Growing Closer to Christ Requires Intentional, Active Love

Every marriage reaches a point where one spouse could just stop trying, and nobody outside the house would notice for a good long while. The dishes still get washed. The bills still get paid. The anniversary dinner still happens, right on schedule. But the effort to actually know each other, to pursue each other, to keep choosing one another – that can quietly stop while everything else keeps running on momentum.

Scripture says that’s the exact picture God gave us for our relationship with Jesus. Nobody drifts into a strong marriage by accident, and nobody drifts into a strong walk with Christ that way either. The same laws that govern a healthy marriage govern a healthy walk with Him. Passive effort produces passive results. Every time.

You Can Drift Without Ever Technically Leaving

A believer can keep every outward habit of the faith and still be spiritually coasting. Church attendance, tithing, staying out of the obvious sins – none of it requires a growing love for Christ, only a maintained routine. That’s the uncomfortable part. You can look entirely faithful from a distance and still be running on fumes up close.

Think of the couple married thirty years who still make the anniversary reservation but haven’t had a real conversation in months. Nothing’s technically wrong. Nothing’s technically right, either. Jesus said something almost identical to the church at Ephesus – a congregation that was doctrinally sound, hardworking, and patient in suffering, and yet He still had this against them:

But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. [Revelation 2:4]

Notice what didn’t slip. Their theology stayed intact. Their work ethic stayed intact. What slipped was the love itself – the part nobody grades on a church attendance chart. That’s the drift we’re talking about, and it’s a lot easier to fall into than most of us want to admit.

Scripture Doesn’t Compare This to a Business Arrangement – It Compares It to a Marriage

God didn’t pick an employment contract or a membership card as the picture for how Christ relates to His people. He picked a marriage – the most intimate, most demanding, most actively pursued relationship a human being can enter. Paul makes the comparison explicit:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. [Ephesians 5:25-27]

That’s not passive love. That’s a love that gives itself up, that acts to cleanse, that works toward a specific outcome. Christ’s love for us is relentlessly active – and the relationship He’s built with that kind of love was never meant to be answered with a shrug on our end. Marriage language cuts both ways. If He pursues us like a groom, we’re invited to respond like a bride who actually wants the marriage to thrive, not one just showing up for the photos.

What Active Love for Christ Actually Looks Like

Active love for Christ looks less like a feeling you wait to arrive and more like a decision you keep making. It’s the difference between praying the same three sentences out of habit and actually stopping to tell Him what’s really going on in your heart that day. It’s opening Scripture looking for Him specifically, not just checking a box that says “read Bible today.” It’s noticing the sin you brushed past last week and actually dealing with it instead of letting it become furniture in the room.

I’ve caught myself doing the spiritual equivalent of nodding along in a conversation I’m not really in. Singing the words without meaning a syllable of them. Reading a chapter and closing the Bible without remembering a sentence of it thirty seconds later. That’s not sin, exactly – it’s worse in a way, because it’s invisible and infectious. Nobody confronts you for it. You have to catch yourself.

Active love takes initiative. It asks, “What does He actually want from me this week,” instead of waiting for a crisis to force the question. It sets aside time on purpose instead of hoping a spare five minutes shows up. It repents fast instead of letting distance become the new normal. None of that is complicated. It’s just effort – the same ordinary, unglamorous effort that keeps any real relationship alive.

Passive Vertical Relationships Fail for the Same Reason Passive Marriages Fail

A marriage doesn’t stay strong because both husband and wife once said “I do.” It stays strong because both keep saying it, in a thousand small ways, for the rest of their lives. Our relationship with Christ works the same way. Salvation isn’t earned by effort – that part is finished, and finished completely. But the ongoing closeness, the depth of the relationship, and the sense of walking with Him rather than just believing facts about Him – that grows in direct proportion to the effort we actually put in.

James doesn’t frame this as automatic, either. He frames it as a response that has to be initiated:

Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. [James 4:8]

“Draw near” is a verb aimed at us. God’s promise to draw near in return is real, and it’s certain – but it follows our move, not the other way around. A believer who never draws near shouldn’t be surprised when the relationship feels distant. That’s not God withholding Himself. That’s just what happens when a relationship runs on passivity.

The Choice Is Yours Today, Not Someday

Every believer faces this choice, not once, but daily – and putting it off is, itself, a form of choosing the passive road. The command was never optional or vague:

“And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). All of it. Heart, soul, strength – the whole self, actively engaged, not coasting on old commitments made years ago.

You don’t need a dramatic gesture to start. You need today’s five minutes of honest prayer instead of the recycled version. You need this week’s decision to actually deal with the sin you’ve been managing instead of confessing. You need one real conversation with Him instead of another polite check-in. Do that tomorrow, too. And the day after. That’s what an active, thriving marriage with Christ looks like – not a single grand moment, but a life of small ones, chosen on purpose, over and over again.