Thursday, May 29, 2008

Breathe on me, Breath of God

I'm very grateful for the Spirit of God, the Breath of God, by which I live and breathe!

As the pressures of life increase with the end of the age, I'm "fighting for breath" so that my inner life is awake and alive and in touch with the living God. I want to live my day out of a place of deep inner quietness, not from a place of drivenness and fear.

The good news in this is that God in Christ is infinitely more zealous about this than I am. He will never grow weary nor discouraged in His zeal over having all of me, and it is this reality that gives me hope. If it were up to my zeal and energy, there would be no hope.

Over the years the Lord has taught me to fear taking action when there is inner turbulence going on in me. I keep learning this again and again as the Lord leads me into new arenas and levels of serving Him.

This week I was reading in John 16 and when I read verse 33, the Holy Spirit quickened it anew to me: em>>"These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."

I was struck in a new way with the truth that only IN HIM do I have inner peace; by the same token, IN THE WORLD (dependence on anything but Jesus) I can count on being easily shaken in my soul. What the Lord has taught me over the years is that when I find my inner being in turbulence, I must pause and find out from the Spirit what is disturbing me. In doing this, He can pinpoint specifically what is causing the disturbance (in what way have I separated my heart and mind from the Vine?), and then I can deal with that specific issue.

And so I love the Holy Spirit and His beautiful and powerful ministry in my life - without Him I cannot remain in Christ; He is unbelievably faithful to get my attention. It then remains for me to respond appropriately to His touch.

Holy Spirit, come again and again and breathe on us Your life-giving Breath. We are "breath-less" without you and live suffocating lives unless You come in Your grace and power. Thank You for loving to do this for us. We love You! In Jesus' name, Amen.

Blessings on your week!

Thursday, May 22, 2008

The Seven Longings of the Human Heart - Week #9

Chapter Seven – The Longing to Make a Deep and Lasting Impact

This is the final chapter of this book, and for the sake of review, I’ll list the seven distinct longings that Mike Bickle presents in the book:
1. The longing to be enjoyed by God
2. The longing for fascination
3. The longing for beauty
4. The longing for greatness
5. The longing for intimacy without shame
6. The longing to be wholehearted
7. The longing to make a deep and lasting impact

These longings are, in part, what make up our humanity. We are made in God’s image, and these are legitimate desires that reflect desires in His personality; these longings are not to be repented of, but the ways and means by which we seek to fulfill them are to be repented of.

Related to the longing to make a deep and lasting impact, the author says,

“Intuitively, people desire to make an impact. Most cannot bear the thought that the extent of their existence could be summed up in a few lines chiseled on a gravestone. There must be more. Knowing that we have limited time in this life, we all long to make a difference that will last far beyond our moment in time…we are wired to make an impact for all eternity.

“God designed us to desperately want to make a difference in the lives of others. We need to know we are making a contribution that is significant to God and one He esteems and remembers forever…Working together with Jesus to awaken other hearts in love is essential to our emotional health. (3 John 4)…The desire to exhilarate others with good news is fundamental to our humanity.”


Bickle goes on to say how all of us love to be part of something that excites and exhilarates someone we love, such as a surprise gift or good news about a breakthrough that just happened (whether that be something in the spiritual or the natural realm).

Surprisingly, the way to making eternal impact is through being faithful in small things (Luke 19:17; Matt. 25:21):

“God has called us to be faithful in small things, which tells us that small things are relevant because they are esteemed and remembered by God. He evaluates and rewards our lives in eternity based on the small things we have done in this age…We easily become preoccupied with seeking what looks and feels significant to us while devaluing faithfulness in the small things. However, eternal impact is mainly achieved through our faithfulness in small things…”

God has called us to partner with Him in sharing with others that which we have discovered in Him. As soon as we discover something wonderful of Him, we immediately want to pass that on. “The idea of changing the trajectory of another person’s life is irresistible.” Just the thought that I could help another person toward Jesus is thrilling!

