I recently listened to an old country song that I haven’t heard in a long time. It came out the year I graduated high school—Bonnie Rait’s ballad “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” It’s a beautiful melody with absolutely depressing lyrics. It’s a about a woman who keeps going back into the arms of a man that she knows doesn’t love her. And she says,
“I can’t make you love me if you don’t
You can’t make your heart feel something it won’t
Here in the dark, in these final hours
I will lay down my heart and I’ll feel the power
But you won’t, no you won’t
‘Cause I can’t make you love me, if you don’t.”
Like I said, absolutely depressing and dark. And yet not altogether unfamiliar to us. Countless people will have at least one experience of unrequited love before marriage as a young person or perhaps as a young adult—when you love someone but they don’t love you back. Perhaps it’s affection for someone who never had the same affection for you. Or maybe there was initially some mutual affection, but then one or the other’s love eventually goes cold. It’s a desperate and vulnerable feeling because the heart is a curious thing. You can’t make someone feel affection when love goes cold or when it never kindles to begin with.
We know what this experience is in love, but how many of us have given due consideration to this experience when it comes to ultimate things—spiritual things? If you can’t make someone love you, would you have any better luck at making them love God? If they are indifferent toward God or if they are in open hostility against Christ, is there anything that you can do by yourself to transform their loathing into love?
What about in your own heart? If you in your own heart are indifferent toward Christ or maybe even have contempt in your heart toward God and his ways, is there anything you can do to make yourself feel differently about Him? What would need to happen to you to make yourself feel differently about Him?
Jesus faces this kind of indifference and hostility the day after his feeding of the five thousand in John 6:36-51. After the miracle, an undisclosed number of the multitude who ate the loaves and fish followed Jesus all the way over to Capernaum to seek more food from him. They missed the point of why Jesus fed them in the first place. He gave them bread not so that they would continually follow him around looking to get bread from him. He gave them bread as a sign of the true bread which the Father gives to them out of heaven, and in verse 35 he identifies that true bread as himself: “I am the bread of life.” But the people don’t get it and they persist in unbelief.
The whole scene raises the question who can come to Jesus? These people saw Jesus’ signs with their own eyes and heard Jesus’s teaching with their own ears. If they aren’t coming to Christ, then who can?
[Listen to the rest of the sermon below at the Apple or Spotify podcasts.]
