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!