Deep Unto Deep - Week #12

Chapter 9 – Believing in the Unseen

This chapter deals with our hiddenness in Christ…Dana Candler says, “My life is not my own. I have been bought with a price. And I have willingly surrendered to my position of hiddenness in Him – hidden with Christ in God. When He appears, I too will appear with Him (Col. 3:4).”

When we fully embrace the free-fall into the hidden life in God, we step into unknown territory where our worth is measured differently than in the visible realm of this world. “We depart from the false identity that was based on how respected, known, gifted and influential we were in the eyes of men and leap into the vast, unknown realm, the hidden reality, of who we are eternally in God…We are trading in what we have always known and what others have always told us of ourselves for a book of blank pages. We leave all the old voices, however true or false, for the One Voice that is temporarily silent in our experience.”

One difficulty with embracing the unseen and unknown is that when the visible things that we have hinged our identity on are not there, we discover that we didn’t know Him as well as we thought we did. But of course, this discovery is good and drives us to seek Him more, and we are transformed more into His likeness.

And the more we are like Him, the more we begin experience His nearness because one significant reason we don’t experience the feeling of His presence is that we aren’t enough like Him to be able to recognize Him when He is near. This shouldn’t be cause for alarm but rather motivation for going after Him more than ever. “As our inner man is transformed so also our intimacy with God will deepen.”

The Unseen Work of God’s Silence
When we cry out for God’s manifest presence and He delays, it’s painful. He is testing our desire with His refining fire, wanting to turn our words into reality. Our desire wanes when He doesn’t show Himself. But He knows how to secretly keep us motivated to pursue Him, and so we go through times of hoping and then times of fainting and then hoping again…In this process “He makes Himself the one Love and one Fear of our hearts by starving us out for Him alone…He stretches our small capacities far beyond what we would have thought possible. He prepares the way for His coming by the very process of the journey’s waiting and the pain of His delays.”

Here is the key to making this process count: “In these times, He asks us to remember Him in love even when all circumstances seem to sing a different song.”

But the author also includes another important element in this walk: “We must learn to face our own emerging questions. We question His distance. We wonder at Him reasons for not coming to us in His presence. His ways are mysterious to us…” One thing I’ve learned and continue to learn is the importance of talking with God about my doubts and feelings and not pretending before Him. I can do that and still remember His love and sovereignty in my life. The psalmist did this over and over – he openly expressed his doubts and fears and anger but always said, “yes” to God.

“Yes. To all that You are. To all of Your ways. I believe in Your love. I will have no other loves but You. I believe that even Your silence is Your love for me and I say, ‘Yes,’ to Your hand upon my heart. Have Your way within my heart and take me to the fullness of love.”

The Unseen Fellowship of God’s Silence
“The Lamb’s greatest suffering was His Father’s silence on the cross…It was His Father’s absence that caused His heart to burst with sorrow. Because of the cross and redemption, we are never again separated from His love…Yet He does take us through seasons where He withholds his manifest presence from us in order to bring forth even greater and stronger love from our hearts. He refines our love by the fire of His felt absence…”

So what the Lord waits for from us in the times of hiddenness and silence is our declaration of love for Him. This “yes” to His love in the midst of “darkness” is precious to God. I like the way the author imagines the Lord instructing the angels: “…My beloved one is about to speak. She is about to choose Me in the darkest night. The words she will say will be recorded and remembered for all our eternity together…We must wait. We must make room for the heart of the volunteer to come forth. It is My way. She will volunteer her love freely.” (Psa. 110:3)

The chapter ends with these comments: “We have one moment on the earth to touch the great place of the Lamb’s heart…If we say ‘Yes’ to this fellowship of suffering, we will one day gaze upon the very real scars on the Lamb’s hands, feet and side with understanding…”

I remember hearing a man of God preach about suffering out of his own experience. He said that in his deep pain he cried out to God, “Why?...” And the Lord told him something like this, “When I’m on my honeymoon with My Bride someday, I want us to be able to have an intelligent conversation.” The sufferings we go through now, if done with a “yes” to Him, will prepare us to understand His scars and relate with Him in eternity, and it will prepare us to share in His glory as well (Rom. 8:18).

Lord, teach us how to be people of the unseen; help us to know the unknowable so that we are more like You and can recognize when You are near. Make us a people of prayer and adoration for the sake of the Lamb…we say “yes” to you, dear Lord.

