Dannah Gresh One of the top selling youth authors under the age of forty, Dannah Gresh is best known for the best-selling And the Bride Wore White (Moody) and the Secret Keeper series (Moody/FamilyLife). She is the founder of Pure Freedom. Dannah, Bob, Lexi and Rob live in State College, PA with their wonder dog, Stormie the Labradoodle! They eagerly await the arrival of a new daughter from China.
Purity Loves Its Creator at Any Cost, Pursuing a Love Relationship with Jesus
Excerpted from “And the Bride Wore White”
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it. (Matthew 13:45-46)
I know only one thing that is free, and that is God’s loving forgiveness. But that short parable that Jesus told about the merchant and the pearl of great price says that to really pursue God, know God, and love God may require selling all that you have. God asks that we trade in all the fake pearls of our life to buy the real pearl. He says in Luke 14:33 that “any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.”
In my retreats, I give the girls who attend a price tag that says “Everything costs something. Some things cost everything.” We hear and tell testimonies about the cost of “fake pearls” in our lives.
Heidi, a pastor’s daughter in her mid-twenties, told about how her vibrant, wonderful relationship with her dad – a rare treasure these days – is blocked by a deep secret. She became sexual with a guy she “really loved,” and then he dumped her. In a heart-breaking, tear-stained night, she confessed it to the guy who is now her loving husband, but she cannot bring herself to tell her dad. It hurts that she has not told him because they are so close. But she knows that telling him one day, which she plans to do, will also bring incredible pain.
One girl, Kylie, told how she hated the label of being “innocent” so she started being flirtatious to be more fun. One of her good friends stopped her and said, “I miss innocent Kylie. I liked her better. She was real.” Kylie left the retreat knowing she was going to have to set some things straight and it was not going to be easy. In fact, she was expecting it to cost her some friendships.
Mikayla had been running with some girls with bad attitudes in her youth group. They joked around and took lightly the things of God. Right before I conducted a retreat at her church, she began to experience real spiritual revival in her life. Then she and her friends came to the retreat. As she melted into God’s arms at the retreat, her friends began to get nervous. In bed, they cruelly taunted her and teased her as others watched. Running with the wrong crowd was costing Mikayla something as she began to make right choices.
The costs of “fake pearls” can be great. Giving your body away might someday need to be paid for in the form of pregnancy, AIDS, or some other STD. Giving your heart away could end in heartbreak and spiritual anemia.
Even seemingly “good” things can be fake pearls if they haven’t had time to be cultured into the real thing. My relationship with Bob was like that. So we “sold” it to pursue God’s best. The cost was great. During our breakup, Bob’s journal had many entries like this…
My dearest Dannah, being without you takes a lot of getting used to. Since this is my journal let me be completely honest. There is a large part of me that doesn’t miss you right now; a large part that feels no emotion, no loss. However, there is also a large part of me that feels tremendous loss, almost a loss of hope…There seems to be no life without you, Dannah. I have come to depend completely upon you. The absence of deep roots of God in my life is an unexplainable mystery. My heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. I am the least and yet there is hope. Sad thing is that I can’t envision it anymore. The light has gone out. It is dark. Love, Bobby
I never saw that journal entry until we were engaged. But I had written several much like it.
9/27/87
God is sovereign. Jesus is enough. Those are my spiritual goals. The day I believe in them completely is the day I am ready for a relationship. That day seems far away. Lord, give me patience.
10/10/87
My head knows the path that I must take, but my heart is one tough muscle. Today in chapel Joseph Stowell said, “God will not do by miracle what I am to do by obedience.” I sure wish He could do this by miracle. Obeying is very painful.
1/19/88
“Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee” Isaiah 26.3 (KJV)
Tonight I write only what God is saying to me…not out of fear that someone would read what I feel in my heart, but rather because I am afraid to articulate feelings I might have to destroy.
Today, those journal entries are proof of how much our relationship was more important to us than our God and of how we were sacrificing something precious so that our relationship with God could be our most priceless possession.
On December 6, I attended a Sunday school class taught by Bob. We were still not together, but my heart was healing and becoming stronger in the Lord. In the class, he read Matthew 13:45-46 which says, “The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.” His journal from the night before outlined his message that day.
The Lord has taught me much in reading His Word tonight. They can be summed up in five statements:
1. There is a pearl of great price.
2. We are to seek it.
3. We are commanded to purchase it.
4. It costs us everything.
5. It is worth the price.
I must come to the point where I stop the payments on the fake pearls in my life and start making the payment on the real pearl. God costs everything. He is worth the price.
Bob had come to realize that if he wasn’t willing to relinquish all the fake pearls in his life, he would never fully understand the full blessing of God’s goodness.
Giving up each other had been such a portrait of that verse in our lives. I had watched so many of my girlfriends return from Thanksgiving break with huge engagement rings on their fingers. I smiled through my pain and congratulated them. I had many lonely, quiet Friday and Saturday nights. I had to confess my negligence to several friends and ask them to let me back into their lives. Bob and I had several classes together that quarter, and seeing him every day only resurfaced the pain I had worked at alleviating in my prayers.
During that time, my theme was “God is sovereign. Jesus is enough.” Until I felt that in my heart, I had determined not to date Bob or anyone else.
Eleven days after Bob taught that Sunday school class on the pearl of great price, I went to my mailbox to find an envelope with my name scrawled in his handwriting. In it, he wrote:
“Matthew 13:45-46 – The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.”
He costs everything. He is worth the price.
You cost everything. You’re worth the price.
I did not realize it, but he had begun to understand that there would be one relationship between him and a woman, which was a portrait of the condition of his love for God. He was having a hard time waiting, but he was sending me some of his desire that I might wait along with him for God to culture us. We both had a lot of loving to do in our relationship with God before we would be ready to love each other. We continued the long process of waiting.
