Mary and Martha (Part 2)

Last week I wrote some thoughts on what I believe Mary and Martha represent related to contending for faithfulness to Jesus as First Love in the midst of internal and external pressures to prioritize that which screams the loudest for our attention in everyday living.

This week I'll share some steps for cooperating with the Spirit of Jesus to fight for a life of spiritual intimacy and of living from the inside out rather than being driven from the outer life. I'll put these steps into two categories - first, the changing of mindsets and second, practical steps:

1. Change of thinking

a. Be convinced that the attitude and action of Mary to pause everything in order to hear Jesus' words is His priority for all of His own. Talk to the Lord about this; ask the Holy Spirit for living understanding of His heart in this. Read the writings of the great saints throughout the generations; those most fruitful were those who prioritized prayer and devotion to Jesus no matter how busy their lives are/were. (Men like Oswald Chambers and Watchman Nee warned believers that our bentness as fallen humans is to prioritize ministry to people at the expense of ministering to God.)

b. Prepare your heart and mind for the fact that while this sounds wonderful in theory, you will have to fight for this reality every day and that it will cost you to actually live this way, just as it cost Mary. You are swimming upstream to do this, even in the Church. Having said that, I'll add that there is much grace for this once the heart and mind is set in this direction.

c. Ask the Holy Spirit to help you. Only He (God, the Third Person) can truly love God in and through you; and only He knows you perfectly and can lead you in this journey. Ask Him for ongoing revelation of the Father's heart of affection for you and the Bridegroom's heart of desire for you even in the midst of what you define as weakness and failure on your part; without this understanding, it is very hard work to find time to be with Him (or when being with Him, to have an open spirit), because of fear of how He will receive you when you approach Him.

2. Establishing a habit

a. Set a time in your schedule to regularly sit at His feet to listen to Him in and through His Word. Without actually putting something on the calendar for meeting with Him, we can't know Him and experience Him as He wants us to. This will look differently for each person, but just as in a healthy marriage, the spouses find time to be alone together, so we need this with Jesus. It is this faithful regular seeking to know what He is really like that will sensitize you to feel His gentle and subtle nudges during the busy times of your day.

b. Find devotional helps to use in your time with Him. There is plenty available, especially now that there's easy access to the internet. Make sure it's grounded in the Word and in the Spirit. Since much of our struggle in seeking God is based on wrong ideas of how He views us, I would suggest that you read and meditate, with the help of the Holy Spirit, on portions like Hosea, Jeremiah 2, Song of Songs. The International House of Prayer has much material available on these themes: www.ihop.org.

c. Ask someone to be your helper if you need this in order to establish the habit. Being in solid Christian relationships is imperative for ongoing growth in knowing Jesus, no matter how long we have walked with Him. As you get established in your personal walk with Him, He will lead you to partner with others to develop a shared walk with Him.

Many of you already have a vital walk of intimacy with Jesus; in that case, I simply encourage you to continue on and look for ways to grow and to help others develop in their personal life and experience with the living God. May the Lord empower your heart through the revelation of His desire for you!

Mary and Martha (Part 1)

There's confusion at times around the persons of Mary and Martha among us believers. I find that when this topic comes up, there's often guilt related to this story (Luke 10:38-41), reflected in the defensiveness that arises about these two sisters.

I don't pretend to have a final word on the subject, but I hope what I share may help give at least a piece of understanding as to why the Holy Spirit made a point of including these young women in the Word of God. I don't believe His intention was to pit the two against each other and thereby cause us to do the same.

There's A LOT that could be said about them. My point in this 2-part writing is to say that I believe that Mary and Martha each represents a mindset or attitude related to priorities. I'm not convinced that any one person is a "Mary" nor that any one person is a "Martha". I don't think we're intended to apply these labels artificially.

We tend to think that the very active person who has a calling to work with his/her hands is not expected to spend time at the feet of Jesus because of the demands on him/her and because they just aren't the contemplative type. On the other hand, we look at a more contemplative type person as someone who finds it easy to sit and listen to Jesus and who doesn't do anything else.

