Deep Unto Deep - Week #14 (Final Week)

This is our final week in Deep Unto Deep. I’ll be taking a break (except for an occasional greeting perhaps) until January 11 when we will start with the first chapter of the classic, The Pursuit of God, by A.W. Tozer.

Chapter 12 – Consumed in Love’s Fire

This final chapter begins, “The journey of the heart does not ever reach an ending point.” Even throughout eternity we will be growing and learning. “…for all the ages to come, Love will unfold and unfold…Our lives on the earth are but the womb of the life to come.”

And so we should expect that our present lives will be full of ebb and flow and will be passing through different seasons in our maturing process.

The author asks the question: “What does a heart on the earth aflame with the love of God look like in full blaze?” Acknowledging that every heart is unique in its expression of this, she goes on to suggest some general realities of a heart ablaze with God’s love:
1. “No longer our own, we belong to Another…No longer is any sacrifice too great or any reward held in higher importance than the reward of the love of Christ…we would give for Love all the wealth of our house and…possessions, utterly despising any recognition of our sacrifice (Song of Sol. 8:7; Phil. 3:8).”
2. We reach a point of no return. This doesn’t mean we don’t need to grow more but simply that we’ve been too ruined by His love to ever return to that which previously brought pleasure outside of Him. (Jn. 6:68; Psa. 73:25,26)

Eph. 3:17-19 is the Apostle Paul’s prayer that the Ephesians would experience the depth and height of God’s love unto the fullness of God.

“As He seizes our hearts with His magnificent closeness, He takes us to the heights of enjoyment and satisfaction in His word. He brings us to the mountaintops and wins our hearts forever by divine pleasure…Yet this is only part of Love’s communion. Along with the heights come also the depths…“When we began this journey, we had so many glorious aspirations and imagined that our way forward would be a continual ascension – a never-ending climb to higher heights of divine pleasure…”

Our idea of going “from glory to glory” is similar to Much Afraid in Hind’s Feet on High Places. She thought that the promise of the Shepherd to take her to the high places meant a straight shot up the mountain and was surprised and offended when He led her down and around in order to finally bring her to the heights.

But the Lord’s idea of going from “glory to glory” and from “strength to strength” and from “faith to faith” is as far removed from our idea as the heavens are from the earth. “As we move from the introductions of intimacy to the place of maturity, we find that He is truly moving us to complete abandonment, and…that is far more painful than we had imagined. We are surprised to find that with the heights of Love come the depths of Love. With the south winds come the north winds and with the mountain tops come the valleys. With the power of the resurrection comes the fellowship of suffering…”

In my personal journey, the fire of the depths is what has revealed how much mixture there is in my love for Him. Mixed in with sincere love for Him has been much natural and self-seeking love. Only the fire of difficulty and suffering can expose the mixture and burn out the dross so that what’s left is the real love of God in my heart.

This is the journey of the Shulammite in the Song of Solomon. The first half of the story is her relating with Him for what SHE will get out of the relationship; midway through the book, there’s a shift that takes place, and she now wants to be with Him for HIS sake. She begins to see from His perspective and what HE will get out of their relationship. She is now walking in “mature love” for Him and would give all for His love, no matter the cost.

Now it’s not only that He is my Reward but that I am His reward, and I want Him to have all of me, the reward of His sufferings (Isa. 53:11). And as I catch vision for this, it compels me to give all to see that He has all of me, but it also compels me to give all for the sake of His getting His reward in many others because I want Him to have all that He died for.

Later in this chapter Dana Candler says and asks, “This God-Man encompasses the heights and the depths of Love’s extent within His very person…He is just as acquainted with sufferings as He is with conquering. The question to ask is, am I offended by Your meekness? Do I embrace Your prominence and shun Your lowliness? Have I received Your kingliness and rejected Your servanthood?...surely within the vastness of His personality, it is His meekness that we most stumble over. And it is this part of His heart that invites us to His fellowship of suffering…”

When we say “yes” to Him in the beginnings of our intimate walk with Him, He knows how to lead us perfectly into mature love; and no matter who it is that He’s watching over, His leadership will always include the depths as well as the heights. As we realize and acknowledge and accept this reality of His perfect leadership, we are able to keep saying “yes” to Him even when we can’t understand the divine reasoning in the way He’s leading us.

The chapter ends with a challenge to recognize that in the critical times we now live in before the Lord’s soon return, He is asking for nothing less than wholehearted response to Him. By His fiery Spirit, Jesus will have a lovesick Bride when He returns.

Holy Spirit of God, come and fan the flame of my heart afresh this holiday season before the new year. Awaken desire for Jesus within me that will empower me to say “no” to the seductions of this age and say “yes” to His invitation to Love. Do this over and over and over in and for me, I pray, for the sake of the Lamb who said “yes” to being crushed by the Father for my sake. Take my life afresh, Lord, and lead me into the fullness of God along with all of your saints…thank You!

The Lord be with you and show You His countenance and favor as you walk out of the old year and into the new in Him. God bless you!

Deep Unto Deep - Week #13

This week we are covering chapters 10 and 11.

Chapter 10 - Prisoners of Hope

The message of this chapter is intriguing to me; the author speaks of how it’s hope that keeps us clinging in seasons of silence and darkness in our walk with God. It’s like being in a “waterless pit” that’s too deep to get out of but is dry so you don’t drown in it.

“One of the scariest things about these prisons is that only one Person know where we are….we cannot explain its darkness to others. Though we yearn to leave our loneliness, no man is allowed to find us here and deliver us…We’re not allowed the comfort of company in these prisons, for they are reserved for God and the soul…One Person has led us here, and He alone can free us once again. Salvation belongs to the Lord (Ps. 3:8), and He is jealous to be the One Who delivers it to our door.”

She goes on to say that our comfort is found in the knowledge of God’s heart. We have asked to know and love Him more and these “prison sentences” are part of His answer.

The Hope that Sustains
“As we find ourselves in the prison sentences of the Lord, this hope (Col. 1:27) has gone ahead of us, entering the Presence beyond the veil. There it lives as a true reality, with our very souls attached to it…This Indwelling One is the Hope that we have as an anchor of our souls (Heb.6:19). In the deep of the darkest place, we have a living flame of fire within us anchoring us to the fiery Man Himself, and by this we know that he will once again come to us and unite us to Himself.”

Hope Deferred
Proverbs 13:12 says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire comes, it is a tree of life.”

So hope, which is what sustains us, is also that which causes heart sickness when it is deferred or delayed. The season of waiting for delayed fulfillment causes pain and a form of sickness but it helps keep the soul from “the deadened state of unbelief.”

“Though it weighs heavily upon us, this hope keeps us alive…This hope is an inward disturbance that refuses us the comfort of giving up. It keeps us alive by the warring of our members and the wrestling with truth that it provokes. Hope in God, in its deferred state, is as a sickness that gnaws within. But when the longing is answered, and the desire comes, we find in the place of this sickness a healthy tree of life.”

Just as Jesus said about Lazarus, “This sickness is not unto death”, so the sickness that comes from deferred/delayed hope is unto something much greater!

How true I have seen this to be in my life. Both in “smaller” issues and in the bigger issues, the fruit of having to wait on the Lord’s seeming silence or inaction is much greater and healthier than that which comes with immediate results. The deep work of purging and healing that happens in me when I have to wait for the manifestation of His answer is well worth the waiting period.


Chapter 11 – Seasons of Relevance

This is a beautiful chapter about the different seasons of our life. I heard someone say recently something like, “success is knowing what season you are in.” There’s a lot of truth to that. In nature, knowing what season is upon you helps you know how to live during that time of the year.

Dana speaks of “the seasons of winter and spring” but also of the “in between seasons.”

She opens the chapter with a reminder that the day will come, when this age is past, when we will “look with wonder at the times we thought were meaningless and see the grandeur of their significance in the wide scope of God’s call upon our lives…We will gasp to see what He was forming in us even in the dullest of days. Even the times we thought were utter loss because of our own failure, God will redeem and give beauty for ashes. Our responsibility was simply to say ‘yes’ to Him and to agree with the leadership of Jesus over our lives – even when we did not understand His ways.”

The Seasons of Winter and Spring

“The spring is for discovering. The winter is for remembering.”

What a great way to summarize these two seasons of life! All of us who are in Christ can identify with this, I believe. Just as in the natural realm of life, spring is when all the new life appears and there’s so much to experience: the colors, the smells, the sounds, the sights! Our expression, “spring fever,” is very descriptive of what happens as winter loosens its grip on the earth.

In contrast, winter is a time of quietness and seeming “deadness.” Recently we have gotten snow here in Minnesota, and it’s like a blanket that muffles the sounds and brings a sense of stillness and lack of life. Of course, we know that there is hidden life but on the surface, it appears that most of nature has died.

So winter in our walk with God is a season of remembering what we discovered in the springtime of our life in Him…what it felt like to see Him and hear Him, to experience His manifest presence. Winter strengthens our faith because we continue to say “yes” when all seems to be “dead” on the surface. We remember God’s love (Song of Sol. 1:4) and what we experienced of His affections.

Winter is a time of few options; God hems us in during spiritual winter seasons. Because of adverse circumstances (“cold weather”), we “stay indoors” more and get spiritual cabin fever, yearning for winter to pass. We find we aren’t enjoying the pleasures that once stimulated us because His jealous love is cutting off desire for those second loves. This can be painful for us, but is part of His loving strategy to win our wholehearted love.

The author goes on to say that hard as winter may be, it takes even more of the power of God at work in our lives for us to stay focused once springtime comes, because suddenly we have many more options and now we must continue to say “yes” to Him as our First Love in the midst of many other appealing and good options.