The next two chapters are short, so let’s cover chapters 10 (Prisoners of Hope) and 11 (Seasons of Relevance) together, ok? Rich blessings on you this week!

Deep Unto Deep - Week #11

Chapter 8 – Communion with the Beloved

This morning the Holy Spirit quickened Psalm 59:9,10 to me:

“O my Strength, I will watch for you,
for you, O God, are my fortress.
My God in his steadfast love will meet me;
God will let me look in triumph on my enemies.”

Over and over the psalmist expresses his longing and his need for ongoing communion with God; because of this deep hunger to meet and encounter God, he watched for Him constantly; this is what it means to “practice the presence of God.” We do that both in the stillness of intentional and conscious prayer and worship, and then it becomes natural to watch for Him throughout the day’s demands.

We were created for uninterrupted communion with the Beloved, and I believe that one of the primary goals of the Spirit of the Beloved is to bring us increasingly into the posture of the Shulammite in the Song of Songs: “leaning on her beloved.” Coming into the fullness of this kind of dependence is a lifelong journey, and the Holy Spirit has great patience and joy in working this into us. He knows exactly how each of us is wired and so knows the circumstances of life that will help lead us to this posture of unbroken dependence and communion with the Beloved.

In chapter 8 the author begins by focusing on the truth that humans can indeed experience communion with God and that it is this capacity that makes us unique among all other creatures. The angels don’t even have this privilege of knowing God intimately – only humans, made in His image, have been invited into such a relationship with the Creator! And the actual experience of God’s love and affection is the greatest reward a human can have…nothing else is as exhilarating to the human heart as to experience God’s love personally.

So Dana begins by saying that while the dry longing for God (chapter 7) is absolutely part of experiencing God, we should not settle for staying there when God wants us to touch and feel His love on our hearts.


Lovesick Communion
In Song of Solomon 2:3-5 we see the loved one’s response to having been touched by the love of the Beloved. She says that His love is the best thing on earth, so much so that she describes herself as “lovesick.” The enjoyment of His affection is so rich that she calls it a form of “sickness.”

“It is a sickness that, in fact, denotes a certain health of soul – for she has finally found all of her fountains within Him, and it is the very tasting of this spiritual milk that empowers her to flee ungodliness. (I Pet. 2:3)…To see more of Him is to desire more of Him, and to desire more of Him is to eventually see more of Him, for he satisfies those who hunger and thirst for Him, and He fills the hungry with good things. (Psa. 107:9)…So on and on, we scale the endless ascent of God’s love…”


Understanding Communion
John 15:9-11 “To abide in love is to commune continually with the One we adore…” This love that Jesus invites us to abide in is the same love that the Father has for Him! The very same way that God loves and feels for His Son is the way that Jesus loves and feels for me.

(A wonderful study in the Scripture is that of looking at the love of the Father for Jesus; seeing that would awaken our hearts to the lavish love that Jesus has for us…we’re/I’m actually invited to be in the middle of this love exchange within the Trinity!)

Fundamentally, the way we experience communion/fellowship with God is through abiding in His love; in other words, staying put in that place of being the recipient of His love no matter what’s going on in my life; whether I’m “succeeding” or “failing” in a given moment, it’s important to stay in that place of believing that I am loved and wanted by God. It’s not doing what Adam and Eve did, which was to run away from God rather than abide in the love that they had been experiencing with Him and finding in Him the forgiveness and cleansing they needed.

This doesn’t mean I don’t face and confess sin, if that is what’s causing me to want to run from His love; it simply means that I rush to His arms of love and mercy for cleansing and forgiveness rather than rush to my own mechanisms to cope with my shame and guilt.

To abide in Christ sounds sweet in theory but requires the work of the Cross and the Holy Spirit to practice, because we have all built up our stockpile of ways of coping when something interrupts our peace in the Lord. And so rather than keeping still and waiting for the Lord’s way out, we immediately jump to our defense mechanisms that we have leaned on for years.


Our Desire and His Desire for Communion
“We were made to know more than longing...He has made us to receive and to experience love Himself. This is our glory…Communion with God, therefore, is more than the desire for Him; it is the enjoyment of Him…the present tense fellowship of superior delight…Much has been said about the faithfulness of God to bring us into our purpose or our destiny. Yet the destiny God is most determined to answer is His purpose for each heart to know communion with His Son.”

