The Fullness of Time

I want to share a simple thought as we transition into the new year.

The Apostle Paul says in Galatians 4:4, "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons."

My simple thought concerning this reality is that I believe God is very precise in His timing. It's apparent that He must have certain things in place before He sends His appointed solution. This is most dramatically seen in the incarnation of the Son, but I believe it's a truth that can be applied in many different situations related to God's work in the earth and in human need.

The reason I find this very encouraging is that many of our prayers are not answered quickly and there is always strong temptation to be discouraged (lose courage and give up); in other words, the passing of time without visible answers tests our courage in prayer.

Most, if not all, of us are praying and trusting the Lord for breakthrough in one or more situations in our lives. I want to encourage you to not only continue to pray, but to pray with boldness and courage, because in the "fullness of time" when the Holy Spirit has everything set in place, He will send salvation if we pray and don't lose heart. (Luke 18:1 says, "And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.")

God is after so much more than what I am asking for; in other words, He delays the breakthrough because He understands that there are people He has to change and have in place, and there are circumstances that need to be in certain order, etc., before "the fullness of time" has come.

May the Spirit of God Who never tires nor grows discouraged breathe afresh on you in this new year and fill you with courage to continue to pray with faith in the One Who sent His Salvation to the earth in the "fullness of time" - not a moment too soon nor a moment too late. He is watching over your situation with great care and counts on your partnership in prayer as He meticulously sets into place all the necessary ingredients in order for the precise moment of the manifestation of His salvation.

God bless you as you step into the next season of your journey in Him in 2009!

Today...continued...

Last week I focused on Jesus teaching His own to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread..." This week I want to add just a bit more to this.

The prayer implies a couple of things to me: one, that the Father provides for today; and two, the very wording of this prayer makes it clear that we are to pray daily, expressing our utter dependence on Him to fully live each day.

I mentioned in last week's posting that I wanted to begin to ask the Father each day for my "daily bread", and His Spirit has been faithful to remind me everyday so far to do this. I believe it will cultivate in me a way of thinking and living that is aligned with His kingdom ways and thoughts.

The Lord wants His children to be fully alive in the present, and the worries and concerns about tomorrow rob us of enjoying the only moment that we are given to live, which is this present moment. Jesus, in addressing the issue of the Father's care and provision for our temporal needs, says in the Sermon on the Mount, "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble." I understand Him to be saying that living today is all that I can manage and still remain fully alive in Him and in tune with His Spirit and His purposes for this day.

I believe these truths are applicable to our need for "daily bread" in all areas of our lives. I have daily need for nourishment in my spirit and in my emotional life, as well as my physical life. In fact, I need it for my inner life even more than for my physical body, which can survive without food for awhile. Jesus called Himself the Bread of life. Without asking each day for my daily Bread and feeding on Him, I can't live in fullness. Jesus says in John 6 that "...unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you."

I have so far to grow in this, but I'm grateful for His infinite patience with me and His abundant grace by which I can grow. I pray that the year 2009 will find us trusting Him more and walking in the childlike virtue of living this day in fullness because He is our daily Bread.

Today

Early this morning as I was worshiping the Lord, the word "today" was being underscored in my heart and mind.

The Holy Spirit was reminding me that today is the only day I need provision for and that there is sufficient for today.

In days of increasing uncertainty in the financial arena, it's a comfort know and to live in the reality that God's provision is for one day at a time - today. We have grown accustomed to finding peace and security in the fact that we have "saved for a rainy day", and now the Lord is lovingly allowing all false securities to begin to unravel. I believe He's going to bring His Bride to a place of utter dependence on Him by the time He returns.

"Give us this day our daily bread..." In teaching us to pray, the Lord Jesus says to ask the Father to give us today our daily bread. I admit that I don't do this very much, and it's probably because I have enough in my refrigerator for many days (figuratively speaking), and I don't even think of asking Him to give me my daily bread today.

But I want to learn this kind of daily dependence on Him; and so I encourage you (and myself) to begin to ask Him regularly for His provision and to be content with having today's bread even if I don't know where tomorrow's bread is coming from. I believe the simple practice of asking daily for my food with thanksgiving will create in me a mindset that looks constantly to Him as my Provider rather than at other sources.

Father, thank You that You are the Source of all Life and that You faithfully provide for Your own. Send Your Spirit to remind us to look always and only to You as the One Who provides our daily bread and to ask You to give us the bread we need today, leaving tomorrow in Your capable and loving hands. Thank You, dear Father!

Ever-Present God

Many times in Scripture the Holy Spirit, through the writers of the Word, says not to fear; and the reason given for not fearing is that "the Lord is with you."

Fear is one of the most, if not the most, paralyzing emotion that we humans experience. It stops us in our tracks and keeps us from moving ahead into the fullness of knowing God and His ways.

So the promise that the Lord is with us is massive for our freedom from fear! And this promise is good for every situation where we encounter fear. If fear strikes my heart because of lack of finances, the realization that the Provider (Jehovah-jireh) has seen and known ahead of time what my need would be and that He is present with me always, brings peace and confidence to move forward in obedience even if I don't yet see the provision with my natural eyes. If fear strikes my heart because of a difficult family situation, pausing to recognize by faith that the Victorious One (Jehovah-Nissi) is with me in that moment, gives me the inner courage to walk with Him through the particular situation with anticipation of His intervention.

There is nothing that He cannot do!...and He is with me everywhere and always!

I often have my students pause and silently acknowledge in the moment that God in Christ is with them right then, no matter what's going on in their hearts and minds. Practicing His presence with us is an important spiritual discipline, because without a growing assurance and awareness that He is with us right now, right here, we cower in fear when faced with intimidating people or situations.

I'd like to urge you, if you don't already practice this, to begin to pause regularly throughout your day and simply thank Him for being with you in that very moment. It's the realization of His nearness that will gradually build confidence in you so that when fear strikes, your first thought is that you are not alone but He is with you. This brings to mind the scene in the Prince Caspian movie in which Lucy is approaching some intimidating enemies who are backing away from her in fear, not because she is strong, but because Aslan is walking right behind her, and they are terrified of him.

The emotion of fear doesn't necessarily go away, because we are always growing in trusting the Lord at new levels, but when we become more aware of His presence with us always, we are empowered to push through the emotions of fear and act in faith.

Jesus is called Emmanuel because God is with us and drew very near in His Son. May the grace to practice His presence rest on you mightily as this year transitions into a new year and may you find your heart strengthened to obey Him as you grow in awareness of His nearness. Only He is sufficient for what is coming to us in these urgent days before His return!

"...he has said, 'I will never leave you nor forsake you.' So we can confidently say, 'The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?'" Hebrews 13:5,6

As Simple as Asking

In my journey with God, I'm discovering that so much hinges on simply asking things of Him.

For example, I find that many believers don't press through in spiritual disciplines (such as regular prayer and fasting and the Word, etc.) because they have such fear of falling into legalism or spiritual pride.

I discovered long ago that one of the best ways to healthily press forward in pursuit of God (without falling into the very common trap of spiritual pride and legalism) is to simply ask the Holy Spirit to save me from those traps as I press into Him.

The reason this is so effective is that there are no human safeguards that I can come up with that can alert me to the inevitable subtle slide into pride and legalism; only the Holy Spirit knows me well enough to detect the first movements towards this sin as I pursue Him with all my heart.

And so I ask Him, "Holy Spirit, will you get my attention when You see me beginning to go down the slippery slope of pride and independence in my pursuit of God? Thank You that You delight to do this for me!" He has done this for me many times in my journey with Him, and it frees me to go after Him wholeheartedly and confidently without being held back by the fear of legalism. Then when He does alert me, I quickly repent and recalibrate my heart attitude without having to scrap the pursuit of Him. (Our tendency is that when we see legalism in our practice, we think that the way to deal with that is to forsake all spiritual disciplines.)

Another reason this is effective is that He will detect this tendency much sooner than I would, and so He can alert me before it reaches a point of being a major issue to deal with. He sees the very first sprouts of sin before they are discernible to me.

This idea of asking applies, of course, to many more areas than just the one I give as an example here. The longer I live and walk with the Lord, the more revelation I have about my identity as His daughter, and I am learning to be a daughter to Him and ask Him for all that I need, depending on His desire to care for me in all areas of my life.

I've discovered that a lot of times, rather than verbalizing a clear request to God, I sort of have this unspoken "wishing" going on inside of me. I believe He likes me to get specific and ask for what I need with specific words, whether it's a temporal need or spiritual or emotional or a need in another person I'm interceding for. This takes concentration and discipline, but it is well worth the reward of getting closer to my Father in the process of finding words to communicate with Him about a specific need.