I see Mary as representing what I'll call the "spirit of first Love". In other words, she exemplifies the one who has settled in his heart that he will do whatever it takes for Jesus to remain true to Jesus as First Love in a world that is constantly pulling and pushing the believer into so much human-initiated activity that he has little time to sit at Jesus' feet to listen to Him.

I see Martha as representing the believer who has given up the fight and reconciled himself to being a slave of the expectations of himself and of others.

I had a simple experience a number of years ago that the Holy Spirit used to open my understanding to what it means to have a "Mary" heart. One Saturday morning I was going through my normal routine of having a simple breakfast after having had time in the Lord and His Word. As I finished eating, I got up as normal to wash the dishes, and suddenly I had a sense of the Lord drawing very near to me in a manifest way. My first thought was that I would wash the dishes and then take some moments to be with Him. At that moment the Spirit of God whispered to me that this was a Mary/Martha moment. The "Martha" response to His nearness is to finish the task at hand first THEN stop to be with Jesus. The "Mary" response is to push the "pause" button, leave the task undone and be with Jesus.

By God's grace, I chose the "one necessary thing" that morning; of course, the dishes got washed a little later. The secondary things that have to get done will get done when we make being at His feet priority.

All of God's own are called to be "Marys" in heart and mind, though the expression of this will differ with each one according to each calling and personality; it's a heart posture of fighting for being at Jesus' feet as top priority, being His friend above all else. Notice that I speak of "fighting" for this; in other words, it's the attitude and action of contending for the "first Love" lifestyle even though we will never feel like we've "arrived." I believe Martha represents the one who has decided to quit fighting for this place at His feet and has settled for a lesser place of not experiencing His nearness and is content to serve Him at a distance and leave intimacy with Jesus to those who we think are more "naturally wired" for that.

Put into different language, I see Mary and Martha as pictures of walking in the spirit and walking in the flesh. Sarah and Hagar (as taught about in Galatians 4:21-31) are pictures of the same.

God has fashioned you uniquely for Himself; whatever your uniqueness looks like, you can have a Mary heart, one that desires and fights to be in the "first Love" relationship with Him. Even when you feel you don't attain this (and how do we ever know we've attained??), your desire and struggle to live in this reality counts to Him, and His heart is moved by you. The more living understanding you have of His heart being touched and moved by your fight to keep Him in first place, the more empowered your heart will be to walk in the "Mary" reality.

Next week I'll share some thoughts about how we can cooperate with the Holy Spirit to fight the good fight of remaining in the Vine, true to Jesus as our First Love.

Lord Jesus, thank You for Your life and death and resurrection and ascension and for the Gift of Your very own Spirit by which we are empowered to be men and women with hearts and minds like Mary of Bethany. Come and increase desire for You so that we can leave undone that which must be left undone in order to give You wholehearted devotion. Thank You for Your zeal concerning this, which is our greatest hope for being true to You!

Excited about God

A.W. Pink says in his book,"Our Accountability to God", that "The theology of the last century has failed lamentably at two essential points, namely, its teaching concerning God and its teaching concerning fallen man. As one writer expressed it, 'On the one hand, they have not ascended high enough...on the other hand, they do not descend low enough.' God is infinitely greater and His dominion far more absolute and extensive than most theologians admit, and man has sunk much lower and is far more depraved than they will allow."

I am very grateful for the journey the Holy Spirit has led me in over my life up until now; but I am just as grateful that He's not nearly finished with me yet! Years ago I read a quote from Catherine Marshall in which she said that excitement and enthusiasm for God grows as one truly matures in God's love and life.

Often we think that excitement about God is for the "immature" and those in the early stages of life in God, and that it's to be expected that our emotions about God get tempered as we grow in Him. I wonder if that idea might partly be rooted in the weak theology referred to by A.W. Pink in the quote above.

If excitement about God is only for us when we've first been delivered from the kingdom of darkness into His kingdom of light, then I suspect we don't have clear ongoing understanding and revelation of Who God is and who we are apart from Him.

