with, “Today / It all begins / I’m seeing my life for the very first time / Through a different lens / Yesterday / I didn’t understand / Driving 35 with the rocket inside / Didn’t know what I had.” My interpretation: this guy is seeing his life with Jesus in a new way. He has a rocket inside.
The song goes on, “While I’ve been waiting to live / My life’s been waiting on me.” But now the guy is learning to fly spiritually. He dares others, “Say, I won’t” … “Not enough / Is what I’ve been told / But it must be a lie / ‘Cause the Spirit inside says I’m so much more / So let them say what they want / Oh, I dare them to try.”
Men, there comes a time in your spiritual life when you need to come to terms with the rocket within you. It’s your deepest longings for God. It’s your passions and desires. Yes, it even involves your sexual energy. Visualize all this as “the tiger in your tank.” Conservative, biblical guys like me sometimes have difficulty pointing the rocket heavenward and taming the tiger. Like the song says, “Not enough / Is what I’ve been told / But it must be a lie.”
I must confess that I’m reluctant even to write about sexual passions and passion for God. Why? Because of some of my own struggles, plus misconceptions Christian men tend to have about their own desires and fantasies. For me, however, only love can tame the tiger. I am coming to peace with this energy as I experience more of God’s deep love for me. “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Ps 63:1). Like the song, “’Cause the Spirit inside says I’m so much more / So let them say what they want / Oh, I dare them to try…”
You and I have sexual energy in our souls that is mingled with our spiritual desire for God. Yes, passions have eros (erotic) energy. But can you believe that God’s agape is able to come into your heart and redeem eros, purify it with resurrection power, and untwist all the distorted images? “This is how God showed his love among us. He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him” (I John 4:9 cf. Luke 4:4 MSG).
Christopher West in his book “Fill These Hearts” has helped. We have three choices: 1) Starvation diet: Pleasure is an evil to reject. I have lived under this cloud for years, 2) Fast food diet: Pleasure is an idol to indulge. Simply let the tiger roar. 3) Banquet: Pleasure is a beacon that points to heaven. For me this has meant allowing Jesus to transform my soul, using agape love to direct eros.
As I get older, I find more and more that my deepest desires are for God. The more I die with Jesus to distorted eros, the more his agape purifies the eros: “While I’ve been waiting to live/ My life’s been waiting on me.”
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