Asking shows that the person has confidence that the one being asked is both willing and able to provide for the need, and Jesus made the way through the cross for us to approach the Father with confidence.

The Lord bless you this week, and I ask that He will breathe on you His breath of life in a fresh way. May we all learn to ask as confident children of God and as a result, find that He watches over all the aspects of our life with joy!

The Believer's Prayer Book

I love that the Bible is a book of prayer! The Holy Spirit has given us a whole book filled with prayers, and of course, the Psalms is one of the most wonderful sources of prayer that we could ask for.

For years I have spent a lot of time in the Psalms, praying the prayers with which this book is filled. Right now I'm in Psalm 80 again, so I thought I'd share it with you, pointing out how much fuel for prayer there is in this psalm.

First of all, it's important to remember that Psalm 80 is a prayer first of all for Israel and that we must keep Israel in the forefront of our mind as we read the Word. God has very definite plans for Israel that are yet to be realized, and the Church's prayers for Israel are critical for the fulfillment of God's purposes for Jesus' natural family.

The great thing is that however we see God relating to Israel is how He relates to all those who belong to Him, and so we can take such Scriptures, whose first application may be to Israel, and find them to be perfectly suited to us in our walk with God on this earth. And so while praying Psalm 80 for Israel, I am also praying it for the spheres of influence that the Lord has given to me.

I'll simply list out all of the petitions that the psalmist makes in Psalm 80:

1. "Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel..."
2. "Shine forth..."
3. "Stir up your might"
4. "Come to save us"
5. "Restore us, O God"
6. "Let your face shine..."
7. "Restore us, O God"
8. "Let your face shine..."
9. "Turn us again, O God of hosts"
10. "Look down from heaven, and see"
11. "Have regard for this vine..."
12. "Let your hand be on the man of your right hand"
13. "Give us life"
14. "Restore us, O Lord God of hosts"
15. "Let your face shine..."

What wonderful prayers for us to use in praying for our family and ministries, etc.! If you don't do this as a regular thing, I would encourage you to practice praying out of the Bible. For example, taking this psalm, you could do something like the following:

• First, go through this psalm and meditate on Who it is addressed to. This is very important, because without pondering the One you are praying to (in light of what the psalmist says about Him), then it will be difficult to pray in faith when you make your petitions. For example, at the beginning of the psalm, the psalmist addressed God as the "Shepherd of Israel...who is enthroned on the cherubim." Meditating and gazing on this truth will awaken faith to believe that such a God can really do something about the person or situation that you are asking about.
  
• Go through the psalm and pray for Israel, remembering the deep passion God has for His chosen people and agreeing with that through praying this.
• Pray these phrases over a particular person or situation or group in your personal sphere. The phrase can act as a jumpstart into your own prayer for the particular thing on your heart.
  

Praying Scriptures in faith is very powerful because we have the assurance that they are prayers that God delights to answer since He wrote them in the first place! I tell my students that praying in agreement with prayers in the Bible is like adding your signature to a check that requires two signatures. God has already signed off on these prayers but needs a second signature in order for the check to be valid (the prayer to be answered).

The Lord bless you and inspire your prayers as you agree with His prayers that are easily accessible to us. It would be great for you to find one or more others who will pray the prayers in the Word with you; that adds even more power when two or more agree together with God!

Have a good week in Him; may you continue to grow in your experiential knowledge of Him and of what He's doing on the earth in this season of history!

Lovers of Truth

I've been thinking a bit about the Apostle John as being a "lover of truth." His Gospel and epistles have a major focus on the word "truth", which is repeated many times over in these writings.

John says in his third epistle, "I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth."

There's a vast difference between being a "lover of Truth" and being one who simply knows true information or true doctrines. I believe that one thing that defines John as being a "lover of Truth" is that he loved and knew Truth personified, the Lord Jesus! John's writings about Jesus are very personal writings; much more than simply giving data and facts about the Man, John shares from a deep personal knowing of Him. And the fact that he could receive the vision of the book of "The Revelation of Jesus Christ" from the Holy Spirit speaks to me of John's love of the Truth. His genuine love of Jesus, the Truth, empowered him to be able to receive understanding of Jesus that was very different from what he had known of Christ in the flesh.

To love the Truth (as opposed to having correct information) means:

• To be agressively seeking Jesus, the Truth; i.e., not settling for facts and doctrines about Him but when seeking Him in the Scriptures, crying out to His Spirit for encounter with Jesus and revelation of Who He is and what He's like and how He feels and thinks about His creation in general, and me in particular.
• To have a holy dissatisfaction with what I know about Him and His kingdom; i.e., never content with what I have learned. I'm grateful for what I know but I should be ever pressing into Him and His Spirit for further revelation of the God-Man Who is infinite in His power and wisdom and emotions, etc. The fact that He's infinite means I will be learning from and about Him forever.
• To want Truth so much that I'm willing to "unlearn" what I thought was truth; i.e., there is a lot that we learn along the way that must be unlearned as we mature in God. This is very painful for fallen humans because we find identity and security in believing that everything that we believe is right. It disorients us to discover that something I was so sure of a little while ago isn't quite aligned with the full truth of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. It takes great courage and humility and desire to love the Truth.
• To walk in the Truth; i.e., to not be hearers only but doers of the Truth, obeying Jesus as He comes to us and instructs us how to walk.
  

I want to be a lover of Truth and so I set my heart before the Father and ask His Spirit to blow on the weak flame of this desire until it is a raging fire that won't be put out by religious arguments and cultural inhibitions nor by the world, the flesh and the devil.

Spirit of God, Spirit of Jesus (Truth), come once again and breathe on our weak desire for Truth. Raise up a Church in these end times that loves Truth, not merely knows truth academically. Here we are; we can't crank up artificial desire but we can place our hearts and minds before You and ask You to awaken desire for Jesus to such a degree that we will embrace Truth even when it cuts across the flesh and human pride. May we, like the Apostle John, find our greatest delight in intimately knowing Truth and having many "children" who are walking in the Truth.

God bless you this week with encounter with Truth Himself!

God's Ability to Protect and Keep

This week I was struck in a fresh way with the Apostle Paul's words in II Timothy 1:12 -

"...But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that Day what I have entrusted to him."

When the Holy Spirit quickened this word to me, it was a wonderful reminder of God's keeping power. It also reminded me once again that the promise to guard is directly related to "that which I have entrusted to him until that Day."

There are three words/phrases in this verse that I want to focus on:

1. Convinced that He is able - Paul's faith and certainty about God was founded on His experiential knowledge of the nature and character and works of God; he had utmost certainty about His power and ability to perform the impossible.
   
2. Guard/protect - the meaning of the word here includes the idea of a fixed gaze on the situation ("a watch; to guard from loss or injury"). Paul not only knew that God was almighty and able to intervene for humans but that He wanted to. This desire to help is reflected in the fixed attention that He gives those of us who are His own. He is not disinterested.
   
3. Entrust - this word carries the idea of a "deposit". Paul understood that God's ability to actually guard and protect specific issues on behalf of His own was contingent upon his "depositing" that situation in Him; in other words, leaving it in His care.
   

One thing I love about God is His unbelievable desire to be and work with humans. He, the almighty One Who can do anything without help from outside Himself, is such a God of love that there are things He won't do without human companionship/partnership!

So my simple encouragement to you and to myself is to take the time to study and meditate on the character and the works of God so that faith grows in us; the more we focus our attention on the beauty and the power of God (Psa. 63:2), the more faith grows and we become increasingly "convinced that He is able". Practical ways of studying and meditating on His power are to meditate on Scriptures that talk about His great works on behalf of His people in Bible history, to reflect back on His powerful interventions in our own lives and the lives of others that we know, to worship and thank Him for His greatness and power, to sing about His wonders, and to give testimony to others of His great works. All of this offsets the massive lies of the evil one related to God's inability and/or lack of desire to intervene and to handle a difficult situation.

As our inner life is being fed truth and light, it becomes easier to believe that God can "guard that particular issue/person/ministry from loss or injury," and once we can really believe that He is not only able to do this but wants to do it, then "depositing" the matter at His feet becomes an outflow of trust in One Who has proven Himself trustworthy, not only in my personal life but in every human being's life in all of history.

