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!