Thursday, September 27, 2007

Deep Unto Deep - Week #4

Chapter Four: Face to Face with Love

In the opening poem, the author prays the following:
“Refusing all my offers
To earn Your love,
To win Your gaze,
To deserve Your smile,
You wrap Your heavy love around me,
Until my anxious arguments subside.”


I have experienced this kind of internal arguing with the love of God when I have gotten quiet long enough to listen to His words of affection for me even when I have felt a failure. As Dana alludes to in this poem, there is something so strong in us that wants to earn and deserve His affections, and His unrelenting jealous love towards weak humans (towards me)is offensive to the flesh. To truly accept that His love for me is unchanging even in my worst moments is devastating to the fallen human drive to be accepted because of performing well.

But I’m discovering more and more that it is in this place of saying “yes” to His unconditional love and acceptance of me that I am being liberated more and more from the ties that bind me to the fear of man. I find that I’m increasingly free from the bondages of sin, both the subtle internal bondages as well as external bondages.

Coming face to face with love is, in some ways, more painful than it is glorious; at least in the early stages of finding the courage to let God love me.

I’m reminded of a song that I heard sung spontaneously recently based on John 13 where Jesus washes the feet of His disciples. The singer was singing out the inner protesting that goes on in us when Jesus, the God-Man, wants to wash our feet: (paraphrased: “I’d rather work hard for You, build buildings and great ministries, give up everything, than to allow You to wash my feet…”

Candler asks this question: “How could the magnificent, brilliant God who is perfect and holy and glorious fall in love with weak human beings who are fallen and broken and sinful?” The revelation that hit her as she sought an answer to this was that He is a Bridegroom God; in other words, His very nature is that of a person in love. She says, “I had lost sight of the irrational, lovesick part of love and…had been trying to reason my way through an illogical reality.”

The Truth of His Love/Receiving His Love

“…Our natural minds cannot and will not make sense of it. So long as we remain in the position of human reasoning, we can reel ourselves round and round the issue, and we will never receive the truth of His love…truth is not determined by our logic. Truth is defined by the One who is Truth. And the One who has set His zealous affections on weak human beings is the Way, the Truth and the Life. What is true is what is found within His heart.”

He yearns for humans to receive His love, so how can we do this? First, I must have revelation of His desire for me and revelation of Who He is as the Lover of my soul. Then I must actually receive the love of God as He reveals it to me, opening my heart wide to it and drinking freely of His unconditional love.

This is a progressive and slow process, generally speaking. In practical terms it means:
· Regularly placing my heart before Him, exposing it to His great and burning heart of love. This is something David did constantly, as seen so well in the Psalms that he wrote and in statements like, “I set the Lord before me always…” (Psalm 16).
· Filling my mind with the Scriptures, particularly those that speak of His emotional makeup.
· Singing and speaking and praying the written Word over my heart again and again.

Little by little we find our inner being transformed and becoming less fearful and less driven and less anxious.

Repetition of His Love

Repetition is very key to truth sinking deeply into the inner being. “We have weak hearts and feeble memories. What He told us yesterday about His pleasure in us seems to be distant today. We so easily drift from truth and lose touch with the intimacy we have known only yesterday.”

We need to hear His love for us continually and throughout our life. I will never outgrow my need to know and hear how He love and enjoys me, His daughter. When I begin to drift away from this, I become more subject to the pressures of people’s opinions and my own expectations and to disappointments in myself or in others, etc.

It is the deep revelation and acceptance of such unconditional and unrelenting love that wins the human heart over to voluntary and radical love for Jesus. He will never force a person to love Him, but an ongoing journey into the emotions of the heart of God will win the believer over to full abandonment and lovesickness for Him, a love that is perhaps most dramatically seen in the extravagant offering of Mary of Bethany. Her extravagance was a reflection of what she had experienced from Jesus.

Holy Spirit, come and reveal the love of God the Father and of Jesus the Son to our hearts, as only You can do! We say “yes” to your great love and thank You that you receive that “yes” even though it’s weak.