We fulfill this call through influence; most of us have no idea how much influence we have on others. The reality is that those that most impact others are not those who get in the news because of one big attention-getting act but are those who day after day are faithful in small gestures.

“From God’s perspective, influence is usually released with a whisper. It is the kind word spoken to the harried co-worker. It is the glance of approval or the word of appreciation given to an eager child or a friend. Its power lies not in volume or shock value but in consistency and sincerity…While we may be temporarily wowed by stage presence and pizzazz, deep within we are impacted most by the people who walk out their commitments with daily consistency. This approach to life is the one valued by God. It is called faithfulness and it operates in meekness.”

So, consistently serving others in meekness is God’s way of impacting others, and He remembers and rewards this well (Heb. 6:10; Matt. 10:42).

However, it’s not enough to impact others in this life; we long for lasting and eternal impact, and the good news is that this is where we have the greatest potential for impact…

”Many Christians divorce their actions in this life from their impact in the next. The Second Coming of Christ has been portrayed as some sort of cosmic delete button…Scripture, however, makes it clear that there is a lot of continuity between the two timeframes. What we do as Christians now will matter then…we are building relationships, honing skills and shaping our characters in practical ways that will make a significant difference in eternity. As we fashion our lives in this age, we must keep in mind the greatness of the age to come and that the small things done in obedience and meekness now will result in greatness and impact then.”

The Sermon on the Mount presents the Kingdom lifestyle of fasting and prayer, giving and serving others and blessing our enemies. All of this counts towards eternity; when we begin to grasp the ultimate meaning of the small things we do now, we will view what we do now in a radically different light. All the ground we gain now will have continuity in the next age when we partner with Jesus to cleanse and rebuild the earth for the coming of the Father after 1,000 years.

In the conclusion of the book, the author says, “Your longings, if you let them, will be what draw you into the Divine. Like separate streams, each of these seven longings is an escort into the eternal ocean of God’s fiery affections.”

I remember many years ago when someone said to me, “I’ve learned that when I am feeling lonely, it is because I’m wanting God.” And she learned to turn to Him instead of to the substitute loves that we have all turned to, whether that be human relationships, or addictions of all sorts, or ministry, etc.

So, Lord, I pray that You will come by Your Spirit and quicken us to recognize our longing for You when we begin seeking fulfillment in secondary loves. You are the Fountain and Bread of Life that satisfies our hunger and thirst. Fill us with the knowledge of You…thank You, dear Lord.

(Just a reminder that until August I will send out simple postings each week and then we will start on Roy Hession’s beautiful little book, We Would See Jesus. God bless you!)

Thursday, May 15, 2008

The Seven Longings of the Human Heart - Week #8

Chapter Six – The Longing for Wholeheartedness

One of the opening sentences in this chapter is: “It was growing increasingly difficult to maintain control of the people who heard Jesus preach. The Pharisees had their defenses up…”

I smiled as I read this because of my own experience of going wholeheartedly after Him as a result of having the veil removed from my religious eyes. When this happens, something inside of the weakest of us is strengthened and no amount of persuasive talk or reasoning can budge such a person. I think right away of two people in the Bible who exemplify this: Mary of Bethany and the blind man Jesus healed.

Mary had encountered Jesus in such a way that nothing would stop her from worshipping at His feet in extravagance – not the scoffing of the disciples, nor the chiding of her family, nor her own internal doubts about acting counter-culturally.

The man born blind was confronted by the religious leaders and questioned about his theology, and although he had barely met and encountered Jesus, the encounter was so real that no amount of religious debating could change his testimony: “I was blind but now I see.”

People who encounter Jesus and keep encountering Him throughout their walk with Him are “uncontrollable” when it comes to trying to keep them within certain boxes. They become more and more childlike in relating with God and with others, and we know that children don’t “color inside the lines”! Genuine maturity in God is expressed in childlikeness – a wonderful freedom to forget oneself, which in turn empowers one to love God lavishly and to love others sincerely.