“Just as the winter freeze holds an invitation to trust and believe in the unseen, so too these spring rains hold within them a doorway of invitation. They invite us to not forget the etchings of identity that God drove deep within us in the wintertime and to remember that He alone is our Reward…When the south winds (of blessing) are present and all is well, we must guard very carefully against the appeal to comfort our souls with things other than God Himself…Good is always the enemy of the best, and the man now has a far greater chance of losing his heart by secondary pleasures than when he spent his day in a sovereign prison where God was His only comfort and pleasure possible.”

“In my prosperity I recognize that I can do nothing apart from Him (Jn. 15:5), and in my poverty I remember that I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me (Phil.4:13).”

This chapter ends with some comments about the in-between seasons…these are the times tucked between the two extremes of dark night and exhilarating day. They are the menial and mundane times when we are most prone to discouragement, and yet they are just a important to our spiritual maturing.

“In these times, the best way to position the heart is in rest. We rest in the understanding that all His ways are love…”

All the seasons of God in our lives are for the purpose of knowing God and being known in love by Him and of experiencing great fruitfulness in our lives. It’s because of the seasons that nature can bear fruit. Even the climates that don’t have the extreme weather changes have their seasons that are needed for the bearing of produce.

So Lord, we say “yes” to Your perfect leadership in our lives, trusting in Your love and goodness and sovereign oversight of our hearts and circumstances. We love you…in Jesus’ name.

We will end the book, Deep unto Deep, next week with chapter 12, Consumed in Love’s Fire. God be near you this week!

Deep Unto Deep - Week #12

Chapter 9 – Believing in the Unseen

This chapter deals with our hiddenness in Christ…Dana Candler says, “My life is not my own. I have been bought with a price. And I have willingly surrendered to my position of hiddenness in Him – hidden with Christ in God. When He appears, I too will appear with Him (Col. 3:4).”

When we fully embrace the free-fall into the hidden life in God, we step into unknown territory where our worth is measured differently than in the visible realm of this world. “We depart from the false identity that was based on how respected, known, gifted and influential we were in the eyes of men and leap into the vast, unknown realm, the hidden reality, of who we are eternally in God…We are trading in what we have always known and what others have always told us of ourselves for a book of blank pages. We leave all the old voices, however true or false, for the One Voice that is temporarily silent in our experience.”

One difficulty with embracing the unseen and unknown is that when the visible things that we have hinged our identity on are not there, we discover that we didn’t know Him as well as we thought we did. But of course, this discovery is good and drives us to seek Him more, and we are transformed more into His likeness.

And the more we are like Him, the more we begin experience His nearness because one significant reason we don’t experience the feeling of His presence is that we aren’t enough like Him to be able to recognize Him when He is near. This shouldn’t be cause for alarm but rather motivation for going after Him more than ever. “As our inner man is transformed so also our intimacy with God will deepen.”

The Unseen Work of God’s Silence
When we cry out for God’s manifest presence and He delays, it’s painful. He is testing our desire with His refining fire, wanting to turn our words into reality. Our desire wanes when He doesn’t show Himself. But He knows how to secretly keep us motivated to pursue Him, and so we go through times of hoping and then times of fainting and then hoping again…In this process “He makes Himself the one Love and one Fear of our hearts by starving us out for Him alone…He stretches our small capacities far beyond what we would have thought possible. He prepares the way for His coming by the very process of the journey’s waiting and the pain of His delays.”

Here is the key to making this process count: “In these times, He asks us to remember Him in love even when all circumstances seem to sing a different song.”

But the author also includes another important element in this walk: “We must learn to face our own emerging questions. We question His distance. We wonder at Him reasons for not coming to us in His presence. His ways are mysterious to us…” One thing I’ve learned and continue to learn is the importance of talking with God about my doubts and feelings and not pretending before Him. I can do that and still remember His love and sovereignty in my life. The psalmist did this over and over – he openly expressed his doubts and fears and anger but always said, “yes” to God.

“Yes. To all that You are. To all of Your ways. I believe in Your love. I will have no other loves but You. I believe that even Your silence is Your love for me and I say, ‘Yes,’ to Your hand upon my heart. Have Your way within my heart and take me to the fullness of love.”

The Unseen Fellowship of God’s Silence
“The Lamb’s greatest suffering was His Father’s silence on the cross…It was His Father’s absence that caused His heart to burst with sorrow. Because of the cross and redemption, we are never again separated from His love…Yet He does take us through seasons where He withholds his manifest presence from us in order to bring forth even greater and stronger love from our hearts. He refines our love by the fire of His felt absence…”

So what the Lord waits for from us in the times of hiddenness and silence is our declaration of love for Him. This “yes” to His love in the midst of “darkness” is precious to God. I like the way the author imagines the Lord instructing the angels: “…My beloved one is about to speak. She is about to choose Me in the darkest night. The words she will say will be recorded and remembered for all our eternity together…We must wait. We must make room for the heart of the volunteer to come forth. It is My way. She will volunteer her love freely.” (Psa. 110:3)

The chapter ends with these comments: “We have one moment on the earth to touch the great place of the Lamb’s heart…If we say ‘Yes’ to this fellowship of suffering, we will one day gaze upon the very real scars on the Lamb’s hands, feet and side with understanding…”

I remember hearing a man of God preach about suffering out of his own experience. He said that in his deep pain he cried out to God, “Why?...” And the Lord told him something like this, “When I’m on my honeymoon with My Bride someday, I want us to be able to have an intelligent conversation.” The sufferings we go through now, if done with a “yes” to Him, will prepare us to understand His scars and relate with Him in eternity, and it will prepare us to share in His glory as well (Rom. 8:18).

Lord, teach us how to be people of the unseen; help us to know the unknowable so that we are more like You and can recognize when You are near. Make us a people of prayer and adoration for the sake of the Lamb…we say “yes” to you, dear Lord.

The next two chapters are short, so let’s cover chapters 10 (Prisoners of Hope) and 11 (Seasons of Relevance) together, ok? Rich blessings on you this week!

Deep Unto Deep - Week #11

Chapter 8 – Communion with the Beloved

This morning the Holy Spirit quickened Psalm 59:9,10 to me:

“O my Strength, I will watch for you,
for you, O God, are my fortress.
My God in his steadfast love will meet me;
God will let me look in triumph on my enemies.”

Over and over the psalmist expresses his longing and his need for ongoing communion with God; because of this deep hunger to meet and encounter God, he watched for Him constantly; this is what it means to “practice the presence of God.” We do that both in the stillness of intentional and conscious prayer and worship, and then it becomes natural to watch for Him throughout the day’s demands.

We were created for uninterrupted communion with the Beloved, and I believe that one of the primary goals of the Spirit of the Beloved is to bring us increasingly into the posture of the Shulammite in the Song of Songs: “leaning on her beloved.” Coming into the fullness of this kind of dependence is a lifelong journey, and the Holy Spirit has great patience and joy in working this into us. He knows exactly how each of us is wired and so knows the circumstances of life that will help lead us to this posture of unbroken dependence and communion with the Beloved.

In chapter 8 the author begins by focusing on the truth that humans can indeed experience communion with God and that it is this capacity that makes us unique among all other creatures. The angels don’t even have this privilege of knowing God intimately – only humans, made in His image, have been invited into such a relationship with the Creator! And the actual experience of God’s love and affection is the greatest reward a human can have…nothing else is as exhilarating to the human heart as to experience God’s love personally.

So Dana begins by saying that while the dry longing for God (chapter 7) is absolutely part of experiencing God, we should not settle for staying there when God wants us to touch and feel His love on our hearts.


Lovesick Communion
In Song of Solomon 2:3-5 we see the loved one’s response to having been touched by the love of the Beloved. She says that His love is the best thing on earth, so much so that she describes herself as “lovesick.” The enjoyment of His affection is so rich that she calls it a form of “sickness.”

“It is a sickness that, in fact, denotes a certain health of soul – for she has finally found all of her fountains within Him, and it is the very tasting of this spiritual milk that empowers her to flee ungodliness. (I Pet. 2:3)…To see more of Him is to desire more of Him, and to desire more of Him is to eventually see more of Him, for he satisfies those who hunger and thirst for Him, and He fills the hungry with good things. (Psa. 107:9)…So on and on, we scale the endless ascent of God’s love…”


Understanding Communion
John 15:9-11 “To abide in love is to commune continually with the One we adore…” This love that Jesus invites us to abide in is the same love that the Father has for Him! The very same way that God loves and feels for His Son is the way that Jesus loves and feels for me.

(A wonderful study in the Scripture is that of looking at the love of the Father for Jesus; seeing that would awaken our hearts to the lavish love that Jesus has for us…we’re/I’m actually invited to be in the middle of this love exchange within the Trinity!)

Fundamentally, the way we experience communion/fellowship with God is through abiding in His love; in other words, staying put in that place of being the recipient of His love no matter what’s going on in my life; whether I’m “succeeding” or “failing” in a given moment, it’s important to stay in that place of believing that I am loved and wanted by God. It’s not doing what Adam and Eve did, which was to run away from God rather than abide in the love that they had been experiencing with Him and finding in Him the forgiveness and cleansing they needed.

This doesn’t mean I don’t face and confess sin, if that is what’s causing me to want to run from His love; it simply means that I rush to His arms of love and mercy for cleansing and forgiveness rather than rush to my own mechanisms to cope with my shame and guilt.