For next week we will read chapter five: Personal Receiving.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Deep unto Deep - Week #3

Chapter Three: Awakened to Love

I love the opening prayer of this chapter. Here is part of it:

Oh, Jesus…
All of my “beauties” falling, falling to the ground,
The goodness, the righteousness,
The good intentions and ‘right’ motives,
Dropping layer by layer…
…I am not what I thought I was…
Taking away what will not stand
That He might crown me with His true beauty
And clothe me in His robes…


As I have given more time to really waiting and listening to God, I’ve become more aware of how much my heart is asleep and my understanding dull. The spiritual awakenings I have had in my life journey with God aren’t enough for now. As the author says, “We are in need of constant furthering of His reviving of our hearts. We need Him to awaken us over and over again. When He does this, our supposed contented hearts are…escorted to the place of divine dissatisfaction.”

This divine dissatisfaction is a great gift from God and causes us to pursue Him. I’m grateful that the Spirit of God doesn’t allow me to settle into a place of false rest. I want the true rest of God which is found in meeting Him over and over again in His Word and experiencing the “kiss” of His Word on my spirit. In other words, when the Word under the power of the Spirit touches my spirit, longing is awakened in me for more of God.

God the Awakener
“When we cry out for His awakening, we are responding to the divine invitation He has already issued to our own hearts. We are not bidding God to come to us, as if we had just thought of the idea. Rather, we are entering into and participating in the ever-standing calling of God over our lives…”

This underscores what the Holy Spirit has been making more real to me lately as I have meditated on His Word in Psalms 52 and 53, and that is that not one person in all of human history has sought for God apart from God’s grace at work. In the first 3 verses of Psalm 53, the psalmist uses all-inclusive words six times!...words like “not one” and “no one” and “all”.

In his book Christ in the Psalms, Patrick Reardon says of this portion, “We humans are so thoroughly infected by the results of sin that, unless God intervenes…, our inevitable lot is despair…We Christians are not Buddhists or Jains. Ours is not a self-help religion. We do not have it within us to find God…(nor) even to begin looking for God…(nor) even to want to look for God…”

It has been wonderful to get a deeper glimpse into my helplessness apart from His grace and into the sinfulness of sin; i.e., the severe and irreparable damage sin has done. As I see this a bit more, the cross is more glorious and captivating in my heart.

God must awaken me. As seen in the Song of Songs, it is He who awakens love in the right time, and He does it many times in a person’s life because we grow in our understanding of the infinite person of God. What I was awakened to before about Him was wonderful, but there is always more to discover about His divine and amazing personality that will expand my capacity for still more.

But He knows the timing. I cannot force things to happen in God, but I can say “yes” to His invitation into intimate knowing of Him; and in His infinite wisdom and love, He will awaken different stages of love for Him when He sees the time is right.

Awakened to the Highest Pleasure
Song of Songs 1:2 says, “Your love is better than wine.” Psalm 63:3 says, “…thy steadfast love is better than life.”

The love of the Father and of Jesus is the highest pleasure the human heart can experience. Nothing now nor in eternity will bring pleasure like His love! Even a small taste of this can ruin us for lesser pleasures. “When we enter into the experience of this superior pleasure, our drive for the lesser pleasures is overcome.” Through spiritual intimacy with God in Christ, we get a tiny peek into what God has prepared for us (I Cor. 2:9).

I have a very long way to go in maturing in the love of God, but the little I’ve tasted of His love and affections has empowered me to do things that I never would have had the courage to do in the flesh. As the Scriptures teach us, love is more powerful than death!

Responding to the Awakening of God
“God refuses to open up the mysteries of His heart to the unwanting soul…The way He allures and motivates us to this kind of wholehearted pursuit (of Him) is through the revelation of His enjoyment over us. (Psa. 45:10-11) The King greatly desires my beauty. This is the motivational method in which we move toward Him in love.”

I will only be willing to “forget (my) own people and (my) father’s house” as I come into the revelation that the King desires my beauty. The “father’s house” represents all the natural affinities and human definitions of who we are (both positive and negative). These have such a hold on me that only the affirming voice of God deep in my spirit can loosen their hold on me.