And so the “Pharisees had their defenses up” because of the effect that Jesus was having on the crowds. They decided to confront Jesus by sending one of their brightest lawyers to try to trip Him up related to theology. He asked Jesus what the greatest commandment in Scriptures was. Jesus replied with a prophetic declaration out of the Old Testament: “You shall love God with all your heart.”

Jesus prophesied that “God will have a people who love Him with all their energy.” And everything that Jesus prophesied will come to pass.

God has put in every human heart a desire and longing to love Him with all our heart/energy; in other words, to love Him wholeheartedly without compromise and defilement. And by the power of His Spirit, He will do such a work in us in the last days that His Bride across the earth with be lovesick for Him and experience profound joy in that lovesick condition even in the midst of great suffering and persecution.

Just this week I was chatting with a young man who is engaged to be married, and we were talking about how being in love messes one’s life up; suddenly, things that seemed so important before no longer seem that urgent, and life gets turned upside down with a lot of disorientation as one reorders his/her priorities in life.

“Today’s weary Church needs a vision of the pleasures of loving God…God’s insistence on wholeheartedness is not for His own gratification. He is not an insecure narcissist looking to His created beings for affirmation…His insistence on wholeheartedness is for our benefit. Loving God with all of our hearts allows us to experience the heights and fullness of what it means to be human.”

We know that humans have great capacity for burning affections because we see this in God (Ex. 20:5; Numbers 25:1-11; etc.). God is a Lover and seeks for lovers. Two people who are in love with each other relate very differently from two people who are in a “client/lawyer” relationship. Our understanding of the Gospel (particularly in the West) has tended toward seeing our salvation as primarily, if not solely, a legal standing. But God has a ravished heart that desires humans.

“In addition to our legal purification before God, salvation includes intimacy with God, a relationship that involves the receiving and giving of deep affection between our hearts and God’s. As God communicates His longing and affections for us, we respond in a similar way (I John 4:19). An intellectual understanding of the legal aspects alone is not enough…We must understand what God feels for us” in order to experience feeling love for Him.

I’m not talking about surface emotions going on all the time; however, as A.W. Tozer speaks of in his book, “Whatever Happened to Worship”, something is drastically wrong when a believer can worship God and never feel His love.

Nor am I referring to any kind of sexual overtones in relating with God. The biblical romance language refers to spiritual awareness and having our spirit deeply touched continually with the fire of God’s Word so that we are lovesick for Him (fully awake at all levels of our humanity – mind, will and emotions) in response to God’s emotions toward us.

“People who are in love give up a lot less frequently than those who are not in love.” Bickle says in another place that “lovers outwork workers.” I’m finding this true in my own experience; I’m energized to press through heavy pressures because I encounter the love of God ongoingly and love Him back with all my heart.

“Half-heartedness with God is a horrible way to live. Half-hearted followers have too much of God to enjoy sin and too much sin to enjoy God. They are left somewhere in between with a serious spiritual dichotomy, and are usually quite miserable…Frighteningly large percentages of the body of Christ live half-hearted lives and accept it as normal.”

I believe half-heartedness with God is why the Church in the West is so unhappy and depressed. Our indulgent lifestyle has made us a complaining and spiritually dull people. Wholeheartedness toward God is the lifestyle presented by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, which is a radical lifestyle of prayer and fasting and giving and serving and blessing one’s enemies.

This chapter concludes with thoughts about fasting and about “violently” holding onto Jesus. Fasting is one of the most powerful ways toward wholeheartedness, and I’m convinced that the Holy Spirit is going to bring the American Church into a lifestyle of fasting and prayer as He is doing in other parts of the world. And we will become a people who will not relent in seeking God until we find Him and then, in mature love, we will hold Him fast and never let Him go (Song of Songs 3:4).

Mature love is a love that resolutely clings to Jesus in a lifestyle of prayer until the deep things of His heart are reached. “This holy violence creates abandonment, a resolve to give up anything that gets in the way of intimacy with God. A holy commitment arises within to live constantly in the state of being in love with God.”