To abide in Christ sounds sweet in theory but requires the work of the Cross and the Holy Spirit to practice, because we have all built up our stockpile of ways of coping when something interrupts our peace in the Lord. And so rather than keeping still and waiting for the Lord’s way out, we immediately jump to our defense mechanisms that we have leaned on for years.


Our Desire and His Desire for Communion
“We were made to know more than longing...He has made us to receive and to experience love Himself. This is our glory…Communion with God, therefore, is more than the desire for Him; it is the enjoyment of Him…the present tense fellowship of superior delight…Much has been said about the faithfulness of God to bring us into our purpose or our destiny. Yet the destiny God is most determined to answer is His purpose for each heart to know communion with His Son.”

The author goes on to say that much of our longing and aching is founded on an inaccurate understanding of God’s closeness to us. “He is near when we imagine Him far.” It's true that there are genuine seasons of dryness and silence in which He is deliberately hiding Himself in order to expand our capacity for Him, but the reality is that more often than not, He is very near; but our unbelief or inability to recognize Him causes us to believe that He is far from us.

“We must be careful to not possess a mentality that spiritual barrenness is what is normal or a belief that this emptiness we are experiencing is simply the way God desires it…He is jealous that we would experience His nearness and His presence.”

It’s because of His longing for nearness that we long for it. “I will be found by you,” He says in Jeremiah 29, “when you seek Me with all your heart.” He wants to be found; He longs for fellowship with humans, and this is most dramatically seen in the incarnation of the Son and then in the sending of His Spirit. God Himself indwells humans! There’s nothing nearer than this!

“Our God has come nearer to us than any man or angel would have thought conceivable…We experience intimacy with God through communion with the Holy Spirit.” This is because the Holy Spirit’s overarching desire and purpose is to bring humans into a relationship of intimacy with Jesus. So as we fellowship with the Spirit, He brings us near to God.

A very effective way to fellowship with the Holy Spirit is through praying in the Spirit. The gift of praying and singing in tongues is a wonderful and powerful way for humans to commune with the Spirit of God and be drawn into fellowship through Him with Jesus.

This immersion into the life of God is our primary calling out of which other callings flow; the “road to this immersion begins with my filling my mind with the Word of God so that the Holy Spirit might ignite it as fire in my inner man. Spirit must marry with Truth inside of me. The warmth of this tenderizing causes the truths of God to become alive within me and enkindles my heart for wholehearted obedience.”

In summary, the experience of actually tasting communion with the Beloved comes through abiding with Christ in the love of the Father, and we abide in His love through obedience to that which we believe He speaks to us to do (or not do). Prayer, and particularly praying in the Spirit, is a spiritual discipline that helps us abide in Christ when we would rather rush to other loves for relief.

The Lord bless you this week! May His nearness be your joy and reward…

Next week we’ll look at chapter 9: Believing in the Unseen.

Deep unto Deep - Week #10

Chapter 7 – Longing

In this chapter the author gives us a beautiful view of the God Who longs for humans. In John 17:24 Jesus expresses the longing in His heart for His Bride when He says, “Father I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am…” Also in John 14:3 He says that He’s preparing a place for us because He wants us with Him forever.

I think it’s important to realize that when Jesus expresses desire, it’s not casual but very intense; in fact, so intense that He was willing to suffer indescribable pain in order to have this desire fulfilled for a Bride to be with Him eternally. We’ve grown so accustomed to the weak “I wants” of our natural and fleshly lives that we don’t understand how intense desire is when it comes from God.

Desire that comes from God becomes all-consuming and is also empowering for the one who possesses it. All other desires take second place in the face of desire in the human heart that comes from God for God.

And so as I read this chapter, I was struck afresh with my need for God-given desire to continue to increase in me. I’ve tasted a bit of His desire and have experienced the empowering that comes with that, but I want much more!

The chapter starts out with this truth: longing for God comes straight from the heart of a God who longs! Just as we love Him because He first loved us, so we long for Him because He first longed for us…I’ll personalize it: I long for Him because He first longed for me.

“We find ourselves desiring to desire Him and pained by the present shallowness of our hearts…We begin to hunger for the capacity to hunger. We begin to thirst for the ability to thirst. The longing to long is the escort into longing itself…To long for God is to give witness to the Transcendent One. Longing is the echo of eternity within our souls. It is that which sets us apart and makes us pilgrims on the journey. This world is not our home…”

For our encouragement, Dana says: “The longing prior to the felt-experience is just as much a part of loving Him as the experience itself…both the craving and the satisfaction are equal parts of the gift of intimacy.”

Love’s Delay

So once we catch a glimpse of the reality that we are made for His love and that nothing is as wonderful as His love (Psa. 63:3; Song of Songs 1:7), why is the actual fulfillment of the experience of that love so often delayed?

The author takes time to unfold the purpose in love’s delay, which is basically in order to cultivate greater longing in the heart of the beloved so that we become lovesick for Him. As I read this and pondered it a bit, I realized that in other areas of life, if we satisfy our hunger too quickly, we don’t experience the full enjoyment of that satisfaction. For example, if I begin to feel a little physical hunger and I immediately run to grab the easiest thing at hand to satisfy the beginning hunger pangs, I ruin my appetite for a delicious meal a little while later.

We humans tend toward “quick and easy fixes” to satisfy our hunger for God and therein we quell the hunger that, if allowed to grow, would give us the capacity to enjoy the only One Who truly and fully satisfies us. The quick solutions to our hunger for God (in the forms of relationships, addictions, positions, work, ministry, etc.) dull our hunger, and we walk out our days in half-heartedness and numbness related to God, unable to enjoy His presence.


Desire: the Prelude to Satisfaction Realized

And so the author points out how important it is to realize that the delay in having our initial hunger satisfied is for a good purpose coming from the heart of a God who longs for us. If we don’t understand that the delay is motivated by the passion of God for us, then we can easily be offended with the time gap between the longing and the fulfillment or assume that we are meant to fill that gap with lesser loves, rather than wait and allow the hunger to mature and expand.

“Understanding God’s own longing keeps us from hurt and offense at the Lord when He does not immediately answer the pain of our heartache…He knows that without longing we cannot enter into the fullness of His love, and therefore, in His absolute kindness and jealousy over us, he places within us the dagger of desire for Himself.”

These times of unfulfilled longing are necessary in order to expand our inner capacity for Him:
“Behind these periods of dryness is the flaming heart of the God-Man who refuses to have a bride not stricken with lovesick desire.”

The dryness and lack of emotion that is characteristic of such periods of our life should not necessarily be interpreted as hardness of heart. “One of longing’s most common faces is emptiness. It is the dry side of desire and the empty side of love.” Yet we have the assurance that desire for God (whether in a dry season or in a season of tears and sweet tenderness) will always be answered eventually because the one Who placed desire within me did so for the very purpose of filling that desire, and He Himself is the fulfillment of desire. “A divinely implanted desire is nothing short of a Divine promise of the very thing we yearn for…If we are not careful, we will misinterpret these times and possibly deny some of the greatest fruits to be born in the realm of intimacy. These seasons make a way for the seasons that we crave most.”

(I want to point out that the acceptance of dryness in our lives should not be confused with deadness of emotions that is the result of either unconfessed sin or unhealed woundedness in us…)

This chapter ends with a wonderful section on fasting in answer to the question about the proper response to these dry seasons in our lives. Dana says there are basically two parts to our response to dryness:
1. Having a correct theology and view of God and His emotions and intentions in allowing delayed satisfaction.
2. Fasting as a form of mourning the absent Bridegroom.

I want to add my hearty amen to her teaching on the power of fasting to expose and increase hunger for God, particularly as it relates to the Bridegroom God. Matthew and Mark both quote Jesus’ presenting of a new paradigm for fasting: it is the way to mourn the absence of the Bridegroom.

Though I had practiced fasting for many years simply out of obedience to the Word, it was when I understood this paradigm for fasting that my heart was truly motivated to give up food as a regular part of my life. Jesus presents it as the means for drawing near to Him during this time when He is not physically present with His people.

Dana says, “The sleeping mourning must be awakened in the heart of the lover. We fast to remind our hearts that He has been taken away, for we have grown used to His absence…” We as believers have unfortunately “grown used to His absence” and fasting is a way to keep ourselves in touch with His absence and to cultivate desire for Him to be present.

My personal testimony is that fasting is perhaps the spiritual discipline that has most awakened desire in me for Jesus when I have fasted for the sake of drawing near to Him.

So I close this chapter with a challenge to you to begin a lifestyle of fasting, if it’s not part of your regular life in Him, but to do it with this motivation: to draw near to the absent Bridegroom. Two very helpful books on this are:
1. The Rewards of Fasting (Mike Bickle and Dana Perkins)
2. The Fasting Key (Mark Nysewander)

Lord Jesus, I ask for the grace to fast to rest upon us, Your Bride, in these critical days. May we be sick with love and longing for You until we finally agree with the Holy Spirit and cry out to you, “Come, Lord Jesus…we can’t live without You!” (Rev. 22:17,20)

Blessings on you…next week we will cover chapter 8: Communion with the Beloved.

Deep Unto Deep - Week #9

Chapter 6 – Dark Yet Lovely

I know we’ve had two weeks on this chapter already, but what Joan shared during my absence (thank you, Joan!) triggered more in me that I’d like to share this week before moving on to chapter seven. So I’m going to simply make some comments on Joan’s input this week:

1. “There is a childlikeness that I must acquire by His grace in order to receive this love and attention at a time of darkness, failure, intimidation, or whatever.”