If I have a large sum of money that I want to be protected from loss or thievery, I entrust it to the bank down the street rather than hide it under my mattress. That's because I know some things about the bank that empower me to entrust my money to them rather than try to protect it myself. This illustration isn't perfect because a bank can be robbed, but the point is that I have faith that the local bank can do a much better job of guarding my money than I can; and so I "entrust" it to them. That means I must let it go; I can't hide it under my mattress and deposit it in the bank at the same time.

And so in very practical issues of life, whenever a little (or big) fear clutches at my heart, I need to acknowledge that I don't have what it takes to protect that which I fear losing; then I must look once again at the One Who is able to guard it. This awakens true faith in me, and I can redeposit it (as many times as is necessary) to His safety box where it is kept from loss or injury through faith in both His desire and in His ability to fulfill what He has promised.

Often we fall into the temptation to think that we care more about the things and people God has entrusted to us in this life than He does, and when we do, we hold onto them tightly for fear of loss. When we do this, God is not able to guard them. The Apostle Paul understood that the only safe place for anything he had been given was in God's hands. This can be scary because it means we step back and only engage the situation as the Spirit directs us, taking the "risk" that God might not come through the way we want Him to. However, as our eyes are increasingly fixed on Him and faith grows, we find that His ways are much higher and better than ours.

One last observation...the Apostle Paul says that God will guard all that we deposit in Him until the final Day! So this isn't a promise just for the moment but is long-term. What a God!

Lord, right now I redeposit into Your heavenly bank that which you have given to me to steward in this life. I look at You and Your long history of doing wonders for Your people and it inspires faith in me to lay these issues at Your feet again and again for You to guard and to bring to fulfillment. I acknowledge once again that You care infinitely more about that which You've given me than I could ever care about. Forgive me for wrongly "owning" that which came from You in the first place and thereby accusing You of not caring as much as I do. I love Your ways, dear Lamb and Lion of God!

The Lord bless you this week and fill you with the knowledge of His goodness and control over your life and all that He has given to you.

We Would See Jesus - Final Chapter

Chapter Nine: Seeing Jesus - For Others

We've come to the final chapter of this wonderful little book, and it ends appropriately by focusing on the inevitable overflow to others that there is when a believer is truly living the first commandment (loving the Lord with the whole heart and soul and mind and strength) as his first priority. When the first commandment is my primary concern in all my life (i.e., my preoccupation is to wrestle for this reality), then the overflow toward others will be spontaneous and pure because it is the very love of Christ for others that's compelling me, not a religious or fleshly sense of duty.

Just as I love God because He first loved me, so I love others because He first loved them. The second commandment to love others as we love ourselves flows out of the first commandment. God's love must be the source of all self-giving love.

This chapter opens with an interesting sentence: "It is only when we have truly seen the Lord Jesus to be the End that we have come to the beginning of the real Christian life that God has for us." In other words, the more all other ends/goals bow to the one ultimate Goal, Jesus Christ, the more we will walk in fullness of life, experiencing what God has intended for humans who are in vital union with Him to experience. The fullness of Christian life in Christ includes the second commandment, impacting others for Him. As the authors say, "...instinctively everyone who makes this new discovery knows that it is for others."

The authors go on to warn that this chapter could seem to make those of us who live in the climate of law rather than grace feel like we are finally on familiar ground with this topic of outreach and ministry to others. "But no, not even here does grace quit the field. There never comes a time when grace ends and self has to begin again, and this applies to what we call our service as much as to any other part of our Christian lives. In no place do we need to know the Way of Grace more than in the impartation of this Life to others. Our service for our fellows does not come from strained efforts on our part to live for them, but rather from seeing Jesus doing so, and then simply making ourselves available to Him..."

The theme of this chapter is beautifully presented in the last chapter of the Song of Solomon in which we see the Shulammite (who is now experiencing mature love for her Lover) showing concern for her "little sister" who is immature and selfish. As she has matured in intimacy with Him, she begins to see others who are in need of discipling, but she is looking at them with Him, not through the lens of seeking favor or of drivenness to activity, etc. She speaks to her Lover in terms of "our" little sister. In other words, she doesn't see the discipling of the immature one as something that she does apart from Him; she isn't independently running into ministry without His leadership. This immature one is "their" sister. She sees herself in partnership with Him in the discipling of their little sister.

This is a massive truth about our Christian walk; we easily get burnt out with ministry if we aren't intimately partnering with Jesus in it. John 15 is a focus of this chapter. The branch cannot bear fruit apart from vital union with the Vine, and neither can the Vine bear fruit apart from the branches. Such is the intimacy that God wants with His own, and out of that union much fruit comes that will remain.

The fruit God looks for from this union is the fruit of the Holy Spirit, the very life of Jesus flowing through us. It's not the fruit of one's natural life straining to live up to the standard of Christ's life, but it's the very life of Jesus within the believer rushing through him out to others so that they touch Christ in us when they encounter us. The fruit of the Spirit can't be imitated; it must be birthed through vital union/connection with Christ in God.

The chapter concludes by addressing what it means to "abide in Christ":

1. A willingness to repent quickly when the Holy Spirit convicts us of the sin of assuming the position of the Vine; this ready repentance keeps us in the correct position as a "branch."
2. Continually seeing Jesus as the Vine, living and acting for others as the only Source of life in and through us. (We do this through worship and meditation on the Word.)
   
3. Continuous faith that counts on this union with the Vine. This faith doesn't beg to be united to the Vine but rather walks as though it is so because it is so! Faith offers praise and thanksgiving to God for this reality.
4. A brokenness and tenderness that continually yields up one's rights and interests to Jesus in order to be available, as a branch, to the Vine.
5. Pouring out of love to others, both in words and in actions.

I love that the authors keep using the word "continually" - this is a life-long journey of maturing in and with the Lord Jesus. The Holy Spirit must keep us always moving further into the life of the Kingdom or we quickly stagnate and live on yesterday's "manna/bread."

Lord, thank You for grace to keep following Your leadership, no matter how long we have walked with You. I want to continue to learn and grow and mature in Your love. Thank You that this is not only possible in You but that You aggressively fight for us in this journey. We love You!

For at least the remainder of this year, I will be sending out simple weekly thoughts on this blog as I did during the summer months. God bless you this week with His beauty and nearness!

We Would See Jesus - Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight: Seeing Jesus as the End

Having dealt with the reality that Jesus is the Way, the natural next question is, "Where does the way lead to? What is its end?"

In summary, the authors tell us that according to John chapter 14, "He (Jesus) is both the way and the whither. In finding Him, men have not only found the Way, but the End too."

This chapter deals with a topic that I have touched on before, and that is the danger of moving away from simple devotion to Jesus. Because the sincere believer slips into this easily and unintentionally, it's worth touching on again.

The Apostle Paul was very concerned about this as it related to the Corinthian church, and he wrote the following passionate words:

"I am jealous for you with godly jealousy. For I have betrothed you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ." (II Corinthians 11:2,3)

The Hessions point out how prone we are to see Jesus as the Way to many good things, such as peace and joy and success in ministry and family, etc. While this is natural in our initial stage of walking with God, He wants us to mature into a true love relationship with Him in which HE is our Goal and End, rather than the blessings that we want.

Young Solomon is a good example of having chosen God above all else. When God offered him a "blank check" to ask for whatever he wanted, He chose wisdom, which was actually to choose God. He could have asked for riches and power, etc. God was so pleased with Solomon's choice that He gave Him not only incredible wisdom to rule, but all the things Solomon did not ask for: riches, power, success.

However, as we see in the case of Solomon, having had the desire for God above all else is no guarantee that this simple devotion will continue automatically the rest of our life in God. By nature, humans will slip backwards in our walk with God if we are not intentional about keeping focused on Him. Our default is to slip into ruts of thinking and acting that satisfy our fleshly need to do religious things and that fool us into thinking we're advancing in God (while in reality we are going in circles).

This is part of what Paul is fearful about with the Corinthians. He knew the dangers of settling into sort of a spiritual routine, lacking focus on Jesus alone. Paul felt the jealousy of the Holy Spirit over God's people and named their bentness towards other ends "spiritual adultery"; even good goals can become other loves to us, corrupting our minds through worldly and fleshly understandings of spiritual truths. In fact, for the dedicated follower of Jesus, it's the good issues related to family and ministry, etc., that are the greatest traps to lead us away from the simplicty of pure and exclusive devotion to Jesus.