One of my favorite pictures in Scripture is that of the beloved at the end of the book of Song of Songs – she is seen coming up out of the wilderness “leaning on her Beloved.” This is the goal of the Holy Spirit in our individual lives and also our corporate life in God – humans clinging to and leaning on God in utter dependence and wholehearted love with no desire to try to walk on our own.

John 17:26 clearly expresses what Jesus desires: a Bride that loves Him just as the Father loves Him. He wants voluntary lovers and He will receive what He has asked the Father for.

May the blessing and grace of the Spirit of God rest on us to encounter the love of God and thereby be empowered to love Him back wholeheartedly. This is joy! I want to walk in this all of my days – may You empower us to live this way, dear Lord.

Next week we’ll complete this book by covering the final chapter, The Longing to Make a Deep and Lasting Impact. Have a blessed week in His love and grace!

Thursday, May 08, 2008

The Seven Longings of the Human Heart - Week #7

Chapter Five – The Longing for Intimacy without Shame

“Before the beginning of time, the Father burned with the desire to have a family, to know them and be known by them in a deep and profound way…God’s dream has always been to share His heart with us in a way far surpassing anything we know or can imagine now. God created us with a profound desire to fully know and to be fully known without shame.” (I Cor. 13:12)

This innate desire for intimacy drives humans to engage in sinful relationships in order to fill the emptiness we experience because of lack of spiritual intimacy with our Creator.

Before the Fall, Adam and Eve enjoyed union and communion with God and with one another without shame. God was the Center and Source of all their desire; they knew and enjoyed God and were known and enjoyed by God. Adam and Eve were naked and without shame; they had nothing to hide from God nor from each other.

This is what we were created for, but when sin entered the world, man became self-conscious with a strong desire to hide. Whereas they had lived together with God and each other in perfect bliss (God-conscious rather than self-conscious), now suddenly they became self-focused, driven by self-awareness rather than by God-awareness.

Having to find justification for existence in themselves now (rather than in the reality that their loving Creator Father had created them simply out of desire for them to be with Him and to partner with Him in populating and overseeing an earth full of Christ-like people), they were driven to devise their own way of justifying their existence. The utter inadequacy of this drove them to hide from their Creator Father, and the bliss of knowing and enjoying Him and His knowing and enjoying them was gone.

Ever since then, every human has both been born into this fallen state and has endorsed it personally by our own sin. We all long for intimacy without shame. We were created this way and cannot repent for wanting this. But as with the other God-given longings that we have been looking at in this book, we must repent of the ways and means by which we seek for fulfillment of these longings. The countless sinful sexual liaisons that litter human history (from co-dependent relationships to full-blown sexual perversions) testify to the inescapable fact that all humans long for intimacy without shame. Our ways of going after this, of course, cause us to dig ourselves more deeply into the pit of shame, and it becomes a vicious cycle.

“Spiritually speaking, being naked and unashamed means all the secrets of our hearts will be fully unveiled. We will have no shame before God when this occurs. Eph. 5:31,32)...It is possible to experience an intimacy with God and people that has no shame in it. Intimacy means so much more than a physical union. It is the empowering confidence people have in one another that allows them to share the deepest parts of their hearts – their hopes, and dreams, their fears and failures, their feelings and frustrations.”

God knows all of this about you and me but longs for me to invite Him in to personally know me; in other words, He wants me to talk to Him about all of this. I’m fascinated with how Psalm 139 begins with a statement about God’s omniscience (perfect knowledge): “O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up…”; then the psalmist ends with an invitation to God to know him: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my anxieties; and see if there is any wicked way in me…”

I see the prayer at the end of Psalm 139 as an invitation to God into intimacy. I often think of this in terms of a mother and child. The young child is known well by his mother by virtue of her having born him and cared intimately for him as he develops, examining carefully everything about him (both his outer body and his personality). The mother loves knowing her child in this way; but there is a whole other level of knowing that kicks in when one day, the child comes to mother and voluntarily shares with her something about himself that he wants her to know. She already “knew” this, but his desire for her to share the knowledge with him lifts the relationship into another realm altogether.