The author goes on to say that much of our longing and aching is founded on an inaccurate understanding of God’s closeness to us. “He is near when we imagine Him far.” It's true that there are genuine seasons of dryness and silence in which He is deliberately hiding Himself in order to expand our capacity for Him, but the reality is that more often than not, He is very near; but our unbelief or inability to recognize Him causes us to believe that He is far from us.

“We must be careful to not possess a mentality that spiritual barrenness is what is normal or a belief that this emptiness we are experiencing is simply the way God desires it…He is jealous that we would experience His nearness and His presence.”

It’s because of His longing for nearness that we long for it. “I will be found by you,” He says in Jeremiah 29, “when you seek Me with all your heart.” He wants to be found; He longs for fellowship with humans, and this is most dramatically seen in the incarnation of the Son and then in the sending of His Spirit. God Himself indwells humans! There’s nothing nearer than this!

“Our God has come nearer to us than any man or angel would have thought conceivable…We experience intimacy with God through communion with the Holy Spirit.” This is because the Holy Spirit’s overarching desire and purpose is to bring humans into a relationship of intimacy with Jesus. So as we fellowship with the Spirit, He brings us near to God.

A very effective way to fellowship with the Holy Spirit is through praying in the Spirit. The gift of praying and singing in tongues is a wonderful and powerful way for humans to commune with the Spirit of God and be drawn into fellowship through Him with Jesus.

This immersion into the life of God is our primary calling out of which other callings flow; the “road to this immersion begins with my filling my mind with the Word of God so that the Holy Spirit might ignite it as fire in my inner man. Spirit must marry with Truth inside of me. The warmth of this tenderizing causes the truths of God to become alive within me and enkindles my heart for wholehearted obedience.”

In summary, the experience of actually tasting communion with the Beloved comes through abiding with Christ in the love of the Father, and we abide in His love through obedience to that which we believe He speaks to us to do (or not do). Prayer, and particularly praying in the Spirit, is a spiritual discipline that helps us abide in Christ when we would rather rush to other loves for relief.

The Lord bless you this week! May His nearness be your joy and reward…

Next week we’ll look at chapter 9: Believing in the Unseen.

Deep unto Deep - Week #10

Chapter 7 – Longing

In this chapter the author gives us a beautiful view of the God Who longs for humans. In John 17:24 Jesus expresses the longing in His heart for His Bride when He says, “Father I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am…” Also in John 14:3 He says that He’s preparing a place for us because He wants us with Him forever.

I think it’s important to realize that when Jesus expresses desire, it’s not casual but very intense; in fact, so intense that He was willing to suffer indescribable pain in order to have this desire fulfilled for a Bride to be with Him eternally. We’ve grown so accustomed to the weak “I wants” of our natural and fleshly lives that we don’t understand how intense desire is when it comes from God.

Desire that comes from God becomes all-consuming and is also empowering for the one who possesses it. All other desires take second place in the face of desire in the human heart that comes from God for God.

And so as I read this chapter, I was struck afresh with my need for God-given desire to continue to increase in me. I’ve tasted a bit of His desire and have experienced the empowering that comes with that, but I want much more!

The chapter starts out with this truth: longing for God comes straight from the heart of a God who longs! Just as we love Him because He first loved us, so we long for Him because He first longed for us…I’ll personalize it: I long for Him because He first longed for me.

“We find ourselves desiring to desire Him and pained by the present shallowness of our hearts…We begin to hunger for the capacity to hunger. We begin to thirst for the ability to thirst. The longing to long is the escort into longing itself…To long for God is to give witness to the Transcendent One. Longing is the echo of eternity within our souls. It is that which sets us apart and makes us pilgrims on the journey. This world is not our home…”

For our encouragement, Dana says: “The longing prior to the felt-experience is just as much a part of loving Him as the experience itself…both the craving and the satisfaction are equal parts of the gift of intimacy.”

Love’s Delay

So once we catch a glimpse of the reality that we are made for His love and that nothing is as wonderful as His love (Psa. 63:3; Song of Songs 1:7), why is the actual fulfillment of the experience of that love so often delayed?

The author takes time to unfold the purpose in love’s delay, which is basically in order to cultivate greater longing in the heart of the beloved so that we become lovesick for Him. As I read this and pondered it a bit, I realized that in other areas of life, if we satisfy our hunger too quickly, we don’t experience the full enjoyment of that satisfaction. For example, if I begin to feel a little physical hunger and I immediately run to grab the easiest thing at hand to satisfy the beginning hunger pangs, I ruin my appetite for a delicious meal a little while later.