The Church in Ephesus (Revelation 2) is a perfect example of shifting away from the Person of Jesus to give one's energies and time to other good things; Jesus commends them for their diligence and faithfulness but ends with a stinging corrective word which casts a shadow on all the good things that they were busy doing: "I have one thing against you; you have left your First Love, and it's so critical an issue that if you don't correct it, I will come and remove from your midst My presence and any ministry impact that you have had." (my paraphrase)

So does this mean we are never to ask the Lord Jesus for blessings in our families or our ministries, etc.? No, but what it does mean is that we are to devote our energy and time primarily to keeping true to Jesus and then pray and trust Him to spread that around to our family and those He has given us to influence for His sake. The reality is that the more I devote myself to Him alone, the more impact my words and actions in Him will have on others, and the overflow of my devoted love to Him will spill out on those I love and minister to.

So how do I stay true to Jesus in practical outworkings?

1. Do what Jesus says in Ephesians 2: repent from having allowed other things and blessings to become your goals, and return to that place of simple devotion to Jesus, telling Him that you want Him above all else.
2. Ask His Spirit to keep you true to Jesus, whatever the cost. Make this an ongoing request because He alone can keep you true to Jesus, and He loves doing this!
   
3. Settle in your heart and mind that this will be costly as it relates to investment of time in prayer and the Word and other spiritual disciplines such as fasting, etc.
4. If you need help, seek someone out to help you establish simple regular habits and who will hold you accountable long enough that you get rooted and grounded in walking in this pursuit of Jesus as your First Love, the End and Goal of your life.
5. Be fully aware that there is much grace for this; in other words, it will be a struggle and a journey and God loves being in the struggle with you. He isn't bothered by our struggle; in fact, that's what blesses His heart so much. He knows our weakness and hastens to help us, not condemn or scold us (except when there is conscious sin and disobedience).

Lord, would You bring Your light and truth and grace to bear on our hearts related to simplicity in Christ Jesus? We want to know You as the Goal and End of our life. I pray that You would lead each one of us in the unique way that You want to and that You would raise up a Bride across the earth that is consecrated and exclusively Yours with no spiritual adultery! You are worthy of such a Bride, and I thank You that You will have this when You return to rule on the earth by the power and jealousy of Your Spirit. Blessed be Your name, Lord Jesus!

Next week we will end this book with the last chapter: Seeing Jesus - For Others.

We Would See Jesus - Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven: Seeing Jesus As the Way

Previously the authors emphasized the truth that Jesus is the Door for both unbelievers to enter the kingdom of God initially and also for believers who are continually entering into the fullness of God throughout our life journey. Entering through the lowly Door to experience more of God requires a lifestyle of repentance.

So then what lies beyond the entrance? Beyond the doorway is a life-long walk, a pathway into God and all that has to do with Him and His kingdom. That pathway is Jesus; so this chapter is about the truth that Jesus is the Way (John 14:6). He is both the doorway and the pathway.

A "Way" speaks of a walk, a continuous experience. "A walk is simply a reiterated step, where something is happening each moment in the present; after one step, the next step; after the one 'now', the next 'now.' This illustrates the fact that our experience of Christ is to be a continuous present tense, a glorious 'now.'"

If we agree that this is what our life in God is, then the natural question that should come to us is, "How can people like ourselves, in circumstances like those in which we are, enjoy a continuous walk like that? With evil propensities within us and sin around us, we are faced with what looks like an impassable swamp. We need a Way, and a Way of such an order that foolish wayfaring men like ourselves may walk thereon in peace and safety."

Of course, we know that God has provided this Way: Christ Jesus.

When you stop long enough to realize the implications of this, it's massive! Lately I've seen more clearly than ever before how prone we weak and fallen humans are to look for many "ways" to mature in Christ. We determine that we will practice spiritual disciplines (such as prayer and Bible reading) or get involved in ministry to people, etc., hoping all the while that these things will bring us to Christ and lead us into the fullness of God. But when we approach our need for maturing in this manner, we find ourselves constantly unable to live up to the ideals that we set for ourselves and end up frustrated and angry and discouraged with no motivation to continue taking one step after another into God.

God's ways and thoughts are higher than ours, and He has determined that His Son is the only Way to arrive at anything in God.


Those of you who know me know that I believe with all my heart in prayer and fasting and all the spiritual disciplines, and I believe they are necessary for the believer to grow steadily in God; but it's easy to unwittingly fall into the belief that my prayers (or whatever) are the way to God. With this as my mindset, my tendency when I'm not praying as I think I should be will be to try to pray better and more in order to draw near to God.

The solution to a prayerless life is not to "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" and pray more in order to get to God and grow in Him, but the solution is to see Jesus as the Way to a fruitful prayer life in Him. The authors emphasize that our need is not to try harder but to repent of making other things the "way" and then ask Jesus to be the Way to a life of prayer and fasting and ministry to others, etc. Whatever we need in order to walk this continuous present tense life in God is arrived at by means of His designated Way, the Lord Jesus.

Practically speaking, this means that when I have failed to measure up in some way or another, rather than isolate myself from God and try to do better so that I can be presentable to Him, I turn immediately to Jesus who is the only One who can "fix" whatever needs fixing or strengthening in me. I come to Him "just as I am" for Him to be the Way to a more fruitful prayer life and ministry. So I talk with Him always about everything, even the sinful and un-Christlike things and thoughts that are going on in me. This is what it means to walk with Jesus. He doesn't want to walk with us only when we've got everything in order; if that were the case, He would never walk with us this side of heaven, because we will never have everything in perfect order. It is in taking His hand when we least feel we deserve to be with Him that He is able to lead us into a meaningful prayer life and ministry.

After sinning, Adam and Eve ran away from God rather than to Him. Their shame and self-consciousness drove them to try to cover themselves with man-made clothing so that they would be presentable to God. All the while, God longed for them to run to Him in the midst of their sin and shame. What a different story it would have been if they had not run away from God to fix themselves before appearing before Him! This is religion, and it is deeply ingrained in all fallen and sinful humans. The Holy Spirit continues to uncover the subtle ways this plays out in my life, and I'm very grateful. I'm learning more and more to let Him in on everything in my life - the good, bad and the ugly. The more I let Him in on it all, the easier it is for Him to cleanse me and for my life to be increasingly filled with His light.

Lord Jesus, we acknowledge and confess that You alone are the Way to all that pertains to life and godliness. Forgive us for the folly of isolating ourselves with the intent of improving ourselves in order to be presentable to You; show us when this is happening in the issues of daily living. Deliver us by Your cross and Your Spirit from religion and from dead works so that we can freely and gladly serve the living God. Thank You that You want to walk with us each step of the way. We love Your ways, Lord!

Next week we'll cover chapter eight: Seeing Jesus as the End.

We Would See Jesus - Chapter Six

Chapter Six: Sinai or Calvary?

In this chapter the authors address the reality that although God has made the way simple into His fullness through the Door (Jesus), the enemy is very astute in presenting truth in twisted ways in order to afflict the hungry heart and prevent him/her from entering in through the Door.

"Whenever a sense of sin lies upon our conscience, two persons fight to get hold of that conviction - the devil and the Holy Spirit. The devil wants to get hold of it in order to take it and us to Sinai and there condemn and bring us into bondage. The Holy Spirit, however, wants to take us and our sin to Calvary, there to bring us through the Door into peace and freedom."

Mount Sinai and Calvary represent the two covenants: the covenant of the law and the covenant of grace. This seems simple when we hear or read this, but in practice there is great struggle in that the enemy "simulates the voice of the Holy Spirit in order that the uninstructed Christian will think it is God who is taking him to the place of condemnation and bondage, and that he must, therefore, follow."

The covenant given on Mount Sinai is still the one that fallen humans find easier to understand and to follow and to which our conscience most readily responds: "Do this and you will live; don't do this and you will die." In our daily lives now this is represented in the whole system of moral and religious standards that we each work out for ourselves.

Whenever we have some sense of failure, the devil works hard to take us to the law in order to accuse us based on the standards that we have adopted but have failed to keep. So the higher our moral and spiritual standards, the more room there is for the devil to accuse us. The very thing that gives strength to the accusations is the law! (I Cor. 15:56)

These accusations usually have 2 effects on the believer, which is just what the devil wants:
1. Self-excusing (Romans 2:15). When we attempt to excuse ourselves, the enemy has succeeded in provoking us to stand before God on the basis of our own righteousness and innocence. This, of course, is sinking sand because anything we have from and of God is only on the basis of our acknowledging our true condition and depending utterly on the righteousness and innocence of Jesus.
2. Self-effort and striving. "He (devil) tells us what we are not in order to get us to struggle in our own strength to make up for it. He accuses us that we are not praying enough, or not speaking enough to others of their need of Christ...The whole purpose of the devil...is to get us into striving and self-effort, and thus into real bondage."