God longs for this kind of intimacy with humans, unbelievable as that may sound; He wants me to consciously invite Him into my world with all its wonder and horror. He wants me to talk to Him about everything, successes and failures and let Him be part of it all! He wants me to run to Him when I fail rather than run away from Him, as Adam and Eve did. Our natural response when we fail is to run and hide from God either through intensifying our religious activity or through throwing ourselves into fleshly sin. Meanwhile, God is crying out, “Adam (Nita), where are you??!!”, longing for me to run to Him that moment rather than hide from Him. (Heb. 4:15,16) The cross shows how eager God is to cover us with His means of righteousness as He did Adam and Eve after their failed attempts to cover themselves.

He wants me to invite Him into all my thought life, good and bad. The more I consciously allow Him to be present as I’m thinking negative things, the more cleansed my thoughts become because the light and fire of His presence cleanses whatever it touches. I’m finding this to be true in my personal walk with Him, and it’s wonderful!

This kind of intimacy with our Creator Father is the only way to break the power of shame off of us, whether it be a shame deeply rooted in years of chronic sin and failure or shame from a sin I committed in thought or action five minutes ago. The beauty and healing power of intimacy with God is that He is totally trustworthy to cover us and never expose us when we open ourselves to be fully known by Him. In walking a lifestyle of this kind of intimacy with God, we are empowered to walk in transparency without shame in other relationships.

He also invites us to know Him intimately. He longs for a reciprocal relationship, knowing and being known without shame. The Apostle Paul speaks boldly of his desire to know God intimately in Phil. 3:8-10. Jesus wants us to know what moves His heart; I believe He reveals general desires of His heart in His Word, and I believe He wants to unveil particulars about those desires to us as we wait and listen in loving worship and obedience.

Through this chapter Bickle touches on some primary ways in which we share intimately with Christ:
* In our victories and successes
* In our pain and struggles
* In our selfless sacrifices for Him and His kingdom
* In our passions and desires

The chapter ends with this:
“Intimacy without shame is a lost concept for most people. They have lived their entire lives in relationships that were more a trade-off than anything resembling intimacy. Anything they encountered approaching intimacy usually involved the shame of knowing it was happening outside of a covenant relationship. To a world full of people who are longing for intimacy without shame, Jesus says, ‘I am here to meet you. I will rejoice with you in your successes. I will weep with you during your times of failure and heartache. I will see and understand your sacrifices, and I will celebrate and affirm the passions that make you unique in time and eternity. I will be truly intimate with you – I will know you and you will know Me, and there will be no shame in it.’”

Holy Spirit of Jesus, incline our hearts to run to the Father in our shame rather than away from Him…I ask for the grace upon us to develop the habit of inviting You to know us intimately and to be included in our deepest thoughts and secrets. Come and know us and reveal the thoughts and heart of God to us that we may have a taste of the bliss there is in knowing and being known without shame. Thank You, Lord.

Next week we’ll cover chapter six, The Longing to be Wholehearted. God bless you!

Thursday, May 01, 2008

The Seven Longings of the Human Heart - Week #6

Chapter Four – The Longing for Greatness

This is a wonderful chapter on the innate desire that we all have to be great and how we try to deny this longing through artificial suppression of it. I believe this is especially true of us as believers; because we know that it’s not right to scratch and claw our way to the top, we deny the reality that we really do desire to be great. For some of us, we’ve denied this for so long that we aren’t in touch with the desire any more. Perhaps because early in life we experienced being put down or being disappointed in not seeing our youthful ambitions for greatness come to pass, we find it easier to settle for an unbiblical view of greatness and say that true spirituality means we shouldn’t want to be great.

I love the premise of this chapter! Mike Bickle shows from Scripture that we humans are created by God to desire and long for greatness. Our error is to think that we will realize this greatness in this very short life on fallen earth. This life on earth is our brief internship that prepares us for eternal greatness in God and in His Kingdom (II Cor. 4:16-18). How we live this life in Him will determine our position in eternity.