Although the excitement isn't always in the surface emotions, I am much more excited about God now than I was in the early years of my life in Him. Even a short few minutes of meditating by His Spirit on His infinite beauty and power and sovereign leadership of humanity coupled with pondering how deeply lost I am at every point without Him awakens deep emotion within me. I pray I will never become sophisticated about God.

A.W. Tozer says in "Whatever Happened to Worship?", "I have had people tell me very dogmatically that they will never allow 'feeling' to have any part in their spiritual life and experience. I reply, 'Too bad for you!' I say that because I have voiced a very real definition of what I believe true worship to be: worship is to feel in the heart!" He goes on to say that there is something wrong with our worship if we don't experience emotions over God.

Holy Spirit, You Who love the Father and the Son with fiery passion, keep us in a place of childlikeness; open the eyes of our heart to see the true and living God and to see our true condition without Him. May we never speak of Jesus with a cold, hard heart, by Your grace. Thank You for Your faithful work in us to help us love Him with Your love.

Wasteful Offering, the Sweet Aroma to God

As long as he had the assurance that his ministry was the outflow of life,

he was satisfied.

This quote comes from a biography of Watchman Nee, a great fruitful man of God from China who was persecuted for his faith in Jesus early in the 20th century. As he matured in God, all he cared about was that the life of Jesus flow out of him. As a young man, he was mentored by an elderly lady who helped him understand that it's not religious activity that produces this life but wasting ourselves in ministering to Jesus that gives life to others.

In the final chapter of Nee's classic book, "The Normal Christian Life", he tells of how he was offended at first with what seemed to be wasted time by this woman: "(I thought that this woman and others like her) are apparently not doing enough. They could do so much more, if they could secure an entry somewhere and enjoy a greater acceptance and prominence in certain circles...(this sister) is the one by whom I have been helped most. She was used of the Lord in a very real way during those years when I was associated with her...(at the time) the one concern in my heart was this: 'She is not used!' Constantly I said to myself, 'Why does she not get out and take some meetings, go somewhere, do something? It is a waste for her to be living in that small village with nothing happening!' Sometimes I almost shouted at her, 'No one knows the Lord as you do. You know the Book in a living way. Do you not see the need around? Why don't you do something? It is a waste of time...energy...money ...everything, just sitting here and doing nothing!'"

Nee goes on to talk about Mary's extravagant and "wasteful" offering to Jesus and how our highest priority must be to minister to Him before ministering to others. This prioritizing of our life will cause problems within the church because there are so many needs to be met that we Christians feel this is a waste of time and energy to wait on the Lord and seek that He be satisfied before others are satisfied.

However, as we give ourselves to this priority, the fragrance of this "wasteful" offering is on us; it's the very fragrance of the One Who poured out the ultimate wasteful offering on the cross. Hanging around Him a lot makes us smell like Him, and it's that "smell" that either attracts or repels people. The apostle Paul says in II Corinthians 2 that this aroma of Jesus on us is sweet to those who are hungry ('being saved') but a stench to those who are rejecting Him. We make no impact one way or the other without this fragrance of Jesus' life on us.

All of our attempts to win people (whether believers or not) are futile if hunger for Jesus hasn't been awakened. His fragrant life causes hunger to awaken.

I want to "smell" more and more like Him; when people are around me, I want them to catch a whiff of Jesus' life. Like Watchman Nee, I don't want to be satisfied with anything less than Jesus' life emanating from me. Time and energy "wasted" in simple unadulterated adoration of Him is the way we get soaked in His fragrance. Each generation and culture and personality will express this differently; but however it looks, it will turn out looking "wasteful" to others, even to others in the church.

Lord, You are worthy of wasteful offerings; You long for extravagant love offerings. Help us know how to cooperate with You in this as we step into a new year when the demands of life and ministry press in even more fiercely than ever. I ask You, Holy Spirit, for a holy tenacity and determination to make ministering to God my priority and the priority of Your bride worldwide as You prepare us for the most difficult days that Your people have ever faced or ever will face in human history. Help us measure the way You measure; help us value what You value for the sake of the Lamb! Thank You that You will do this for us, in His name...