This is a reminder of our need to mature into childlikeness, which I believe is (among other things) characterized by lack of self-consciousness; or to put it in positive language, childlikeness is characterized by “self-forgetfulness.” This is necessary in order to freely receive God’s love and attention in the midst of “darkness, failure, intimidation, or whatever.” And as Joan alludes to, this comes by grace as we obey the simple instructions that God gives us day to day, no matter the cost.

This also brought to mind the reaction of Adam and Eve to God after they had sinned. In their darkness and failure, they hid from Him rather than run to Him. This is the natural human response to God when we sin or fail in some way. The very time when we most need to run to Him for His salvation and cleansing, we run away because of fear and shame. I’m learning, albeit slowly, to stay in the love of God in those moments when I most want to run from His love to other “saviors” that will prop up the tendency of the flesh to want approval based on performance.

Holy Spirit of Jesus, come by Your grace and empower us to increasingly walk in childlikeness, that wonderful self-forgetfulness that readily receives your love and forgiveness and cleansing and moves on quickly (though not superficially) as a beloved child.

2. “A comment came my way that sent me into a dark corner and I didn't want to come out. In order to begin to be free of the effects of this comment, I had to take steps to offset situations of childhood that left me unaffirmed as a person. The effect of negative comments, etc. always has sent me into the dark corner. I am finally getting to realize this reality so that I could begin to take the steps to be free of the effect of not being affirmed. Then to bask in the love of God and begin to see His reality of who I am.”

Joan refers to her past as an unaffirmed child; to one degree or another, most of us have experienced this, even with the finest parents. I want to add that even those who have had unusual affirmation from their parents need to hear affirmation from God simply because human parental affirmation, wonderful as it is, will never take the place of divine affirmation from the heavenly Father. This is good news, because it implies that our sense of being and of well-being isn’t dependent on having had a perfect upbringing. God is sufficient for those deficits as we look to Him for life and health.

I love that Joan made the hard choice to not stay in “a dark corner” and “took steps to offset situations of childhood that left me unaffirmed as a person.” This is so important if we are to walk in the fullness of our destiny in God because there will constantly be comments made to us that have the potential to shut our hearts down. We can’t control what others do and say to us, but we can make choices by God’s grace about how we will process and respond to them, and these choices will determine how we mature in receiving God’s love and giving it.

Holy Spirit, would You strengthen us in choosing to not stay in "dark corners" of self-protection but to move out into the sunlight of Your presence.

3. “My desire has been for all of us to come to know in the deepest way God's personal love for us. This includes the area of the reconciling good and evil. This is a subtle trap for us as believers. We can see in our society today (including many church bodies), a destroying of the reality of God's love and truth especially in the realm of personal holiness. This reconciling does not bring personal freedom into our deepest being, let alone in this present world system. In this realm of love and truth, we must be able to issue mercy to ourselves in knowing that we are forgiven. God's mercy to each of us can come through in a deep level because of the blood of Jesus cleansing us and the Holy Spirit renewing us.”

When I read this, I was struck with how needful it is that we freely receive the love and mercy of God in order to NOT reconcile good and evil; in other words, there’s a strong tendency in us to excuse and cover up our sin if we don’t have revelation of the unconditional love of God for us even in our sin and weakness. It’s very difficult for us to face failure squarely without knowing that we are deeply loved and cared for even when we have sinned.

And it is in this very revelation that my heart is released from guilt and shame to want to be clean and upright before a holy God. Without such an understanding in my spirit, I will try to cover over my failure with “fig leaves” of justifications for why I behaved the way I did.

Holy Spirit, come and show us more of the unrelenting love of God the Father and of Jesus our Bridegroom so that we can "fail successfully" in Him and grow confidently in His love for His sake and the sake of many others.

I am “dark yet lovely” to God for the reasons I shared a couple of weeks ago; may this staggering truth continue to go deeply into us as His people, setting us free to love others unconditionally and thereby giving them a taste of divine acceptance in Christ Jesus.

Blessings on you this week; next week we’ll look at chapter seven: Longing.

Deep Unto Deep - Week #8

Thank you to Joan Frazerhurst who is writing the blog while Nita is away in Asia.

Chapter 6 - Dark Yet Lovely (continued)

I found this chapter quite challenging and it caused me to really look at some areas in my own life. When I am apprehended by my own darkness, or as it comes through a comment from someone else, I find it quite difficult to think myself as"lovely." Anyone else experience that? This is the time for me to reach for His love. But, when I am feeling this darkness and/or possible misunderstanding, it is very difficult to reach for that personal love. I don't feel too personal at the time. I find I need to deliberately look to the Lord, desiring the deeper knowledge of the thought that I am still lovely to Him. I can't say that it miraculously happens...it doesn't! I can only say that it is only a step of faith in the fact of His love toward me as one of His created beings...because He did create me. There is a childlikeness that I must acquire by His grace in order to receive this love and attention at a time of darkness, failure, intimidation, or whatever.

Actually, as I have been reflecting on this chapter and began to write some thoughts down, I had the very experience that I had already described above. A comment came my way that sent me into a dark corner and I didn't want to come out. In order to begin to be free of the effects of this comment, I had to take steps to offset situations of childhood that left me unaffirmed as a person. The effect of negative comments, etc. always has sent me into the dark corner. I am finally getting to realize this reality so that I could begin to take the steps to be free of the effect of not being affirmed. Then to bask in the love of God and begin to see His reality of who I am. Self-examination and trusting the Holy Spirit to reveal my issues is essential.

I love the thought that tells us that God perceives our desire and our moving toward Him before we or others even notice it, and even when I would rather not be seen or heard from. This leads to the next thought about the process of discovering my darkness...God finds us lovely in the midst of this discovery. Whew! If we think we are dark, this is the time to know that the Lord went deeper into that darkness than anyone...even to the extent that He was forsaken by His Father. This deep truth allows us to be able to look straight at the fact of our darkness in order to be set free...the Lord brings us into the light of His shining face and loving heart. Just imagine being able to continually walk with the inner knowledge of being loved. I guess this is what we are being prepared for. God has put that "taste" in our being so that we will want to be free and desire more and more of Him...Addicted to His love! Sounds like a song?

As Dana indicates, and I am very grateful that she includes this thought, that if my heart tolerates sin and darkness, God does not enjoy that. He cannot enjoy both in us...the "yes" to Him and a tolerance of sin. My heart must be sincere in seeking to walk toward holiness. As I've written comments on these books from Nita's Book Club, I find I have been more personal than I ever have been. My desire has been for all of us to come to know in the depest way God's personal love for us. This includes the area of the reconciling good and evil. This is a subtle trap for us as believers. We can see in our society today (including many church bodies), a destroying of the reality of God's love and truth especially in the realm of personal holiness. This reconciling does not bring personal freedom into our deepest being, let alone in this present world system. In this realm of love and truth, we must be able to issue mercy to ourselves in knowing that we are forgiven. God's mercy to each of us can come through in a deep level because of the blood of Jesus cleansing us and the Holy Spirit renewing us.

Dana also speaks of a paradox, "...as we make our way forward in love, with immaturity so often lifting its head, He sees the sweet budding desire in my heart and calls me lovely." The persons "that feel loved and pure, overflowing with dignity and desire...are the burning and shining lamps throughout history that triumph over the enemies of their soul and walk in the truth of their destiny."

It is His labors, not our labor that makes us lovelier. Let us continually desire God to draw us into His heart of love. What a heart and what grace!

The following song was sung at church last Sunday and it seemed a fit here:

You Are My All in All

You are my strength when I am weak
You are the treasure that I seek
You are my All in All.
Seeking you as a precious jewel,
Lord, to give up I'd be a fool.
You are my All in All.

Jesus, Lamb of God, Worthy is your name.

Taking my sin, my cross, my shame,
Rising again I praise your Name
You are my All in All.
When I fall down you pick me up,
When I am dry you fill my cup
You are my All in All.

Jesus, Lamb of God, Worthy is your name.

by Dennis Jernigan

Week #7 - Deep Unto Deep

Chapter Six: Dark yet Lovely


Song of Solomon 1:5 is where this phrase, “dark yet lovely,” appears; I will make initial comments on this chapter, and Joan will take it up from there next week.

The Lord has His way of “trapping” us, cornering us so that there’s nowhere to run. This is His great mercy even though it may be painful in the moment. He knows that we are only at peace and joy when we know Him and are known by Him in intimate communion, and in His great love for us, He carefully designs circumstances to get us to Himself.

Often, as fallen humans, our response to this being cornered by God is to run to coping mechanisms, busyness being the most common among Christians. In referring to a season like this in her sister’s life, the author writes, “Which was worse – the pain of His silence or the disillusionment of her love’s weakness? It was all she could do to stay and continue (seeking Him) instead of reaching for something to ‘prop up’ her soul and deliver her from this place of (facing her) barrenness. Ruined for comforts and pleasures that were once fulfilling, yet experiencing nothing of the sweetness she desired in communion, she remained trapped before her silent Beloved…”

The end of that story is that when this day, which was set aside to pursue God, was over for her sister, she finally held her arms open to Him and simply said, “Enjoy me. Right here, right now, in my absolute weakness, enjoy me.” And God broke through for her.

This simple and desperate prayer isn’t a magic formula, so there’s no guarantee that He will break through just because someone says a certain thing, but the point is that Dana’s sister was finally able to accept that God was attracted to her desire for Him even though she was so weak and barren spiritually. This is what empowers our hearts to keep seeking Him and to keep obeying Him to the end.

As we see in the maiden in the Song of Solomon, we need a revelation of Jesus’ strong desire for us if we are going to mature into lovesick worshippers who will give all for Him. “Though sincere desire for Jesus burns within us, we unavoidably run headlong into our own weakness. Our passion for Him is real. Our sincerity is sure. Yet we lack spiritual maturity. We cannot go long before we discover our utter inability to sustain our fervency.” It’s at this point that we need the revelation that though we are “dark” (weak and spiritually immature), we are “lovely” (desirable) in His eyes.