In the movie Fiddler on the Roof, this truth is dramatically shown in the scene where the second daughter of the Jewish father leaves her family to join her fiancĂ© in Siberia. Her father can’t understand why she would leave the warmth and comfort of family and home to go to that barren and cold place. Of course, it was her lovesick heart for her fiancĂ© that caused her to leave the lesser loves for the superior love. Only the superior love of God will empower us to “leave” the lesser loves and put them in their proper order.

But to hear that affirming and identifying Voice requires that I seek Him with all my heart (Jer. 29:13,14). When the heart is awakened, there must be a corresponding response of diligent seeking of Him (Prov. 2:1-5). We can’t expect that with a casual glance His way once in awhile we will be able to find the pleasure of knowing and being known by Him in love.

Awakened in the Wilderness
And here is where the struggle begins, because the Lord leads the awakened heart to the wilderness, the place of encounter with Him. The very word “wilderness” implies loneliness and silence and absence of the comforts of the “city.”

“The wilderness is the place where all of our secondary loves are revealed and where we are stripped of false affections and other masters besides Him…Our souls do not know how to be before God in the stillness of intimacy. We have allowed many voices and many opinions of man to dominate our lives, leaving us with a great deal of inward disorder.”

The “wilderness” exposes the inward disorder because all the things that distracted us in the “city” are not there any more. We discover that what we thought we possessed in God we don’t posses at all, and this can be very painful and disorienting.

But it is the necessary path to entering into the divine affections of God, so I want to encourage you that if you are in such a “wilderness” now, stay with Jesus in the love of God. It will be worth it! Keep saying “yes” to God; look and listen for His words of love in the Word and say “yes” to them even though your flesh will want to protest. Know that you are on a journey into His heart and in His time, He will awaken love.

Chapter Four (Face to Face With Love) is next week’s chapter. Rich blessings on you this week!

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Deep Unto Deep - Week #2

Chapter Two: He is a Bridegroom

Song of Songs 4:9 shows that God is ravished with delight over His people, and we “cannot pass by this quickly…To say that He loves me is a familiar notion indeed, but to pursue, know and experience His love is a rare preoccupation…We confuse the hearing of a concept with the actual abiding of that reality inside of us.”

The discovery of how true the author’s words above are is what has changed the way I approach the love of God. I think I unconsciously used to think that hearing and even accepting truth from God meant that the work was done; and while the entrance and acceptance of His Word by faith is necessary as a first step, the deep lodging of that truth in my inner being requires what Dana Chandler later says: “It is not casually or from a distance that we dive into the depths of these vast regions, but rather we enter this Ocean by a focused abandonment, a violent pursuit and a lifelong drinking…We have heard with our ears of a God of love, and we have known with our minds that in this love is our life, but have we yet been embraced by Love Himself?”

Now I understand the great value and need I have to regularly be quiet before God and listen and let Him tell me of His love for me. It’s not enough that years ago I may have heard Him tell me His heart is ravished over me; I must live by His love always. I’m spending time in Psalm 52 right now and meditating (chewing over) verse 1b many times: “The steadfast love of God endures all the day.” (ESV)

Just this morning as I was waiting silently before Him, He showed me a little bit more how prone and bent toward idolatry fallen man is; so much so that if we don’t have a lifestyle of waiting on Him and listening for His voice, we are quick to worship visible things, such as the work of our hands (i.e., finding our satisfaction and significance in being able to point to measurable results), etc. I’m as prone to this as anyone and so I fight for time to regularly and consciously wait on Him for His smile and/or loving correction that affirms me as His own.

The Everlasting Story
The author points out how important it is to understand the end and goal for humanity from God’s perspective, and that is a great wedding day (Revelation 19) with the Son.

