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!