Though the enemy's accusations have the appearance of truth, they're half-truths, which make them all the more deadly. We desperately need the discernment of the Holy Spirit to recognize the difference between the voice of the accuser and the voice of the Spirit.

The half truth that the devil speaks is that we are sinners and he leads us to the law; he leaves out the truth that Jesus died for us and did a complete work on our behalf. When the Holy Spirit points out sin in our life, He leads us to Calvary and magnifies Jesus and His work on our behalf.

This revelation of the Spirit has two effects on the believer when he truly receives it:
1. Acknowledgment of his sin; whether it be true conviction of sin or false accusation of the enemy, the blood of Christ is the solution for either one.
2. Rest from self-initiated activity to get himself right. With a revelation of the work of Calvary, the believer is empowered to simply repent with no arguments or defenses, and in repenting (turning), he can rest because he has no need to waste emotional energy on self-justification.

(As I was reading this chapter, I remembered reading years ago about Madame Guyon, a saint from centuries past who, when she was accused of evil, said something to the effect, "You would say much worse things about me if you really knew me." What a way to silence the accuser and throw one's dependence onto the righteousness of the only Righteous One!)

When the Holy Spirit points out a lack in our life, He doesn't mean for us to start striving to correct that. For example, if we see that we lack love for another in our life or if we are prayerless, the way out is not to strive to make up for this in our own strength.

"The Holy Spirit...is not concerned primarily to get us to try to be better, but to repent deeply of the sin there is; not to try to be more loving to that person, but to repent of having been jealous and critical towards him, etc. Having repented, the Holy Spirit would bid us rest as sinners at the Cross, where sin is cleansed away, and so be at peace. As we rest as sinners in that low place, Jesus pours into our hearts His own love for that person..."

The authors tell a story of a place in Africa that had been a center for revival in the past but spiritual coldness characterized the place with the passing of time. This was recognized by the Christians and they had prayed and repented of it but the spiritual famine continued. A visiting Christian from another part of Africa came and charged them with their coldness and told them they needed to get out and witness to the unbelievers. A wise leader in the local group answered him in this way: "You are quite right - we are cold. We have acknowledged that to God and have been repenting. But we are not going to start striving to do this or that to bring the blessing back, not even street preaching. Having repented, we are going to rest as sinners under the blood of Jesus until God is pleased to meet us again." God soon met them and spiritual renewal came to that place.

Lord, have mercy on us and our bent towards trying to fix things with fleshly activity. Grant us the grace to turn and repent and wait and rest until You move on our behalf. Thank You for Your great kindness and patience. Thank You for Calvary and for the righteousness that is ours in Christ Jesus alone. Thank You that we don't need to excuse nor defend ourselves; our defense is found in You. We love You!

Next week is chapter 7: Seeing Jesus as the Way.

We Would See Jesus - Chapter Five

Chapter Five - Seeing Jesus as the Door

Last week we looked at our need to see Jesus as the Truth and how, in His light, we see our true condition even after we have come into the Kingdom. Seeing this about ourselves can leave us with a sense of despair unless we understand that Jesus is not only the Truth but He is the Door by which we can enter into God's life and fullness and out of our lostness.

Jesus as the Door is a reality that we believers need just as much as those who enter in initially to His kingdom through Him. We keep entering in to all that God has in store for us through Christ alone, no other way; so we need to see Him as the Door throughout our entire journey in this life.

The fact that Jesus calls Himself the Door implies that there is a barrier, a wall, that hinders us from access to all that God is and has. Anyone who has seriously gone after God has encountered this wall.

I was struck by the authors' language about how often believers encounter this wall between the soul and God, because lately I've been pondering the fact that being a "prodigal son" doesn't just apply to those who have wandered away from God through blatant sin but also to those of us who wander away from Him in more respectable or disguised ways: "Though we have been restored from the 'far country' of original sin, sin may yet come in, perhaps in more subtle forms, and we find ourselves as a result in other 'far countries', smaller but none the less real - the 'far country' of jealousy, or of resentment, or of self-pity, or of compromise with the world. And there always arises 'a mighty famine in that land' (as it did for the Prodigal Son), and we begin to be in want.

It is not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord (Amos 8:11). Who of us does not know the coldness of heart towards the Lord, the apparent deadness of the Sacred Page and the accumulating defeats in other areas of life..."

The authors point out that the way back is not through trying to stop the sinning but through humbling ourselves and turning to Him as the Door into fellowship with God: "Jesus does not merely show us the Door; He Himself is the Door. This is God's great gift of love to a prodigal world - a never-failing Door back to peace and satisfaction, if we will but turn and see Him standing so near and accessible to us. And such a Door is He, that neither preparatory steps nor subsequent steps are necessary to enter into what we need. In simply coming to Him we have passed from one spiritual condition to another, for He is Himself both the blessing needed and the Door to it."

Although this sounds academic to those of us who have been around the Gospel a long time, it is a profound and offensive truth to the flesh! It takes the revelatory work of the Spirit for this to renew our mind related to the Gospel and God's ways. The words "neither preparatory steps nor subsequent steps are necessary to enter into what we need. In simply coming to Him we have passed from one spiritual condition to another" are profound. As fallen and sinful humans we want to present ourselves as deserving to God and then come to Him for salvation; or once we have entered through the Door initially, we keep wanting to fix ourselves before approaching Him. The irony of this is that only He can "fix" us, so we must come to Him just the way we are without being fixed if we are to receive His life and blessing and fullness.

The last part of the chapter presents four essential things that we need to understand about Jesus as the Door in order to experience Him as such:

1. We must see Him as the open Door. Through His death, He ripped open the veil that separated the sinner from God. "What appear to be the obstacles - man's coldness, unbelief, and such sins, are the very things that qualify him for this Door, provided he will acknowlege them, for it is a Door for people who are characterized by just such sins..."
2. We must see Him as the Door which opens on street level. In other words, "...open for the failure as a failure, and not merely for us when we have become a little more successful. The Jews in the New Testament could easily believe that there was salvation for the Gentile, if he was circumcised and became a Jew. What they could not and would not believe was that there was salvation for the Gentiles as a Gentile, without becoming a Jew at all."
3. We must see Jesus as a low Door; in other words, we must bow low in repentance in order to enter through this Door. "So often the way in which we repent to God and sometimes apologise to another shows that we have not truly judged ourselves. We betray the fact that we feel...that we have acted out of character with our true selves...The truth is we have not acted out of character but in accordance with our true form, as declared to us by that Figure hanging on the Cross for us!"
4. We must understand that this Door is a narrow Door. "As we get nearer to that place of repentance the path gets narrower...We can no longer be lost in the crowd...At last when we come to the One who is the Door Himself, there is not room even for two...If you are going to enter, you will have to stand there utterly alone.

Lord, grant us revelation of our need of you always and the grace to simply come to you as we are. I ask you for an increase of grace in my own life to enter into the fullness of God through the Door, Jesus Christ, and not through my own self-righteousness. Thank You that this is what You do so well! Thank You, Lord Jesus, for being the Door and for being so accessible because of Your blood and sacrifice. We love you!

Next week - Chapter Six: Sinai or Calvary?

We Would See Jesus - Chapter Four

Chapter Four: Seeing Jesus as the Truth

In the previous chapter, the authors spoke of Jesus as the One Who fills every human need; in this chapter they begin to focus in on what some of those human needs are.

"What, then, is our first and basic need? It is to know the truth - about ourselves and about God. Until we do so, we are living in a realm of illusion and we are impervious to the word of grace; it seems largely irrelevant to our case. The breaking in of the truth about ourselves and about God, and the shattering of the illusion in which we have been living, is the beginning of revival for the Christian as it is of salvation for the lost."

The writers go on to speak at length of the self-deception that we live in and how much we need a revelation both of our own sinfulness and of God's love for us. They give a brief study on the Old Testament sacrifices and of Jesus being crucified "outside the camp" (Heb. 13:11-13), and the implications of that related to the profound fallenness and sinfulness of humans. (I hope you have the book and will read this chapter, because I'm not going to try to summarize it much this time.)

I want to focus briefly on the opening quote above from this chapter; I'm finding increased desire within me to be filled with light, the light of God in Christ Jesus. And so I've been asking the Holy Spirit for the gift of conviction and of contrition, true godly sorrow over my condition apart from Him.