One of the things that makes us “lovely” to Him even when we are immature in our love is that there is a “yes” in our spirit towards Him, there’s a real and genuine desire in us to obey Him. This in itself is very attractive to Him, even though He knows very well that we are “dark.”

The author goes on to define the “darkness” in our lives:
• Sin and compromise
• Weakness of our fallenness (which will only be reversed fully in the age to come)

“To know that I am ‘dark but lovely’ is to understand my weakness, which is comprised of my sinfulness, my immaturity and my natural limitations together with the revelation of my loveliness to Him. (Psa.86:1,2)…With His eyes full of fire, He perceives the continual cry deep within my heart to belong fully to Him, and He calls it part of my ‘loveliness.’ He defines me by the things that are not yet revealed as though they were…”

This makes me think of when Jesus said to Simon, “You are Peter…” Jesus’ fiery eyescould penetrate and see into who Simon really was – he was Peter, and Jesus spoke that into being by naming Simon a new name which carried the meaning of Peter’s true self in God.

“We are far weaker than we realize and far lovelier than we realize…Our loveliness is not an attribute gained by our attainments. It is a gift of God. He sees us beautiful because of what He Himself has accomplished in our salvation and transformation. This divine perspective is our source of protection from the accusations of the enemy…Without this combined confession – our darkness and our loveliness – we cannot continually ascend in our journey of His embrace…Our loveliness protects us from shame and condemnation, and our weakness keeps us from pride and arrogance.”/strong>

The author goes on to expound on the fundamental reasons God sees us as lovely even when we have so far to go in maturing, and she also addresses the issue that this doesn’t imply that He finds deliberate rebellion attractive at all.

But I want to end here to once again encourage you to ponder these things, allowing God to rename you as He did Peter. Many, if not all, of us have been given negative labels (names) by significant people in our lives – parents, teachers, friends, spouse, children, etc.; and we often live under those names for years, crippled and insecure because of accepting them.

God alone knows who you are and can, by His Spirit, call forth the true you by “naming” you for who you really are in Him. So please don’t simply read this as just some more information to add to the collection of spiritual data but take the time and effort to listen to His voice and to agree with what He says to you about your true identity.

I’ve found that hearing His affirming and defining words once isn’t enough; so Lord, I pray that Your grace will rest on Your people to seek You with all our being; and when we find ourselves “cornered” by You, grant us courage and perseverance to remain with You there and allow You to love us even in the awareness of how “dark” we are. You are soooo good, dear Lord! We love You and thank You…in Jesus’ holy name!

Next week we’ll continue with this chapter on “Dark yet Lovely.” Blessings on you!

Deep Unto Deep - Week #6

Chapter Five: Personal Receiving (continued)

This week we will finish up chapter five on the need to really be “alone with the Alone.”

The author says,

“One of the greatest hindrances to this sweet communion is when I bring others with me into this garden of intimacy…

It is a difficult thing to come before the throne of grace entirely alone in the simplicity of just God and my heart. In so many ways, some conscious, some unaware, I come before Him dragging a collection of other people’s attainments or disappointments, strengths and weaknesses…In my emotions, I approach Him as though He were simultaneously thinking of all of these other people when He looks at me. This is partly because of my fear of being alone with Him…It is also because I am so used to living life in the eyes of many, instead of the eyes of One.”

One of the most powerful prayers prayed by men and women in the Scriptures is “Here I am, Lord.” As I’ve meditated on this prayer, its significance has grown in my understanding over the years because it really is a bedrock statement that I am here alone with You, God, and I come with nothing in my hands nor with anyone else alongside me; it’s just You and me. It’s a separation from all else to be with Him alone. (And this can happen in a crowd as well as in the secret place.)

I say this simple phrase many, many times to the Lord; it’s my way of saying that I’m “all ears” and His alone. (This doesn’t mean that I am free from the pull of distractions, etc., but just making the statement helps set the tone for fellowshipping with Him in the uniqueness of His and my relationship.)

Dana says near the end of the chapter that in this journey of intimacy with God “to try to go the way of another only slows our journey for He has formed each one’s way for him or her alone. This is an important truth, for we waste much time and emotion comparing our spiritual lives to those around us a though we could be measured by each other.”

What a joy when the truth begins to really penetrate my thinking that the Lord doesn’t compare me with anyone else!

All of this serves to point out again how important it is that we find our identity in God’s love and affection for us, and we can never encounter this reality without listening to His voice and agreeing with what He says about us. As we persist in this, our inner being is slowly but surely strengthened to stand with boldness before Him to obey what He tells us to do in His name. The only thing that will cause us to endure the pressures of the end of the age is that we are drawing constantly from this spring of Life in Christ Jesus.

Even now, I encourage you to take a moment and set all aside to recognize that God is with you and that He made you a noble being who He enjoys as His child, if you indeed belong to Him in Christ Jesus and are reaching for Him by faith. Your reaching may be very weak, but it counts to Him and He longs for fellowship with you by His Spirit; He longs for you to know that His unfailing and never-ending love for you personally and then your response of love back is what identifies you as a “success” in this life. Ask the Holy Spirit to come to you and lead you to Jesus and the Father, bringing you into that divine circle of love and affection where we are transformed and empowered to obey and follow Him.

Dare to say to Him (and maybe even to others eventually), "I am the disciple whom You love, Lord! That's my primary identity."

Lord, we depend on You alone…no one else can satisfy nor tell me who I am in You and who You are in me. Thank You that You hear and answer the genuine cry of the needy! I love You; most staggering of all is that You love me! Praise Your Name!


Special note: I’ll be traveling to Asia soon and in my absence, Joan Frazerhurst will be filling in for me – thank you, Joan! If I’m able to get online, I may send a note while gone.

For next week, read chapter 6: Dark but Lovely. God bless you…

Deep Unto Deep - Week #5

Chapter Five: Personal Receiving

This is an important chapter related to facing the need do the hard, and at times painful, work of really receiving the love of God personally rather than generically.

“We find that though we were comfortable with Him proclaiming His love to the entire crowd, we become terrified to be alone in the ocean of His love. We begin to resist and uncomfortably squirm beneath the weight of His desire…

The God that ‘so loved the world’ remains only a nice God until the ‘world’ become you. If it continues to be ‘corporate’ in our understandings, and we merely receive the truth that He so loved ‘the world,’ it will not ever change the inner parts of our hearts.”

A few years ago as we were having a time of simple worship on Bethany campus (going non-stop all day for several days), I entered the Prayer Room where the worship was going. At that time of day, there were only 2 or 3 of us in the room loving the Lord through simply being with Him in that place. I sat for a little while being quiet before Him and I sensed His invitation to kneel at the large cross that was on one side of the room. I expected to do this for a few brief moments, but I found myself staying there for a very long time.

After a long while in that posture, I heard the Lord lovingly say in my spirit, “Now stand before Me.” And so I stood up and faced the cross, remaining in that posture for awhile. I wasn’t experiencing surface emotions during this time, but then when I felt release to sit down again, I sat listening to the Lord and sensed Him say to me, “Well done, Nita.” Hearing this whisper in my spirit overwhelmed me and I began to weep and weep over His loving and affirming words. That experience did a lot to shift “the inner parts of my heart” and strengthened me to continue to obey Him in the difficult situation I was in at that time.

Candler says, “What makes a bride a bride is that she knows…that she is the unique one and the favorite of her husband. This is why it is so crucial that each heart goes on a personal journey of bridal love…We have to know and feel like the favorite of the Lord.”

This brings to mind the apostle John who, whenever he made reference to himself in the Gospel of John, called himself “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” We know God is not partial, so why would John label himself such a thing? On the surface it appears arrogant; but I believe John had received the love of Jesus personally and so knew what his true identity was: the one that Jesus loves! Once I (and any follower of Jesus) begin to get even a little hold on that reality at the personal level, the issues of who I am and why I’m here start to clear up. And along with clarity of identity comes confidence and joy.

The apostle John had the courage to say the truth about what Jesus said about him, and it takes courage to dare to say “yes” to this truth and to let it begin its transforming work in me.

The author goes on to say some key things that I’ll quote below:
• …within His great musical heart were many songs. He created one person to sing a unique song of His heart…Only that person, with that frame, history and journey could answer and fulfill His desire for his or her specific place in His heart.
• The way that I enter this great mystery is through agreement – my agreement with who He is and then who I am flowing out of that.
• (The Holy Spirit) reveals Jesus to my heart, and as I behold His beauty, I am transformed from glory to glory. Proceeding from this revelation of who He is, is the revelation of who I am in Him.
• When He created me He said…"This is good"…He agreed with His work in my creation. I must also come into deep agreement with Him, joining Him in His pleasure.
• …if there resides within me a beautiful mystery of Jesus…will I not do well to peer into the way He has formed me…so that I might discover and understand what He has desired to reveal of Himself within me?...this is not an inward search unto a heightened self-knowledge or self-awareness. It is the knowledge of God that we are after.
• He measures neither my heart nor my path by that of another.

Although there is more in this chapter, I’m going to pause it here and continue on next week, because I believe it is at this juncture that we who love Him have such difficulties entering in. To deeply experience His unique love for me takes intentionality and radical agreement with what He says about me. To take the time and effort to listen and then receive by saying, “Ok, Lord, if that’s what You say about me, I will agree even though it goes against the grain of all that I’ve been told by others and by myself and by the devil.”

