Can anybody tell me who Nada Surf is?
I mean, if it weren’t for Relient K’s cover of their song “Inside of Love,” I never would have heard of them. But as I listened to that song on the way to work today, one lyric in particular caught my ear.
Watching terrible TV, it kills all thought
Getting spacier than an astronaut
Making out with people I hardly know or like
I can’t believe what I do late at nightI wanna know what it’s like
On the inside of love
I’m standing at the gates
I see the beauty above
We’ve all been in places where we’re searching for something that fulfilled us, that showed us what we really needed. Perhaps one of man’s greatest needs is love.
In “Inside of Love,” the singer is searching for love. He’s been on the outside his whole life, he says, and he wants to be on the inside, he wants to see what it’s really like.
Well, my friend, there’s an answer for that.
It struck me this morning as I read Matthew 2. It’s the story of Jesus’ birth. Joseph, His earthly father, is visited in a dream. The angel quotes a prophecy that says Jesus is to be called “Immanuel,” or “God with us.”
It’s a popular idea of Christmas, but do we really sit down and think about what that means? God with us! There’s a couple things it means.
First: God is now with us. We were separated from God, distant, because of our sin. But when Jesus comes, it means we can have a relationship with God unhindered by sin’s eternal sting. We’ll still struggle in that relationship, but our eternity is secured if we confess and believe.
Second: God literally came down to earth to be with us. Jesus is God, and He came to earth to live perfectly, die and live again so that relationship we talked about in the last point could actually happen. How insane is that? I mean, seriously. Take stock of that for a minute. Do we get that? Do we get the depths of grace that exist in that reality?
That’s what it’s like to be on the inside of love, Nada Surf. It’s joy, relief, peace.
By A Ransomed Soul 