As the authors suggest, truth must break in by the power and grace of the Holy Spirit, or we "live in a realm of illusion" and grace seems irrelevant to our situation. Why would I need the grace and mercy of God if I have no revelation of my need and my lostness even as His child?

I've lived many years in the Lord without a deep appreciation and desperate sense of need of His grace because I have ignorantly lived in the world of religion, my mind darkened by the illusion of being right because of adherence to the law (religious conformity). I'm grateful for the measure of light I've had but am increasingly desirous to know Jesus (the Truth) more fully.

Getting a doctrine correct is not the same as knowing the Truth, Who is Christ Jesus; I've discovered that any clever person can manipulate truth when it's just words. But when I encounter Truth as a Person, I find He cannot be manipulated and won't be conformed to my image.

And so I love how this chapter ends with John 3:20,21 "...everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth come to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen..." The authors point out that while we would expect the contrast of "practicing evil" to be "doing good", Jesus doesn't say that. He says that the contrast of practicing evil is to "do the truth," in other words, it's to be honest in regard to our evil.

This honesty about our evil must be the work of the Holy Spirit; we can be just as religious about saying how bad we are (when there is not true conviction by the Holy Spirit) as when we deceive ourselves about not having sin.

And so we are happily at the mercy of God, and the best thing we can do is to cry out for His break-in of truth, and He will do it in His time and in His way. All He asks of me is that I obey whatever I believe He is saying to me (within the boundaries of His Word and of His nature).

So, Spirit of Jesus, Spirit of Truth, come and fill us with Light...once again I ask you for the gift of conviction of sin and a godly sorrow that empowers us to "do the truth" so that we are a people who can more fully receive and celebrate Your grace and love! We love You, our Lord...thank You for hearing our prayer.

Next week's chapter is chapter 5: Seeing Jesus as the Door.

We Would See Jesus - Chapter Three

Chapter Three: Seeing Jesus as All We Need

Roy and Revel Hession write wonderfully about the name of Jesus in this chapter. They draw from the Old Testament revelation of "Jehovah" and the two-fold meaning of that name:

1. The "I AM", the Ever-present One, "who stands outside of time and to whom there is no past nor future, but to whom everything is present...To Him our lives with their past and future are all present; our yesterdays as well as our tomorrows are all now to Him"
2. The grace of God...in other words, while "I AM" speaks of His utter completeness in Himself, the further revelations of Him in the Old Testament (the name "Jehovah" compounded with another word, such as Jehovah-Shalom, etc.) reveal Who He is related to humans. "...the moment human need and misery present themselves, He becomes just what that person needs...The name 'Jehovah' is really like a blank cheque. You can fill in what he is to be to you - just what you need, as each need arises..."

The Old Testament reveals seven compound names for Jehovah, and these are known by those of us who love and know God. But the focus of this book is to fix our eyes on the "supreme compound of Jehovah - JESUS."

The name Jesus means "I am your Salvation." This introduces the idea that man is not only in need of help in our weakness and brokenness but in our sinfulness. Our greatest need is for a Savior and Lord in our sinful state. The authors go on to say,

"...where there is sin, there is always Jesus - seeking to forgive sin and recover all the damage that it has caused. He is not shocked at human failure; rather He is at home in it, drawn by it, knowing what to do about it, for he in Himself and in His blood is the answer to it all...God, in giving Him to be the answer to our sin, has given Him to be the answer to all our other needs, both spiritual, moral and material, for 'how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?' (Rom. 8:32)"

And so we must see ourselves as sinners (not just theoretically but under the Spirit's conviction) if we are to have a revelation of the beauty of Jesus..."Apart from seeing ourselves as sinners, we shall see no beauty in Jesus that we should desire Him."

This week as I re-read this, I fell in love with the Lord Jesus once again (this is a lifelong experience with each fresh illumination from the Spirit about Jesus). In recent years I have come to realize how hopelessly lost I am without Him and how I need Him to save me every day from sin and selfishness. And He does it as I lean heavily on Him. Because of my life history within the "holiness" movement (both in upbringing and in the mission that I've been a part of), I lived many years of my life in God with subtle spiritual arrogance about my condition in God. I love what the Spirit has given me through the holiness movement but realize now that it is only a piece of the truth of the living God.

Now I'm much "happier" in a fuller revelation of my need and of the One Who satisfies my every need, whether it be forgiveness of sins or strengthening of my inner life or my physical body, etc. I'm no longer surprised at my sin and weakness and am learning more each day to run to Him immediately rather than stay afar from Him in my spiritual pride.

Like the Shulammite in Song of Songs, I am discovering Him to be "altogether lovely (beautiful)"! He is the "I AM", fully complete in Himself while He is also the grace of God poured out lavishly in being the "I AM _____ (the name that answers whatever the need is)". The cross is more meaningful and beautiful to me as I realize my condition as a sinner saved by grace and my need for His salvation every moment.

So my prayer for us this week is that the Lord would give us the wonderful gift of conviction of sin; without that, we could take what the author says in this chapter and come under a lot of false condemnation and accusation, or we could try to make ourselves feel badly about our sin. Only the Holy Spirit can convict of sin, and only in true conviction are we empowered to leave the sin behind. Holy Spirit, come and reveal sin as You interpret it and reveal JESUS, the answer to my sin. Oh, thank You, Lord Jesus, that You are attracted to sinners and weak people. Manifest Your jealous love for us and Your power to deliver! Thank You...

Next week will be chapter four: Seeing Jesus as the Truth.

We Would See Jesus - Chapter Two

Chapter Two - Seeing God in the Face of Jesus Christ

"...we realize that our goal should be God Himself, but He seems far off, unknowable. The fact is, God is unknowable, unless there is an easily appreciated revelation of Himself. Apart from that revelation, men have groped for Him in vain and have had to say with Job, 'Oh, that I knew where I might find Him!'...Left to themselves, men arrive at a false knowledge of God, a knowledge that begets fear and bondage, and which repels rather than draws them to Him."

The authors go on to say that the full and final revelation of God is in His Son Jesus. Jesus Himself told His disciples that seeing Him, they were seeing the Father (John 14:9). God is light but light is "invisible unless it shines upon some object...The object upon which He has shone is the face of Jesus Christ, and as we look into that face, there shines in our hearts the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, which we can see nowhere else."

II Cor. 4:6 says "...it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." This, at first glance, sounds wonderful and beautiful until we realize that the glory being referred to here by the Holy Spirit through the Apostle Paul is the ugliness and shame of the cross (John 12:23, 32).

"We are always falling into the mistake of thinking God is one like ourselves (Psa. 50:21) and therefore that His glory consists in much the same things as that in which man's glory consists, only on a bigger scale. Man's glory is normally thought to lie in his ability to exalt himself, and humble others to his will...How often have we coveted the glory of being able to sit at a desk as a high adminstrative chief and at the touch of a button command men to do what we want!...In Jesus, however, we see that God's glory consists in the very reverse - not so much in His ability to exalt Himself and humble man, but in His willingness to humble Himself for the sake of man..."

God is Christlike! We see in Jesus a startling meekness and humility that caused Him to be very approachable, and the Father is just like that! As Christian believers we have learned this with our heads, but we need revelation of this to our spirit in order for it to transform us at the gut level. I find that I need ongoing revelation of this truth to my heart and mind in order to not come under the lies of the evil one who is constantly slandering the character and nature of God in subtle ways.

How do we see the face of Jesus? We find His face in the written Word first of all; but we must not be like the Pharisees who knew the Scriptures inside out but couldn't recognize the One Who the Scriptures were talking about when He showed up. It's possible to know the written Word of God better than anyone around you and not know the Living Word intimately.

And so our approach to the Word must be one of poverty of spirit (in other words, coming with a childlike hunger to learn even if it runs cross-grain to what I've believed all my life about Jesus) and a willingness to take the time and effort to fast and pray and study the Word of God under the illuminating power of the Holy Spirit. It means to cry out what the Greeks cried out to Philip: "We would see Jesus." The word "would" in the original language carries the sense of "preference, wish, desire, will", etc. This wasn't a passive wish but a must for these Greeks; in other words, they went out of their way to try to see Jesus.

For us as well, seeing Jesus requires that we go out of our way; it will be inconvenient and mess with our lifestyle but until we seriously seek Him out through fasting and prayer and studying His Word and leaving some things undone, there won't be said of us what was said of the early Church disciples in Acts 4:13, "Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated and untrained men, they marveled. And they realized that they had been with Jesus."

