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.