It takes a long time and faith-filled effort on our part and the power of the Holy Spirit for this truth to penetrate our deepest being. It’s generally such a gradual dawning of truth on us that we think we’re getting nowhere, but if you persist in listening and believing and obeying the Father’s words to you and about you, there will be inner transformation and renewing of the mind taking place.

Nothing will bring me into my true identity and destiny except the voice of the heavenly Father through His Son Jesus by the working of the Holy Spirit. No amount of mere human affirmation can do this, though God’s affirmation at times comes through humans. When it’s mere human words, the encouragement lasts very briefly; when a word comes directly from God, either through humans or straight to the human spirit from the Holy Spirit, then it brings life and it’s eternal.

So once again, I encourage you to take time to sit before the Lord with His written Word, ask the Holy Spirit to breathe on you as you read, open your heart fully to Him by saying, “Yes, Lord, I will believe what You say…” Take a Scripture such as Matthew 10:29-31 and let it sink in while you wait in the Lord’s presence.

Holy Spirit, I pray that You would show us the love of the Father and of the Son for each of us personally. May Your grace rest upon us to dare to look to You alone for our name and identity. May the same courage that John found to agree with Your revelation to him about being Your “favorite one” come to us as we ponder and gaze on Truth. We love You, dear Lord. Thank You for hearing our prayer!


Next week we’ll finish off this chapter five, Personal Receiving. God bless you!










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Deep Unto Deep - Week #4

Chapter Four: Face to Face with Love

In the opening poem, the author prays the following:
“Refusing all my offers
To earn Your love,
To win Your gaze,
To deserve Your smile,
You wrap Your heavy love around me,
Until my anxious arguments subside.”

I have experienced this kind of internal arguing with the love of God when I have gotten quiet long enough to listen to His words of affection for me even when I have felt a failure. As Dana alludes to in this poem, there is something so strong in us that wants to earn and deserve His affections, and His unrelenting jealous love towards weak humans (towards me)is offensive to the flesh. To truly accept that His love for me is unchanging even in my worst moments is devastating to the fallen human drive to be accepted because of performing well.

But I’m discovering more and more that it is in this place of saying “yes” to His unconditional love and acceptance of me that I am being liberated more and more from the ties that bind me to the fear of man. I find that I’m increasingly free from the bondages of sin, both the subtle internal bondages as well as external bondages.

Coming face to face with love is, in some ways, more painful than it is glorious; at least in the early stages of finding the courage to let God love me.

I’m reminded of a song that I heard sung spontaneously recently based on John 13 where Jesus washes the feet of His disciples. The singer was singing out the inner protesting that goes on in us when Jesus, the God-Man, wants to wash our feet: (paraphrased: “I’d rather work hard for You, build buildings and great ministries, give up everything, than to allow You to wash my feet…”

Candler asks this question: “How could the magnificent, brilliant God who is perfect and holy and glorious fall in love with weak human beings who are fallen and broken and sinful?” The revelation that hit her as she sought an answer to this was that He is a Bridegroom God; in other words, His very nature is that of a person in love. She says, “I had lost sight of the irrational, lovesick part of love and…had been trying to reason my way through an illogical reality.”

The Truth of His Love/Receiving His Love

“…Our natural minds cannot and will not make sense of it. So long as we remain in the position of human reasoning, we can reel ourselves round and round the issue, and we will never receive the truth of His love…truth is not determined by our logic. Truth is defined by the One who is Truth. And the One who has set His zealous affections on weak human beings is the Way, the Truth and the Life. What is true is what is found within His heart.”

He yearns for humans to receive His love, so how can we do this? First, I must have revelation of His desire for me and revelation of Who He is as the Lover of my soul. Then I must actually receive the love of God as He reveals it to me, opening my heart wide to it and drinking freely of His unconditional love.

This is a progressive and slow process, generally speaking. In practical terms it means:
· Regularly placing my heart before Him, exposing it to His great and burning heart of love. This is something David did constantly, as seen so well in the Psalms that he wrote and in statements like, “I set the Lord before me always…” (Psalm 16).
· Filling my mind with the Scriptures, particularly those that speak of His emotional makeup.
· Singing and speaking and praying the written Word over my heart again and again.

Little by little we find our inner being transformed and becoming less fearful and less driven and less anxious.

Repetition of His Love

Repetition is very key to truth sinking deeply into the inner being. “We have weak hearts and feeble memories. What He told us yesterday about His pleasure in us seems to be distant today. We so easily drift from truth and lose touch with the intimacy we have known only yesterday.”

We need to hear His love for us continually and throughout our life. I will never outgrow my need to know and hear how He love and enjoys me, His daughter. When I begin to drift away from this, I become more subject to the pressures of people’s opinions and my own expectations and to disappointments in myself or in others, etc.

It is the deep revelation and acceptance of such unconditional and unrelenting love that wins the human heart over to voluntary and radical love for Jesus. He will never force a person to love Him, but an ongoing journey into the emotions of the heart of God will win the believer over to full abandonment and lovesickness for Him, a love that is perhaps most dramatically seen in the extravagant offering of Mary of Bethany. Her extravagance was a reflection of what she had experienced from Jesus.

Holy Spirit, come and reveal the love of God the Father and of Jesus the Son to our hearts, as only You can do! We say “yes” to your great love and thank You that you receive that “yes” even though it’s weak.

For next week we will read chapter five: Personal Receiving.

Deep unto Deep - Week #3

Chapter Three: Awakened to Love

I love the opening prayer of this chapter. Here is part of it:

Oh, Jesus…
All of my “beauties” falling, falling to the ground,
The goodness, the righteousness,
The good intentions and ‘right’ motives,
Dropping layer by layer…
…I am not what I thought I was…
Taking away what will not stand
That He might crown me with His true beauty
And clothe me in His robes…

As I have given more time to really waiting and listening to God, I’ve become more aware of how much my heart is asleep and my understanding dull. The spiritual awakenings I have had in my life journey with God aren’t enough for now. As the author says, “We are in need of constant furthering of His reviving of our hearts. We need Him to awaken us over and over again. When He does this, our supposed contented hearts are…escorted to the place of divine dissatisfaction.”

This divine dissatisfaction is a great gift from God and causes us to pursue Him. I’m grateful that the Spirit of God doesn’t allow me to settle into a place of false rest. I want the true rest of God which is found in meeting Him over and over again in His Word and experiencing the “kiss” of His Word on my spirit. In other words, when the Word under the power of the Spirit touches my spirit, longing is awakened in me for more of God.

God the Awakener
“When we cry out for His awakening, we are responding to the divine invitation He has already issued to our own hearts. We are not bidding God to come to us, as if we had just thought of the idea. Rather, we are entering into and participating in the ever-standing calling of God over our lives…”

This underscores what the Holy Spirit has been making more real to me lately as I have meditated on His Word in Psalms 52 and 53, and that is that not one person in all of human history has sought for God apart from God’s grace at work. In the first 3 verses of Psalm 53, the psalmist uses all-inclusive words six times!...words like “not one” and “no one” and “all”.

In his book Christ in the Psalms, Patrick Reardon says of this portion, “We humans are so thoroughly infected by the results of sin that, unless God intervenes…, our inevitable lot is despair…We Christians are not Buddhists or Jains. Ours is not a self-help religion. We do not have it within us to find God…(nor) even to begin looking for God…(nor) even to want to look for God…”

It has been wonderful to get a deeper glimpse into my helplessness apart from His grace and into the sinfulness of sin; i.e., the severe and irreparable damage sin has done. As I see this a bit more, the cross is more glorious and captivating in my heart.

God must awaken me. As seen in the Song of Songs, it is He who awakens love in the right time, and He does it many times in a person’s life because we grow in our understanding of the infinite person of God. What I was awakened to before about Him was wonderful, but there is always more to discover about His divine and amazing personality that will expand my capacity for still more.

But He knows the timing. I cannot force things to happen in God, but I can say “yes” to His invitation into intimate knowing of Him; and in His infinite wisdom and love, He will awaken different stages of love for Him when He sees the time is right.

Awakened to the Highest Pleasure
Song of Songs 1:2 says, “Your love is better than wine.” Psalm 63:3 says, “…thy steadfast love is better than life.”

The love of the Father and of Jesus is the highest pleasure the human heart can experience. Nothing now nor in eternity will bring pleasure like His love! Even a small taste of this can ruin us for lesser pleasures. “When we enter into the experience of this superior pleasure, our drive for the lesser pleasures is overcome.” Through spiritual intimacy with God in Christ, we get a tiny peek into what God has prepared for us (I Cor. 2:9).

I have a very long way to go in maturing in the love of God, but the little I’ve tasted of His love and affections has empowered me to do things that I never would have had the courage to do in the flesh. As the Scriptures teach us, love is more powerful than death!

Responding to the Awakening of God
“God refuses to open up the mysteries of His heart to the unwanting soul…The way He allures and motivates us to this kind of wholehearted pursuit (of Him) is through the revelation of His enjoyment over us. (Psa. 45:10-11) The King greatly desires my beauty. This is the motivational method in which we move toward Him in love.”

I will only be willing to “forget (my) own people and (my) father’s house” as I come into the revelation that the King desires my beauty. The “father’s house” represents all the natural affinities and human definitions of who we are (both positive and negative). These have such a hold on me that only the affirming voice of God deep in my spirit can loosen their hold on me.