We humans tend toward “quick and easy fixes” to satisfy our hunger for God and therein we quell the hunger that, if allowed to grow, would give us the capacity to enjoy the only One Who truly and fully satisfies us. The quick solutions to our hunger for God (in the forms of relationships, addictions, positions, work, ministry, etc.) dull our hunger, and we walk out our days in half-heartedness and numbness related to God, unable to enjoy His presence.


Desire: the Prelude to Satisfaction Realized

And so the author points out how important it is to realize that the delay in having our initial hunger satisfied is for a good purpose coming from the heart of a God who longs for us. If we don’t understand that the delay is motivated by the passion of God for us, then we can easily be offended with the time gap between the longing and the fulfillment or assume that we are meant to fill that gap with lesser loves, rather than wait and allow the hunger to mature and expand.

“Understanding God’s own longing keeps us from hurt and offense at the Lord when He does not immediately answer the pain of our heartache…He knows that without longing we cannot enter into the fullness of His love, and therefore, in His absolute kindness and jealousy over us, he places within us the dagger of desire for Himself.”

These times of unfulfilled longing are necessary in order to expand our inner capacity for Him:
“Behind these periods of dryness is the flaming heart of the God-Man who refuses to have a bride not stricken with lovesick desire.”

The dryness and lack of emotion that is characteristic of such periods of our life should not necessarily be interpreted as hardness of heart. “One of longing’s most common faces is emptiness. It is the dry side of desire and the empty side of love.” Yet we have the assurance that desire for God (whether in a dry season or in a season of tears and sweet tenderness) will always be answered eventually because the one Who placed desire within me did so for the very purpose of filling that desire, and He Himself is the fulfillment of desire. “A divinely implanted desire is nothing short of a Divine promise of the very thing we yearn for…If we are not careful, we will misinterpret these times and possibly deny some of the greatest fruits to be born in the realm of intimacy. These seasons make a way for the seasons that we crave most.”

(I want to point out that the acceptance of dryness in our lives should not be confused with deadness of emotions that is the result of either unconfessed sin or unhealed woundedness in us…)

This chapter ends with a wonderful section on fasting in answer to the question about the proper response to these dry seasons in our lives. Dana says there are basically two parts to our response to dryness:
1. Having a correct theology and view of God and His emotions and intentions in allowing delayed satisfaction.
2. Fasting as a form of mourning the absent Bridegroom.

I want to add my hearty amen to her teaching on the power of fasting to expose and increase hunger for God, particularly as it relates to the Bridegroom God. Matthew and Mark both quote Jesus’ presenting of a new paradigm for fasting: it is the way to mourn the absence of the Bridegroom.

Though I had practiced fasting for many years simply out of obedience to the Word, it was when I understood this paradigm for fasting that my heart was truly motivated to give up food as a regular part of my life. Jesus presents it as the means for drawing near to Him during this time when He is not physically present with His people.

Dana says, “The sleeping mourning must be awakened in the heart of the lover. We fast to remind our hearts that He has been taken away, for we have grown used to His absence…” We as believers have unfortunately “grown used to His absence” and fasting is a way to keep ourselves in touch with His absence and to cultivate desire for Him to be present.

My personal testimony is that fasting is perhaps the spiritual discipline that has most awakened desire in me for Jesus when I have fasted for the sake of drawing near to Him.

So I close this chapter with a challenge to you to begin a lifestyle of fasting, if it’s not part of your regular life in Him, but to do it with this motivation: to draw near to the absent Bridegroom. Two very helpful books on this are:
1. The Rewards of Fasting (Mike Bickle and Dana Perkins)
2. The Fasting Key (Mark Nysewander)

Lord Jesus, I ask for the grace to fast to rest upon us, Your Bride, in these critical days. May we be sick with love and longing for You until we finally agree with the Holy Spirit and cry out to you, “Come, Lord Jesus…we can’t live without You!” (Rev. 22:17,20)

Blessings on you…next week we will cover chapter 8: Communion with the Beloved.