Before the Lord returns, He will have a Bride across the earth of whom this can be said; meanwhile, each of us can be moving in this direction in our own walk with Him, starting with baby steps: short times of fasting and prayer and study that will grow into longer times, and also inviting one or two others to join in on this because God wants us to do this in partnership with Him and with others rather than try to make it on our own.

God bless you with the empowering grace of His Holy Spirit to seek Him in the face of Jesus this week! Next week we'll look at chapter three, Seeing Jesus as All We Need.

We Would See Jesus - Chapter One

Chapter One: Seeing God - the Purpose of Life

"...there is but one purpose for mankind...(it) is to know, and to love, and to walk with God; that is, to see God. (Deut. 10:12; Micah 6:8; Mark 12:30)" And I'll add Luke 10:42; Phil. 3:8; Psalm 27:4; Revelation 2:4,5; I Cor. 3:18.

With this simple statement, the authors summarize this chapter about what the purpose of God is for every human.

They point out that we modern believers consider the monastics as misguided in their extreme seeking after God but warn that all of our so-called "light" in understanding the Gospel has not given the modern Christian any hunger and passion to see God but seems to have had the reverse effect, making us a driven people that believe serving God to be our primary purpose in life, rather than "seeing God."

He also warns, on the other hand, about what I call "spiritual lust." In other words, in our seeking to see God, we can unwittingly slip into seeking Him only for experiencing good feelings.

Both of these realities (drivenness to activity and seeking only to have certain feelings) can fool us into thinking that we know the Lord Jesus while we may be experiencing a Jesus made in our own image.

Roy and Revel Hession speak with prophetic voice when they say the following of Christian service for God:
"At first sight it seems heroic to fling our lives away in the service of God and our fellows...Service seems so unselfish, whereas concentrating on our walk with God seems selfish and self-centred. But it is the very reverse. The things God is most concerned about are our coldness of heart towards Himself and our proud, unbroken natures. Christian service of itself can, and so often does, leave our self-centred nature untouched. That is why there is scarcely a church, a mission station, or a committee undertaking a special place of service, that is without an unresolved problem of personal relationships eating out its heart and thwarting its progress. This is because Christian service often gives us opportunities of leadership and position that we could not attain in the secular world, and we quickly fall into pride, self-seeking, and ambition. With those things hidden in our hearts, we have only to work alongside others, and we find resentment, hardness, criticism, jealousy, and frustration issuing from our hearts. We think we are working for God, but the test of how little of our service is for Him is revealed by our resentment or self-pity, when the action of others, or circumstances, or ill-health take it from us!"

They conclude this section with this wonderful paragraph:
"We need to...concentrate on seeing God for ourselves and finding the deep answer for life in Him. Then, even if we are located in the most obscure corner of the globe, the world will make a road to our door to get that answer. Our service of help to our fellows then becomes incidental to our vision of God, and the direct consequence of it."

Watchman Nee writes with clarity about this as well saying that much of Christian service is a fulfilling of a lust to be active rather than an overflow of a lovesick heart.

Meanwhile, the overactivity of the Church has caused some who are desperate for Jesus to seek for feelings about Him rather than for the real Jesus. (By the way, A.W. Tozer warns that a there is something wrong with a Christianity that does not experience God emotionally, so the desire to feel His love is not bad at all; but we must not fall for the lie that we can only truly encounter Him when we have surface emotions going on.)

This short life we're given in this fallen world is primarily for the purpose of knowing God intimately, and through obedience to His voice, becoming like Jesus. This life is an internship in which we are being shaped and formed into His likeness so that He can entrust eternal rulership alongside Him to any who are walking in full abandonment to Him as best we know how. The things we may accomplish now are important when done in loving obedience to Him, but they are the overflow of lovesickness for the true God which issues forth from having revelation of His ravished love for us.

Because I have shared simple suggestions a few times in this blog about how to focus on knowing Him intimately, I won't repeat those here. (Please refer back a couple of weeks or so, if you are interested...)

Lord Jesus, send Your Spirit to help us; we are helpless to deliver ourselves from our lust for self-satisfaction whether that be through hyper-activity or through surface feelings. Thank You that You are filled with fiery jealousy over Your Bride and that You will fully capture her heart! We cry out to You to do this, for the sake of the One Who gave Himself to have an equally-yoked Bride for eternity.

Next week we'll look at Chapter 2: Seeing God in the Face of Jesus Christ.

We Would See Jesus - Preface

I've just been worshipping and interceding to the words of a beautiful worship song:
"O my God, You've won my heart by giving me Yours forevermore;
Here I pledge in life or death, I am Yours forevermore..."

I believe with all my heart that we humans are created with a desire to give our all to something or someone, and I believe that the empowerment to do that comes from having been captivated by something or someone outside of ourselves.

As Christians we know this "something or someone" to be the Lord Jesus Christ. I fear that our watered down version of what being a Christian means has deceived us into believing that theological correctness means we have given our all to Him. If that were the case, the evangelical Church would be filled with burning hearts that can't be contained for very lovesickness for the Lamb who will come as a Lion soon to establish His earthly throne in the city of Jerusalem.

And so I have picked the book We Would See Jesus (by Roy and Revel Hession) to review next, simply because I believe that without really "seeing" (beholding) the real Jesus and how He has given His heart to His Bride, there's no hope of my pledging that I am His in life or death.

In the preface of this book, Roy and Revel Hession focus on the bedrock reality that, as important as it is to deal with the various aspects of the Christian walk, when you boil it all down to one simple reality, “it is enough to see Jesus. Seeing Him we are convicted of sin, broken, cleansed, filled with the Spirit, set free from bondage, and revived…He is both the Blessing we all seek and the easily accessible Way to that blessing.”

The theme of this book (seeing Jesus) has been and continues to be foundational for my life and ministry in God. I believe that all of the schemes and strategies of the evil one are ultimately aimed at hindering humans (whether believers in Jesus or not) from seeing Jesus for who He really is.

The authors explain two words that are used many times throughout the book:
1. Grace: in the New Testament “grace is not a blessing or an influence from God which we receive, but rather an attribute of God which governs His attitude toward man, and can be defined as the undeserved love and favor of God….The whole essence of grace is that it is undeserved (Rom. 11:6)...This means that when at last we are content to find no merit nor procuring cause in ourselves, and are willing to admit the full extent of our sinfulness, then there is no limit to what God will do for the poor who look to Him in their nothingness…The struggle, of course, is to believe it and to be willing to be but empty sinners to the end of our days, that grace may continue to match our needs.”
2. Revival: the author points out that his use of this word in this book refers to the possibility of a person living in vital union with Christ as a lifestyle, recognizing his/her need for continual renewal and awakening. He is not downplaying corporate revival, and I want to note here that at the end of this age, the focus will be on our corporate life in God (while not neglecting the private walk with Him), so I'll underscore this all along the way so that we don't miss what God is after as we approach the end.

I won't go any further with the book but want to stress this week how critical it is that we make seeing (beholding) Jesus the priority in our life if we want to stand under the end-times pressures that are coming; and so I encourage you to pray as you read this book so that it's not mere facts and information being passed on but rather impartation of life and light and power in the Holy Spirit.

Holy Spirit, come and strengthen in us desire for Jesus, the One You love unashamedly. Breathe on us, Lord, or we have no life-giving breath in us. Show us the real God-Man...we love You and thank You for how faithful and true You are in our lives...

Next week we'll cover chapter one: Seeing God - the Purpose of Life. Blessings on you this week!

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.

Devoted to Jesus

As I continue to walk and grow in the intimate knowledge of the Lord Jesus, I realize what a powerful figure Mary of Bethany is in human history.

There's a lot I could share on this but will keep it brief this week and touch on three simple realities about Mary:

• First, she had obviously been so captivated by the Man Jesus that nothing could budge her from the place of being at His feet. (If you look very closely at her life, you begin to get a little idea of the enormous pressure she fhad to stand up under in order to stay in this place of full devotion and dependence on Him - there was societal pressure, religious pressure and personal pressure.)
• In response to her insistence on being wholy devoted to Him as First Love, MANY have been impacted and empowered throughout history; to this day, her life continues to inspire lovesick worshipers to stand under the massive pressures that want to stifle and distract one away from pure devotion to Jesus.
• Jesus defended her position and continues to do so today. In the end, all true followers of Jesus will go Mary's way rather than her going the way of others.

The beauty of Mary is that none of this was on her agenda. She simply wanted to be near Him and listening to Him as much as possible and ended up being a powerful figure in human history, esteemed by Jesus as one who approved the one "needful thing" and who persevered in that one thing.