Over recent years as this reality has gripped me, it has liberated me in two ways:
1. First of all, it has freed me to enjoy the desire to be great and not be ashamed of that; in other words, I’m free to not expend emotional energy on trying to stuff something that is a legitimate desire in every human being.
2. Second, it has freed me from having to realize this greatness in this life. My heart goes out to those who don’t know Jesus and work so hard to extend their life now because they believe it’s the only chance to be fulfilled; or there are those of us who follow Jesus but don’t realize that when Christ returns and sets up His Kingdom on earth, we will begin to walk in our greatness, so we don’t have to be known and recognized now.

With this as the essence of this chapter, I’m going to list several quotes for you from it:

* Striving for greatness has driven a lot of people to do ungodly things as they try to fulfill their desire at any cost. As a result, adult etiquette seems to shun any desire for greatness, to stuff it down somewhere in our psyche and feign humility, all the while smoldering on the inside because someone else gets recognized and we get ignored.
* You desire to be great precisely because you were meant to be great…We are not to repent of this God-given longing…We are only to repent of pursuing it with a wrong spirit…Get rid of your false humility, but remember that the only way into greatness is through the cross of Jesus and by walking in meekness (Matt. 20:26,27).
* To the Laodicean Church, Jesus gave a staggering promise of greatness…”To him who overcomes I will grant to sit with Me on My throne”…Nobody sits in God’s presence. Every creature described is pictured as standing in respect or prostrate in holy adoration when appearing before God. Yet in this passage we read of saints sitting in God’s presence…Do we have any idea of who we are (to God)?...The revelation of the redeemed as enthroned with Jesus answers our cry to be successful.
* The longing to be great, to be noble and to be successful is answered by God when He enthrones us as His bridal partner in eternity…we will be co-heirs with Jesus. This is an expression of how He feels about us. (Matt. 5:12, 19; Rom. 8:17; Rev. 5:10)
* Every social order has a ruling class…One usually has to be born into it. The other way to become part of the ruling class is to marry into the aristocracy. As a believer, you have married into money and power in a big way, an extreme way…This is not to say that the redeemed will be equal to God. That is a lie Satan has successfully used in many false religions. But you will reign on the earth as a king and priest.
* As kings, the saints will reign with judicial responsibility and authority on the Earth in the age to come…There sure seems to be a lot of work to do before we’re ready to step into that role. Fortunately, Jesus always makes a way. He never appoints us to anything without providing a process of preparation…The primary preparation to greatness is entirely different from what we would do by nature (Matt. 20:26,27; Matt. 18:4).
* The measure to which we develop in love, meekness and revelation during our lives now determines our position and functions in His government (Matt. 7:14; 19:30; 20:16, 26,27; 22:14; Luke 13:24). Our ministries in the age to come have nothing to do with how much we accomplished outwardly in this age, but rather how much we develop inwardly.

In the last part of this chapter Bickle suggests that there are a couple of fundamental elements needed in our present walk with God in order for success in our next assignment after this short 70-year internship:
* Meekness (Matt. 5:5)
* Faithfulness in the little things (Lk. 18:17)
* Resisting the temptation to promote oneself (whether in blatant or subtle ways) – leave all promotion in the hands of God

Living and walking in these virtues comes easier when we have revelation of the truth of who we are to Jesus; we are His inheritance (Eph.1:17,18). As this truth sinks more deeply into our heart understanding, we find we’re wholly satisfied to let the Lord place us in high or low places in this age, knowing that in the age to come, we will rule and reign with Him from a position of greatness!

Holy Spirit, reveal Your awesome plan for the Bride of Christ in the age to come so that our hearts in this age are at peace and empowered to embrace meekness and faithfulness and hiddenness for the sake of taking our place with You to rule in the age to come. Thank You for doing this for us! In Jesus’ name…

Next week we’ll cover chapter five: The Longing for Intimacy without Shame. May the grace and light of the Lord’s countenance be on you this week!

Thoughts for Lent (9) - On Changing Our Minds

In this reading from Walter Brueggemann's  A Way Other Than Our Own , the author issues an invitation to us as the final week of Lent be...