Enjoying God - Week #1

The Lord bless you! I trust you are expanding in your capacity to receive His love as you continue to mature in Him. A favorite prayer of mine that I often pray is that of St. Augustine: “The house of my soul is small; do Thou enter in and enlarge it.”

The more I open my heart to freely receive the love of God in Christ Jesus, the more aware I am of how offensive God’s love (the real thing) is to my flesh! When I pause long enough to let Him tell me how He loves me even in my worst moments, the flesh rises up to say, “Yes, but…” and then goes on to protest why it can’t literally be true that He likes and enjoys and wants my company.

So the next book that we’re just starting this week could be problematic for us, but I have chosen it because of my own experience in recent years of understanding the radical nature of the love of God, seen most clearly in the cross of Christ Jesus.

I’ll start with a line from the foreword of S.J. Hill’s book: “He has designed you with the characteristics and personality to touch His heart in a way that no other human being has ever been able to do. It’s a simple truth. But if it doesn’t dominate your spirit, then most of what you’ll do will come out of duty rather than delight…” (Mike Bickle)

Chapter One is entitled The Drawing of the Human Heart. This book is very simple, and I’m praying that the Holy Spirit will take its simple but foundational truths and stop us in our tracks once in awhile; I encourage you, as I have before, to take this slowly and allow yourself to “soak” in these bedrock realities, without which so many of us as Christians live stressed-out lives in these days of massive pressures coming from all sides.

Hill quotes Blaise Pascal: “There once was in man a true happiness of which now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present. But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, by God Himself.”

Each human personality is an infinite abyss – you are and I am; because of our sin and fallenness and the sin of others against us, we spend our lives trying to fill that infinite void with finite things and people, what Hill calls “lesser loves.”

I have become convinced that without ongoing revelation of the relentless and unchanging love of God for me always (not just when I’m doing well), I cannot break free from chasing after second loves which I look to for affirmation and for my identity.

The author says, “The ache deep inside your being is a blessing. It invites you to something greater than you could ever fathom: the lifelong pursuit of knowing and enjoying God.” That ache is the desire to be fully known and fully loved; the good news is that we are fully known and loved, but the scheme of the evil one is to keep this truth hidden from us, even those of us who are in Christ.

One basic Christian reality that has become real to me in recent years is that I love God because He loved me first. I have “known” this truth (I John 4:19) for most of my life but am now beginning to “know” it. Much of my life and service for God has been unconsciously based on my love and commitment to Him rather than on His love and commitment to me. But without knowing at the core of my being that He loves and enjoys me, I cannot hope to freely love and enjoy Him. And so the author underscores the reality that GOD is the Initiator/Seeker, not man, in this love affair. This is unlike other religions that have man seeking a disinterested god(s).

“There is a place within you – a deep place – that only God can touch. It’s in that place that God’s echoing invitation emerges and penetrates your spirit. It’s the invitation not only to pursue Him but also to enjoy Him. This call comes out of an even deeper place, a deeper longing, in the heart of God. As much as you may want Him, He wants you more.”

Using the story of Helen of Troy, Hill talks of the fact that there is a war being fought over you and me; the war is between God and the enemy – God in Christ has fought for you; that’s how valuable you are to Him.

He goes on to say that today’s Church suffers from spiritual boredom “because believers were never made for a program, an institution, or a weekly pew-warming ceremony. Christians were never made to be satisfied by a three-point outline that contains just enough advice to get over the ‘hump’ of the week. The human heart was made for passion. It was created for relationship. It was designed to experience the fullness of God.”

In our state of dissatisfaction, we go after adventure in many forms. Some Christians find adventure in sports or camping or missions, etc., while others look for adventure in romance novels and movies, etc. While some of these activities aren’t evil in their rightful place, today’s western Christian culture has lost its way in its pursuit of substitutes for what our hearts really long for.

The thing that is filling my heart with faith for His Church these days is that God is jealous over His Bride, and I believe that wherever He finds a hungry heart, He begins to do whatever it takes to win our wholehearted love for Him. I am witnessing this among Christians everywhere I go these days – hunger for the true God. The jealous Bridegroom is warring for His Bride and awakening desire for Him in our weariness over chasing second loves that have left us disappointed and devastated.

There’s a good prayer by S.J. Hill at the end of this chapter that I encourage you to pray (or pray your own prayer of saying “yes” to God); but I want to close with the prayer quoted by the saint of long ago, Julian of Norwich:

“God, of your goodness, give me yourself, for you are enough for me. If I ask anything less, I know I shall continue to want. Only in you I have everything.”

God bless you this week with the certainty that He is with you and is not discouraged with His good work in you! He knows He is able to win and woo us into wholehearted love and enjoyment of Him through revealing to us His wholehearted love and enjoyment of us. All He needs is our “yes” to His work!

Let’s read chapter two for next week, “The Divine Romance.”