Blessings on you this week - even our weak gestures towards seeking after Him with all our heart counts as beautiful in His eyes, so be blessed as you struggle for the one needful thing - Jesus!

A Praying Church

In Mark 11:17, Jesus says, "Is it not written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations'? But you have made it a 'den of thieves.'"

It's obvious that the Church, most particularly in the west, has drifted so far from being a praying Church that we no longer have a grid for what that means. Studies show that pastors and Christian leaders in America spend hardly any time in daily seeking of God and show that the people in the Church spend even less.

The great news is that God spoke clearly through the prophet Isaiah, who Jesus quotes above, and prophesied that His house (composed of both Jews and Gentiles) will be a house of prayer for all nations. In other words, God's people will be characterized by prayer, seeking after Him with a lovesick heart.

Because of the strong prophetic words in Scripture about the end-time Bride and her holy longing for the Bridegroom, we shouldn't find it surprising that the Holy Spirit is raising up a prayer movement that is yet in its infancy and which will grow to such an extent that the whole Church will become a "house of prayer for all nations."

As I watch and listen to many people these days, I'm struck with how determined God is to bring us into our full identity as His Bride, filled with first love for Jesus and a fire that no floods of opposition can extinguish. One way in which I see His relentlessness is that He is letting us taste the fruit of our independent efforts; we see on all sides the crumbling of family and ministry structures within the Church, even dedicated Christian homes and ministries. We are all part of a cultural Christianity that is wreaking havoc on American believers.

I believe that God is watching over us carefully, and from His heart of jealous love, He is opposing our methods and programs and attempts to make things work. He wants to intervene in our desperate affairs (whether that be family issues or ministry issues, etc.), but He can only intervene to the extent that we wait on Him in loving prayer, seriously asking and contending in prayer for His intervention. He will have a praying and devoted Church, and so He waits and waits until our pain becomes such that we will seek Him with all our heart. (Wholehearted seeking of God (Jer. 29:12,13) has implications that are not appealing to our drivenness as a people.)

The Lord says in Isaiah 64:4 that no one has seen a God like our God Who works for those who wait for Him. The weight of working is on God while the weight of waiting is on us. As long as our primary posture is that of working, causing God to have to wait, then we won't experience the joy and breakthrough of His life and power into our hearts and into our circumstances. Our hard work (i.e., striving on our own to make things work) holds God at bay even though He longs to work on our behalf.

God wants us to partner with Him in work, but that must come out of a place of utter dependence on Him, and as fallen and sinful humans, we don't get to that place easily.

I believe the Lord is waiting for His Bride to reach a point of such recognition of the futility of our methods and strategies and systems that we will stop many of the things we are doing to find the time to cry to Him corporately; the financial crises all around us is His kindness towards His people to awaken us to His ways and His wisdom. He will convince us that He is all-wise and chooses the weak ways (prayer and fasting, etc.) to confound the worldly ways of accomplishing His purposes.

The prayer movement arising in the earth is God's strategy for this hour to lead us into our identity as a praying Church, a house of prayer for all the nations. May the Lord breathe upon us and awaken desire for Him above all else.

Lord, I'm very grateful for the fact that You have not given up on Your people and that Your jealousy over us will fight to strip us of all that we have come to hope in that is not You. Come, Holy Spirit of God, don't relent in pursuing Your Bride. Raise up the prayer movement all over the earth and call Your Church into Her full identity as a praying Church for the sake of Jesus! Amen.

God bless you this week - may you experience His affection for you!

Divine Perspective

(A word about the month of August: I'm going to continue sending out random thoughts through the summer and then in September, we'll start the book We Would See Jesus by Roy Hession.)

Psalm 73:17 "...I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned..."

If ever God's people needed perspective and discernment, it is today. And the need for this will increase as the pressures of the end of the age increase. I find this true in my own life, and it is underscored by hearing from many others as they struggle to flourish in the midst of the increasing chaos, anger, and pressures of this age.

There is no other place to get divine, heavenly perspective apart from the real presence of the Lord.

Psalm 73 is about eternal perspective; the psalmist openly makes his complaint in the first part of this writing and admits his anger and pain over what he observes in this life, which is that those who don't care about God seem to have life easier than those who are intent on walking in the ways of the Lord.

Although the Scriptures leave no doubt about the reality of suffering in this life for God's people, there's something in us that wants to have it all now - the fulfillment of everything now. I think the Church in America is particularly conditioned in this way because of our worldview that seeks for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" now in this land; because we don't have an eternal perspective on fulfillment in the next age, we are surprised and offended with God when things don't go well in this age.

The New Testament saints lived for another age. (II Cor. 4:16-18) They studied and believed all that Jesus taught about a future and a hope beyond the present and arranged their lives around that reality. This empowered them to rejoice in difficulties. In the average American church our sermons and programs are mostly given to working at and ensuring that we have a good marriage, a good family, a good job, a good ministry in this life, with no vision for the countless years we have ahead of us and what God has for us to be and do forever.

Obviously, our focus in the Church on improving things in this life has not produced strong families and ministries but rather broken homes and self-absorbed ministries. C.S.Lewis once said (in response to the idea that to be heavenly minded is to be of no earthly good), that it's actually the reverse. He said that it's for lack of focus on eternity that we live such miserable lives now and contribute so little to this age.

And so the psalmist found his way into the presence and heart of God and there he gained eternal perspective. The "sanctuary" of God speaks of God's manifest presence; there we, like the psalmist and all children of God in all ages, touch reality; first of all, we encounter the reality of the one real God, transcendent and sovereign in His leadership of human history. Then we touch the reality of what matters above all else in this life: intimacy with this transcendent One - "Whom have I in heaven and there is none on earth that I desire besides You...for me it is good to be near God."

In that place of intimate communion and union with the sovereign King and Lover of my soul, I gain perspective on all that is happening around me. There I "discern" what's real and what the final outcome will be; to keep perspective I must have a lifestyle of continual seeking His presence and hearing His viewpoint.

As I have shared before and will continue to share, I believe the worldwide prayer movement is clearing the way for the Bride to desire and cry out for the return of the Bridegroom and is one of the key means by which the Holy Spirit is breaking open the heavens so that His people can experience more of His manifest presence, and in that place, we gain eternal perspective.

Spirit of God, awaken hunger within us to be with You, close to You, to experience Your real presence and to live seeking You so that we may be a people living for another age, empowered to know in You what is really happening around us; save us from being subtly sucked into the mind of this age and from evaluating what's real through worldly eyes so that we can rejoice in suffering and bear witness in our joy of a transcendent life in God through Christ Jesus.

God is with you!

No Created Thing Can Separate Us

I've been taking some vacation days lately and enjoying not having to be somewhere at a certain time (at least not as often as when I'm fully engaged in the calling of God on my life); this has been a good time for me to experience in a new way the unconditional love of the Lord for me in the sense that I can step back and, in the midst of not doing "ministry", I can bask in His affections for me as a beloved daughter of His and further break off lingering and lurking deceptions that my significance to Him comes from all that I'm involved in.

In a recent Daniel fast, one of my prayers (taken from Daniel's life) during and since that fast is that I would continue to receive revelation from the Holy Spirit about my status as God's "beloved" (Daniel 9:23). I know that I must have continual revelation and understanding of this all of my life. I will never outgrow my need to hear my Father's words of affirmation and affection, no matter how much I mature in Him.

So with this in mind, I want to close this posting with part of an email that just came to me from a dear friend who is simple in his love and devotion to God. It touches, at least in part, this theme of the unrelenting and unconditional love of God and is especially significant to me because of who wrote it.

"Why Jesus came to earth: To get fame, from you. You are his most precious treasure, he wants you as his best friend, his biggest fan. So may you know today, that nothing can seperate us from the very love of God, as scripture so elegantly puts it. It is because, God is so good and wants all the glory and the fun that comes with that for your happiness and for His. He doesn't want you living life alone and unknown, but known by the king, as Esther was, chosen for the king to be his queen. This message is that God wants us, whether any one else does or not, He does; He wants our autograph, to put it in his lamb's book of life. He knows us by name, knew us in our mothers womb, knows the hairs on our head. He thinks we are cool, in another words. For those that call upon his name and choose him, know him, and hear his voice, and he is so glad to call his very own, be one of the chosen. Be a friend of Jesus and famous for being a fan, full of the glory that comes by being in his presence. Amen."

Here at the Bethany House of Prayer we continually ask the Holy Spirit to reveal afresh and to a greater measure the love and affection of God for each of us and for all of His children. God bless you this week with His nearness!