Speaking of the Trinity, Chandler says, “The Holy Three have always existed as a divine dance of romance, a whirlwind of affection and pleasure and love unending. It was from this pulsating intimacy that God created humanity and the natural order. Though we will always remain the creation, He formed humanity to enter into relationship with the Trinity, the Godhead. In His great mysterious heart was a desire to bring human beings into the holy river of affections known between Father, Son and Holy Spirit and to share in this divine communion with them. The Father desired a family, and the Son desired a bride. From this overflow of burning desire, humanity was brought forth.”

I have the privilege of meeting and sharing with God’s people in a variety of places, and it’s obvious that the Holy Spirit is stirring deep hunger in the Church for the presence and love of God in an experiential way; no longer content with conceptual knowledge of God alone, His people are beginning to cry out for Him, and without this kind of knowing of God, we won’t endure the time of testing that is coming on the earth as the world is collapsing around us.

“When God created Adam, He said to him, ‘I will make a partner suitable to you.’ The Holy Spirit revealed to Paul that this promise ultimately speaks of Jesus and the church (Eph.5:32)…On that final day, Jesus will have affectionate partners who are voluntary lovers fully possessed by Him, and natural history will culminate with a lovesick bride in the image of Jesus, ruling the Kingdom of God with Him.”

Bridegroom Heart
Hosea 2:16 says, “And it shall be in that day, says the Lord, that you will call Me ‘My Husband’ and no longer call Me ‘My Master.’” Throughout the generations, God unveils and emphasizes different faces of His personality and character, and as we approach the end, His heart as a Bridegroom will be unveiled as never before, and His people will know Him as Husband rather than as Master.

Jesus spoke of this reality in his final prayer to His Father (John 17:24) and in His final public sermon (Matt. 22:1) in the parable of the king who had planned a marriage. He also addressed the reality of His heart as a Bridegroom when speaking of the primary reason for fasting after His ascension (Mark 2:18-20). This is a shift in thinking about God and will massively affect how we work for and with Him in the end of the age.

The author goes on to speak of the zeal and jealousy of the heart of this great Bridegroom: “The Father in His zeal for His Son will bring forth a worthy bride. The Son in His ardent love for His Father will present us to Him as a holy people, the family of God. The Holy Spirit in His devotion to the Son will equip us and accomplish His way within us…Lest we think that we ourselves keep our own hearts, we must rest assured in God’s own zeal to bring our righteousness forth as brightness and our salvation as a lamp that burns (Isa. 62:1). We need only to say ‘yes’ to Him.”

Bridal Heart
In the last part of chapter two, the author speaks of the heart of the bride, reminding us that the King is overcome with our love (Song of Songs 6:4). In the gaze of the loved one, the Lover sees the fulfillment of His inheritance promised to Him by the Father…
“He is overcome by our eyes of faith as we peer into the mystery of who He is and who we are before Him with only a dim understanding and faint comprehension. It is this act of gazing that causes the Lord to speak one of the strongest statements of scripture about the way His heart is moved by the love of weak human beings. He says, ‘Turn your eyes away! They overcome Me!’

“When we walk through the valley of difficulty with darkness veiling our eyes from Him and when our enemy hurls accusations against Him on every side, we will cry out wholeheartedly, ‘My Beloved is fairer than the sons of men. He is the most gracious of them all! I know what is within His heart…My Beloved is beautiful and excellent…His leadership is perfect! All His ways are just and true!’”


We are given the privilege of loving Him voluntarily during this life when we see so dimly; each day we get to choose once again to sow seeds into the unseen through faith and love. Someday we will see with perfect clarity and be in wonder and awe forever; meanwhile, it is in this short moment on earth that we have the opportunity to love Him without having seen Him. This ongoing choice ravishes His heart and overwhelms Him!

“Forever these choices will ring through the corridors of eternity with resounding worth and relevance.”

I pray that we will grasp more each day how much our weak love for Him moves His heart; may the Spirit of God come and reveal the heart of Jesus, the Holy Bridegroom, and in that revelation, may our hearts be set ablaze with love for Him, empowering us to choose to love Him and not be offended by His leadership, no matter how we feel or what the circumstances of life are like.

God bless you this week. Next week we’ll cover chapter three: Awakened to Love.

Thursday, September 06, 2007

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!

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...