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!