Deep Unto Deep - Week #9

Chapter 6 – Dark Yet Lovely

I know we’ve had two weeks on this chapter already, but what Joan shared during my absence (thank you, Joan!) triggered more in me that I’d like to share this week before moving on to chapter seven. So I’m going to simply make some comments on Joan’s input this week:

1. “There is a childlikeness that I must acquire by His grace in order to receive this love and attention at a time of darkness, failure, intimidation, or whatever.”

This is a reminder of our need to mature into childlikeness, which I believe is (among other things) characterized by lack of self-consciousness; or to put it in positive language, childlikeness is characterized by “self-forgetfulness.” This is necessary in order to freely receive God’s love and attention in the midst of “darkness, failure, intimidation, or whatever.” And as Joan alludes to, this comes by grace as we obey the simple instructions that God gives us day to day, no matter the cost.

This also brought to mind the reaction of Adam and Eve to God after they had sinned. In their darkness and failure, they hid from Him rather than run to Him. This is the natural human response to God when we sin or fail in some way. The very time when we most need to run to Him for His salvation and cleansing, we run away because of fear and shame. I’m learning, albeit slowly, to stay in the love of God in those moments when I most want to run from His love to other “saviors” that will prop up the tendency of the flesh to want approval based on performance.

Holy Spirit of Jesus, come by Your grace and empower us to increasingly walk in childlikeness, that wonderful self-forgetfulness that readily receives your love and forgiveness and cleansing and moves on quickly (though not superficially) as a beloved child.

2. “A comment came my way that sent me into a dark corner and I didn't want to come out. In order to begin to be free of the effects of this comment, I had to take steps to offset situations of childhood that left me unaffirmed as a person. The effect of negative comments, etc. always has sent me into the dark corner. I am finally getting to realize this reality so that I could begin to take the steps to be free of the effect of not being affirmed. Then to bask in the love of God and begin to see His reality of who I am.”

Joan refers to her past as an unaffirmed child; to one degree or another, most of us have experienced this, even with the finest parents. I want to add that even those who have had unusual affirmation from their parents need to hear affirmation from God simply because human parental affirmation, wonderful as it is, will never take the place of divine affirmation from the heavenly Father. This is good news, because it implies that our sense of being and of well-being isn’t dependent on having had a perfect upbringing. God is sufficient for those deficits as we look to Him for life and health.

I love that Joan made the hard choice to not stay in “a dark corner” and “took steps to offset situations of childhood that left me unaffirmed as a person.” This is so important if we are to walk in the fullness of our destiny in God because there will constantly be comments made to us that have the potential to shut our hearts down. We can’t control what others do and say to us, but we can make choices by God’s grace about how we will process and respond to them, and these choices will determine how we mature in receiving God’s love and giving it.

Holy Spirit, would You strengthen us in choosing to not stay in "dark corners" of self-protection but to move out into the sunlight of Your presence.

3. “My desire has been for all of us to come to know in the deepest way God's personal love for us. This includes the area of the reconciling good and evil. This is a subtle trap for us as believers. We can see in our society today (including many church bodies), a destroying of the reality of God's love and truth especially in the realm of personal holiness. This reconciling does not bring personal freedom into our deepest being, let alone in this present world system. In this realm of love and truth, we must be able to issue mercy to ourselves in knowing that we are forgiven. God's mercy to each of us can come through in a deep level because of the blood of Jesus cleansing us and the Holy Spirit renewing us.”

When I read this, I was struck with how needful it is that we freely receive the love and mercy of God in order to NOT reconcile good and evil; in other words, there’s a strong tendency in us to excuse and cover up our sin if we don’t have revelation of the unconditional love of God for us even in our sin and weakness. It’s very difficult for us to face failure squarely without knowing that we are deeply loved and cared for even when we have sinned.

And it is in this very revelation that my heart is released from guilt and shame to want to be clean and upright before a holy God. Without such an understanding in my spirit, I will try to cover over my failure with “fig leaves” of justifications for why I behaved the way I did.

Holy Spirit, come and show us more of the unrelenting love of God the Father and of Jesus our Bridegroom so that we can "fail successfully" in Him and grow confidently in His love for His sake and the sake of many others.

I am “dark yet lovely” to God for the reasons I shared a couple of weeks ago; may this staggering truth continue to go deeply into us as His people, setting us free to love others unconditionally and thereby giving them a taste of divine acceptance in Christ Jesus.

Blessings on you this week; next week we’ll look at chapter seven: Longing.