In the movie Fiddler on the Roof, this truth is dramatically shown in the scene where the second daughter of the Jewish father leaves her family to join her fiancé in Siberia. Her father can’t understand why she would leave the warmth and comfort of family and home to go to that barren and cold place. Of course, it was her lovesick heart for her fiancé that caused her to leave the lesser loves for the superior love. Only the superior love of God will empower us to “leave” the lesser loves and put them in their proper order.

But to hear that affirming and identifying Voice requires that I seek Him with all my heart (Jer. 29:13,14). When the heart is awakened, there must be a corresponding response of diligent seeking of Him (Prov. 2:1-5). We can’t expect that with a casual glance His way once in awhile we will be able to find the pleasure of knowing and being known by Him in love.

Awakened in the Wilderness
And here is where the struggle begins, because the Lord leads the awakened heart to the wilderness, the place of encounter with Him. The very word “wilderness” implies loneliness and silence and absence of the comforts of the “city.”

“The wilderness is the place where all of our secondary loves are revealed and where we are stripped of false affections and other masters besides Him…Our souls do not know how to be before God in the stillness of intimacy. We have allowed many voices and many opinions of man to dominate our lives, leaving us with a great deal of inward disorder.”

The “wilderness” exposes the inward disorder because all the things that distracted us in the “city” are not there any more. We discover that what we thought we possessed in God we don’t posses at all, and this can be very painful and disorienting.

But it is the necessary path to entering into the divine affections of God, so I want to encourage you that if you are in such a “wilderness” now, stay with Jesus in the love of God. It will be worth it! Keep saying “yes” to God; look and listen for His words of love in the Word and say “yes” to them even though your flesh will want to protest. Know that you are on a journey into His heart and in His time, He will awaken love.

Chapter Four (Face to Face With Love) is next week’s chapter. Rich blessings on you this week!

Deep Unto Deep - Week #2

Chapter Two: He is a Bridegroom

Song of Songs 4:9 shows that God is ravished with delight over His people, and we “cannot pass by this quickly…To say that He loves me is a familiar notion indeed, but to pursue, know and experience His love is a rare preoccupation…We confuse the hearing of a concept with the actual abiding of that reality inside of us.”

The discovery of how true the author’s words above are is what has changed the way I approach the love of God. I think I unconsciously used to think that hearing and even accepting truth from God meant that the work was done; and while the entrance and acceptance of His Word by faith is necessary as a first step, the deep lodging of that truth in my inner being requires what Dana Chandler later says: “It is not casually or from a distance that we dive into the depths of these vast regions, but rather we enter this Ocean by a focused abandonment, a violent pursuit and a lifelong drinking…We have heard with our ears of a God of love, and we have known with our minds that in this love is our life, but have we yet been embraced by Love Himself?”

Now I understand the great value and need I have to regularly be quiet before God and listen and let Him tell me of His love for me. It’s not enough that years ago I may have heard Him tell me His heart is ravished over me; I must live by His love always. I’m spending time in Psalm 52 right now and meditating (chewing over) verse 1b many times: “The steadfast love of God endures all the day.” (ESV)

Just this morning as I was waiting silently before Him, He showed me a little bit more how prone and bent toward idolatry fallen man is; so much so that if we don’t have a lifestyle of waiting on Him and listening for His voice, we are quick to worship visible things, such as the work of our hands (i.e., finding our satisfaction and significance in being able to point to measurable results), etc. I’m as prone to this as anyone and so I fight for time to regularly and consciously wait on Him for His smile and/or loving correction that affirms me as His own.

The Everlasting Story
The author points out how important it is to understand the end and goal for humanity from God’s perspective, and that is a great wedding day (Revelation 19) with the Son.

Speaking of the Trinity, Chandler says, “The Holy Three have always existed as a divine dance of romance, a whirlwind of affection and pleasure and love unending. It was from this pulsating intimacy that God created humanity and the natural order. Though we will always remain the creation, He formed humanity to enter into relationship with the Trinity, the Godhead. In His great mysterious heart was a desire to bring human beings into the holy river of affections known between Father, Son and Holy Spirit and to share in this divine communion with them. The Father desired a family, and the Son desired a bride. From this overflow of burning desire, humanity was brought forth.”

I have the privilege of meeting and sharing with God’s people in a variety of places, and it’s obvious that the Holy Spirit is stirring deep hunger in the Church for the presence and love of God in an experiential way; no longer content with conceptual knowledge of God alone, His people are beginning to cry out for Him, and without this kind of knowing of God, we won’t endure the time of testing that is coming on the earth as the world is collapsing around us.

“When God created Adam, He said to him, ‘I will make a partner suitable to you.’ The Holy Spirit revealed to Paul that this promise ultimately speaks of Jesus and the church (Eph.5:32)…On that final day, Jesus will have affectionate partners who are voluntary lovers fully possessed by Him, and natural history will culminate with a lovesick bride in the image of Jesus, ruling the Kingdom of God with Him.”

Bridegroom Heart
Hosea 2:16 says, “And it shall be in that day, says the Lord, that you will call Me ‘My Husband’ and no longer call Me ‘My Master.’” Throughout the generations, God unveils and emphasizes different faces of His personality and character, and as we approach the end, His heart as a Bridegroom will be unveiled as never before, and His people will know Him as Husband rather than as Master.

Jesus spoke of this reality in his final prayer to His Father (John 17:24) and in His final public sermon (Matt. 22:1) in the parable of the king who had planned a marriage. He also addressed the reality of His heart as a Bridegroom when speaking of the primary reason for fasting after His ascension (Mark 2:18-20). This is a shift in thinking about God and will massively affect how we work for and with Him in the end of the age.

The author goes on to speak of the zeal and jealousy of the heart of this great Bridegroom: “The Father in His zeal for His Son will bring forth a worthy bride. The Son in His ardent love for His Father will present us to Him as a holy people, the family of God. The Holy Spirit in His devotion to the Son will equip us and accomplish His way within us…Lest we think that we ourselves keep our own hearts, we must rest assured in God’s own zeal to bring our righteousness forth as brightness and our salvation as a lamp that burns (Isa. 62:1). We need only to say ‘yes’ to Him.”

Bridal Heart
In the last part of chapter two, the author speaks of the heart of the bride, reminding us that the King is overcome with our love (Song of Songs 6:4). In the gaze of the loved one, the Lover sees the fulfillment of His inheritance promised to Him by the Father…
“He is overcome by our eyes of faith as we peer into the mystery of who He is and who we are before Him with only a dim understanding and faint comprehension. It is this act of gazing that causes the Lord to speak one of the strongest statements of scripture about the way His heart is moved by the love of weak human beings. He says, ‘Turn your eyes away! They overcome Me!’

“When we walk through the valley of difficulty with darkness veiling our eyes from Him and when our enemy hurls accusations against Him on every side, we will cry out wholeheartedly, ‘My Beloved is fairer than the sons of men. He is the most gracious of them all! I know what is within His heart…My Beloved is beautiful and excellent…His leadership is perfect! All His ways are just and true!’”

We are given the privilege of loving Him voluntarily during this life when we see so dimly; each day we get to choose once again to sow seeds into the unseen through faith and love. Someday we will see with perfect clarity and be in wonder and awe forever; meanwhile, it is in this short moment on earth that we have the opportunity to love Him without having seen Him. This ongoing choice ravishes His heart and overwhelms Him!

“Forever these choices will ring through the corridors of eternity with resounding worth and relevance.”

I pray that we will grasp more each day how much our weak love for Him moves His heart; may the Spirit of God come and reveal the heart of Jesus, the Holy Bridegroom, and in that revelation, may our hearts be set ablaze with love for Him, empowering us to choose to love Him and not be offended by His leadership, no matter how we feel or what the circumstances of life are like.

God bless you this week. Next week we’ll cover chapter three: Awakened to Love.

Deep Unto Deep - Week #1

This week we start on the book Deep unto Deep, the Journey of His Embrace, by Dana Candler. There are twelve chapters, and my plan is to do one a week, the Lord willing.

As I watch and pray in these critical days, I become more convinced each day that the Christian believer must seek encounter with God as never before. The immense pressures of a sinful and emotionally wounded world will cause the believer’s heart to harden and grow cold if we aren’t continually experiencing the beauty and power and affection of God.

One problem with starting to seriously pursue intimate knowledge of God is that we encounter our personal spiritual barrenness and can be so discouraged by it that it’s much easier to give up and fall back into the old patterns of coping with life without experiencing the love and affection of God as a normal part of our walk.

This book is very encouraging in the quest to really experience God, the living God, not simply our own ideas of Him. Dana addresses the issue of the soul’s barrenness and how even that counts and can help us towards Him.

I’ll start with a couple of comments/questions from her introduction:
• How do our weak hearts enter the holy torrents of Divine Love?
• Only one thing will equip and sustain our hearts for what lies ahead: intimacy with God.
• In the hearts of believers all across the earth, this groan (the desire for spiritual intimacy) is increasing. The ache is intensifying. We have grown tired of words and bored with ideas…We do not want only a theology about the experience of God but the true encounter with Jesus Christ from which the theology is birthed.
• Our hunger for Him is a supernatural awakening, and His answer is a divine enflaming.

Chapter One: The Nobility of Barren Prayer

“We are on a journey into the heart of God, and that journey is essentially one of prayer and communion with the One we love. As we position ourselves before Him in devotion and prayer, one of the very hardest and most common things we encounter are the times of emptiness that we experience.”

Because this is such a common experience in our pursuit of God, it’s imperative that we get a glimpse of how God feels about these times if we are to persevere in seeking after Him; otherwise, if it’s up to my perspective on what’s happening, I will easily give up and consider it useless.

