Moving Confidently in His Love

In My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers says:

If you debate for even one second when God has spoken, it is all over for you. Never start to say, "Well, I wonder if He really did speak to me?" Be reckless immediately—totally unrestrained and willing to risk everything—by casting your all upon Him. You do not know when His voice will come to you, but whenever the realization of God comes, even in the faintest way imaginable, be determined to recklessly abandon yourself, surrendering everything to Him. It is only through abandonment of yourself and your circumstances that you will recognize Him. You will only recognize His voice more clearly through recklessness—being willing to risk your all.

I think that every true follower of God, no matter how mature in Him, trembles over making a major decision in his/her life, but the trembling is of a different sort when the saint is rooted and grounded in the ravished love of God for him!

As the Holy Spirit is beginning to shake all that can be shaken in His people, there will be more and more significant changes happening all around us. In His kindness He will move people around and change what people are doing in order to situate us in the best possible context to get us into a posture of lovesick obedience to Him. He knows us so well; He knows where we have wrongly placed our hopes; He knows what leads us to wanting Him more than we want anything or anyone else; and He knows that only in that place of wholehearted pursuit of Him is where we are most content and fruitful.

These aren't days for timid and half-hearted steps of obedience to God; however, without ongoing revelation to our inner man of the jealous love of God for us, it's very difficult for us Christian believers to move out of the gravitational pull of the Christian mindsets that are strongly shaped by the culture around us.

The ways we have developed to serve the Lord are so deeply ingrained in us that we think they are biblical and we are unaware that so much of it is basically adopting the ways of men and attaching the name of Jesus to it. I believe the beginning days of the Spirit's dismantling of our ways of serving God are here and that we will see this dismantling increase. He has a fiery jealousy over His Bride and won't let us continue in our deception forever - this is great news!! But it will be increasingly painful as He shakes all that we thought was of Him until it's just Him and His Bride together in the "wilderness".

In that wilderness place, we will discover His love (read Hosea for more on this), and we will return to our First Love; we will fast and pray and mourn over our idolatry, and we will find our prophetic voice to sing and preach boldly of His coming judgments. This, of course, happens on the individual level, but it will be a corporate reality by the time God has completed His work of preparing a pure Bride for His Son.

Watchman Nee, in his little booklet Ministering to the House or to God?, suggests that when all is disintegrating around us, the solution isn't to come up with more solutions but to stop trying to fix things and gather for prayer and fasting and seeking God above all else. (This is what Joel 2 is about.)

Praise the Lord for such jealousy and kindness and tenderness for His own! It's His mercy that causes Him to judge His own first before He releases His judgments on the world.

So how do we live now in light of the beginnings of His judgments for His Church? There are probably a number of answers, but the most obvious one that I know from the Scripture is to fast and pray corporately. If there isn't a group of people in your area that are doing this together, ask the Lord to give you 1 or 2 other people who will begin to fast and pray with you regularly; ask for revelation of the bridegroom love of God for you and for the grace and power to take confident steps of obedience out of the place of trusting in His sovereign love and power.

God bless you this week with a holy discontent related to your experience of His love for you (I continually ask for more revelation of this for myself) and related to the experience of those around you who name His name. Enjoy His enjoyment of you and be empowered by that revelation to take bold steps of abandonment to His leading, whether that be at the level of your ways of thinking or whether it be related to steps of action that He is asking of you.