The Scriptures show that whoever sows “to the Spirit will reap from the Spirit” (Gal.6:8). Our sincere, though weak, seeking after God counts in the invisible realm of the Spirit. He is very aware of our pursuit of Him even though we are not aware of His awareness! He isn’t surprised that we are weak in going after Him, and it’s this very weakness that provides Him the opportunity to show His strength (II Cor. 12:9; Heb. 11:34). The success of His kingdom takes into account our weakness (II cor. 3:4; Heb. 4:15).

“He is not waiting for us to bear fruit and experience what we would call ‘victory’ in prayer before we raise our voice. He calls it a victory when we willingly lift our voice to Him from the wilderness of our barrenness…In this place, our weak words overcome His great heart.”

The Wisdom of Waiting

In times of silence on the part of God to our prayer, we are often tempted to quit what we’re doing and to try something else, but there is great wisdom in waiting. The issue isn’t so much the method we are using but the journey the Spirit has us on, and waiting on God is part of His strategy to bring us into more of Him. The pressures and screams of our culture (including the Church culture) to get results are immense, but there is divine wisdom in waiting patiently and in faith on God and His timing (Isa. 40:28; Heb. 11:6). He does reward those who wait and believe.

“Behold, this is our God; we have waited for Him, and He will save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for Him; we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation.” (Isaiah 25:9)

The God Who is Overcome

Nothing can conquer God except one thing…the glance of a heart in love with Him (Song of Songs 4:9). Our small attempt to gaze on Him moves His heart!

“God does not define our love by emotions as we so often do. We love to measure our experience of God by what is felt. Love cannot be evaluated with this system of calculation. God is the One who measures love and what we call barren, He often calls fruitful; what we call wasteful he often calls well spent.”

Because of the drivenness of fallen man and the hyper-drivenness of the modern western culture (partly resulting from our obsession to scientifically measure results to prove our significance), we as Chrstians fall into defining our life in God by what our own eyes can see in the natural. It’s imperative that we, God’s people, find out how God measures reality or we will be continually sucked into how we and others measure us. This leads eventually to a life without focus, a life with all my emotional energy being spent on “measuring up” to someone’s opinion of what counts.

The author goes on to say that the way that we grow in understanding what our weak prayers do to the heart of God is through choosing “again and again to believe that He cherishes our feeble words and holds each sigh close to His heart.” I want to underscore the words, “again and again.” I can’t overemphasize this element of persevering in saying “yes” to this truth over and over and over again. In time you will reap, if you don’t grow weary in this. He is the Rewarder of those who diligently seek Him!

The picture that always comes to mind when I think on these things is that of a small child that cannot walk but can reach for Mommy or Daddy. The reaching doesn’t get him any closer to his parents, but the reaching brings Mom and Dad running to pick him up! And so our little reaching in prayer does not get us to God, but it so moves His heart that He comes running to us…We must believe and walk in this reality in our inner person whether or not we have external emotions accompanying it or not. He knows what He is fashioning in us and in those around us during times of seeming spiritual barrenness.

I Will Remember Your Love

This chapter ends with the wonderful truth that the Lord says that He remembers our love for Him. He who sees in secret promises to reward us openly (Matt.6:6), and He sees and remembers our tears (Ps. 56:8). In Jeremiah where God confronts Israel with her compromise and her exchanging the living God for false gods, He says that He remembers the love of her youth, indicating that He is very aware of our heart posture toward Him.

This is vital for us to know and to remind ourselves of so that we press into seeking Him and not give up because we aren’t having external feelings about His presence.

”To know that each small choice matters and that every tear holds eternal significance within the heart of the Lamb of God changes everything for us and enables us to give ourselves unreservedly to the journey of the heart. We begin to recognize eternity hiding in the shadows of each feeble prayer and every small movement of our hearts toward the Lord…In giving ourselves to lives of prayer, our prayers will not all feel barren in our experience. Yet neither will they all be saturated with presence and the experience of communion. The important thing we must learn is that no matter what we encounter along the way, we must find the intimacy provided in that place…

In finding out the movements of His (Jesus’) great heart, we have a compass for our own journey…”

May your heart be encouraged to either begin or continue to seek after the Lord with all your being in these critical days; His eyes roam over the earth looking for faith in the earth and for friends to partner with Him as His judgments begin to be released in the coming days. Holy Spirit, open the eyes of our heart to see how You measure what really matters. We love You, Lord; thank You for knowing and seeing and valuing even our weakest reaching for You.

Next week we’ll cover chapter two: He is a Bridegroom. The blessing of the Lord be on you this week!

Maturing into Childlikeness

Recently I wrote a short article about maturing into childlikeness that I'd like to post here. This is such an important reality in our lives, and I believe that at the core of becoming more childlike is the virtue of self-acceptance. In other words, it's as we fully accept who God has made us that we become less self-conscious and can increasingly forget ourselves in a healthy way.

So I share this short article with you this week with the prayer that the grace and power of the Holy Spirit will increase in each of our lives so that we increasingly enjoy the freedom and spontaneity that is ours when we forget ourselves in Christ. God bless you this week!

Maturing into Childlikeness
“And He called a little child to Himself and put him in the midst of them, and said, Truly I say to you, unless you repent (change, turn about) and become like little children (trusting, lowly, loving, forgiving), you can never enter the kingdom of heaven (at all). Whoever will humble himself therefore and become like this little child (trusting, lowly, loving, forgiving) is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 18:2-4 (Amplified)

Though we commonly look at maturity in Christ as growing up into adulthood (Ephesians 4:13-15; Col. 1:28,29), I want to look at maturing in Him as growing up into childlikeness; the more we mature in Him, the more the characteristics of childlikeness abound in us.

There are many wonderful characteristics of a healthy child, such as being emotionally alive, spiritually sensitive, teachable, trusting, hopeful, loving and receiving love, forgiving, not self-conscious, etc. The one I want to focus on here is the lack of self-consciousness, which I will refer to as self-forgetfulness.
Maturing into childlikeness, particularly self-forgetfulness, is only possible in the Child Jesus (Isaiah 9:6). Luke says “And the Child grew and became strong in spirit, filled with wisdom…” (Luke 2:40). Later in Acts 4:30 Luke makes reference to God doing wonders in the name of His holy Child Jesus.

In the process of maturing into full manhood, Jesus did not outgrow the virtues of childlikeness; those virtues carried over into His manhood, making Him the most attractive and appealing Man that has walked the earth. Unlike Jesus, our own sin, compounded by the sin of others against us, has robbed us of the virtues of childlikeness, making us self-conscious adults who over-analyze and dissect ourselves and others to the point of not being able to receive freely of God’s life and love. I believe a part of maturing in Him for us means to gain back these virtues, including that of self-forgetfulness and the spontaneity that accompanies it.

To regain what we have lost, we must:
1. Acknowledge how far as a Church culture we are from childlikeness, particularly in the west where rationalism has split our heart from our head and we’ve lost the art of being still to listen and receive truth with the simplicity and faith of a child.
2. Then we must repent of personal sin that has distorted our view of receiving truth, receive God’s forgiveness and fresh filling of His Spirit;
3. We must also forgive the sins of others against us, sins from our distant past and sins of the present, and receive healing for the wounds of our soul;
4. Finally, in order to continue to mature in self-forgetfulness, we must cultivate a lifestyle of practicing the childlike virtue of listening and receiving freely from God then obeying whatever He tells us to do. This practice will begin to tenderize our “immature, self-conscious adult” hearts and empower us to be still and hear the affirming voice of the heavenly Father. It was in His Father’s affirmation of Him that Jesus, the divine Child, could mature into manhood properly, obey the Father, and through His obedience to His Father’s will reproduce His likeness in those who trust in Him.

In a wonderful fantasy story by George MacDonald, the wise woman, who is the Christ figure of the story, is depicted in one place in the story as a child:
“…as Rosamond looked, the child began, like the flower, to grow larger. Quickly through every gradation of growth she passed, until she stood before her a woman perfectly beautiful, neither old nor young; for hers was the old age of everlasting youth.”

Holy Spirit of Jesus, come and save us from immature adulthood; forgive our sin and heal us of those wounds we carry because of sins of others against us; take us to the Father through the Son to hear His affirming voice that calls us into mature childlikeness so that we stand as full adults, “perfectly beautiful, neither old nor young,” free to forget ourselves in worship of You and in ministry to others.

Coldheartedness

Knowing God and growing in the knowledge of His love and affections is the greatest experience a human can have!

Because of the times we live in and the increase of stress and pressure, the believer in Jesus must be encountering His love ongoingly in order to walk through our days with a tender and warm heart. Coldheartedness is a common malady among God's people, and I believe that it comes (at least in great part) because of allowing little offenses to accumulate. Little by little our hearts get callous, and it's usually so gradual that we aren't aware that we are getting hardened.

I recently was with a group of Korean missionary trainees in Vancouver, and as I was in prayer and waiting on the Lord before meeting with them, the cry arose in my heart: "Lord, help me never speak of you with a cold and dull heart!"

Because I am increasingly aware of how easy it is to grow cold in my love for God (and consequently for others as well), I make it a practice to intentionally take time to allow the Holy Spirit to search me and show me any little (or big) issue that has transpired in my life that I need to ask forgiveness for or that I need to forgive someone for.

If done with regularity, this doesn't have to take a lot of time.

The Lord bless you and cause His face (smile) to shine on you this week! He longs to show you His affections for you...in that place of knowing we are always loved by Him, no matter what, we will be empowered to speak of Him with burning hearts!

Holy Spirit, You Who burn with passion for Jesus, come and keep our hearts warm and tender toward God so that when we speak of Him, others will want Him. Thank You that You can do this and that You love to do it!