The Father’s smile

So much of our spirituality and religion is greatly affected by who we know God to be. A.W. Tozer said, “Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than a low or unworthy conception of God.” We all have within us a gallery images of who God is, and those images dramatically affect our responses to Him. This gallery greatly affects the faith and religion we live out each day in relationship with God.

The trouble is many, if not most of those images are distorted at best or entirely false at worst. This God many of us relate and respond to is not the God of scripture, and we begin to wonder why some of us live out such a grim, hard, and loveless faith each day.

It is because the God we have come to believe is distant and hard to please. God becomes a cold Father demanding your work without encouragement or love or pride in you. It is very difficult to serve that god with enthusiasm or joy. It is difficult not to chalk up other more enthusiastic brothers and sisters to fanaticism when the god you know is cold, removed, and grim. But this is not the God presented in scripture. This is the god of the Pharisees and he will always drive a Pharisaic religion and faith.

The moment I was first ambushed by the love of God is when I came to see the Father of Scripture who loves and delights in me, His son. He comes close to me in a true fellowship where I can find rest and healing. He is not hard to please.

Yes, he disciplines us, but I have come to know His delight and smile. He will correct and challenge me with the smile of a Father who is tender and proud. My Abba is proud of me and knows I am His “imperfect by promising” son. I see His delighted smile which knows I am coming to look more and more like my Abba every day.

My Word of the Year 2015

Several years ago I quit making resolutions or new years goals. I accepted, then, a challenge to choose only a word for the year. “One word that sums up who you want to be or how you want to live or what you want to achieve by the end of 2015. One word that you can focus on every day, all year long. It will take hard work, and will require intentionality and commitment. But if you let it, your word will shape you and your year. It will guide your decisions and help you grow.”

This year my word is: PRAYER.

While I would say I am a man of God’s Word, I want to be more of a man of prayer. Prayer is not an element of my relationship with God, it IS my relationship with God. I have to realize my relationship is dependent upon communication and time together.

If I wrote my autobiography, someone could read it inside and out, over and over again. They could highlight important parts about my story and things that mater a great deal to me. But that person does not know me. That person and I have no relationship. We have never sat and spoken together.

Much like this, I can study God’s Word inside and out, over and over again. I can highlight important parts and dedicate years and whole college degrees to studying things very important to God. But I could do all of this and still not know God. I do not have a relationship. I have not sat and spoken with Him.

I am a man of God’s Word and a man after God’s heart, but I want to be MORE of a man of prayer than I have been before. I want to be more of a man of prayer at the end of 2015 than I am right now. I want to know Him more intimately. I want to be terribly close to His heart, and that will only come as we sit and speak together with more intentionality and frequency.

Doing without the gospel

Once I come face to face with the real gospel of Jesus, it will well up within me either of great appreciation or joy or a rebellion and resentment. Many of us, particularly many Americans, resent a vital part of the gospel, namely the giftedness of it. Once many are face to face with the fact they have to accept a gift rather than give and give and give of their earning efforts, we are resentful of the gospel.

The gospel makes clear we are “justified as a GIFT by His GRACE through the redemption which is in Jesus Christ” (Rom. 3:24). Oswald Chambers writes, “We cannot earn or win anything from God; we must either receive it as a gift or do without it.”

Here is a stark challenge to the way many of us try to understand the gospel. If you are not receiving it as a gift and trying to work for it with all your own efforts, you are missing it. If you are trying to work and earn God’s love, you are choosing to do without it.

It is gift and it is to be received. It does not require your giving or your work. It is selfish pride just as much for me to refuse a gift, because even in that refusal I make way more of myself and less of God.

Sit still in the presence

Today, God, I want your Word to affect both my mind and my heart. I need to know your tenderness, your intimacy, and your love in a way that I have not known it in some time. I will soak up your Word today. Please help my heart understand. Speak to my heart and may I come to know you more?

“and though you have not seen Him, YOU LOVE HIM, and though you do not see Him now, you BELIEVE in Him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, obtaining as the outcome of your faith the salvation of your souls.” -1 Peter 1:8-9

I greatly desire my heart to know the joy of salvation my mind knows it is. My soul is saved, and my mind knows the good news of the reality, but my heart does not often sit and rest with the very good news that this truly is for my soul eternal. God, help my heart rejoice today. I want to love you more.

Help my heart today. Give me a heart of flesh to replace the bits of built up stone.

Bask: a prayer

Abba,

May your spirit connect directly with mine!  May my spirit truly worship yours!  Today I am striving to bask in your love.  Not to think about your love and try to feel your love, but to sit and bask in your love.  I sit here right now drinking in your love.  Your love that calls me your child and sees me as blameless.  A love that relates to me in my spirit and not my flesh.  I praise you and deeply thank you for loving me in my spirit instead of my flesh.

I swim in the love of my heavenly Father who has loved me despite my flesh and the mistakes and struggles it trips on.  You love me because you see through my flesh, my feelings and my facade into my spirit which truly does remain blameless due to the outrageous price you paid for me so long ago.

Today, Abba, I rest in your love that I could NEVER receive from anyone else.  I am skinny-dipping in the waters of your love that lavishes me in acceptance, mercy, grace and spiritual pleasure.  I am truly drinking in a love I could never return.  I long for you to be pleased, and I trip and stumble to make you happy and you still tell me not to compare and measure your love for me in terms of my love for you! I try not to compare my lazy, passive, conditional, emotional, and often theoretical love with your love.

I rest in your love today with the realization that no matter how amazing my wife or daughters’ love for me is, it will fail in comparison to yours.  That no matter how much my mother loves me, it will tremble at yours.  That I CANNOT depend solely on Tonya, Bryleigh, Haddisen, mom, friends, books, or my writing to feel special, loved or valid, but to depend only on your love.

I am taking this moment to really trust in your love for me at my deepest core, to spend a moment claiming my identity as your beloved child, and TRUSTING that enough to believe…BECAUSE of that I am special, loved and valid.  I am your child and I am drinking that love in right now.  Thank you for loving me, Daddy.  I love you and desire you to be happy, and I trust that I truly am special, loved and valid BECAUSE of your love for me.

Act Like You Need it

Sit and allow

Child,

I am not here to speak to you.  You are not here that I might teach you something.  I ask you to be restful right now.  Be silent and quiet.  I do not ask you to do this so you may DO anything else.  I am not going to speak to you.  I merely ask that you are silent and just LET ME LOVE YOU.  Just be still and drink in my love.  Don’t sit and think too heavily ABOUT my love.  Just sit quietly in my lap with your head on my chest and just let me love you.  My love is not an ideal, a theology to study.  My love, right now, is my action.  I am LOVING you.  Just be still in my arms and just let me love you.  Be still and drink in the love that radiates around you RIGHT NOW only awaiting your silence…your stillness to fall on.  If you are not still, you will only rustle it about.  But if you are still, my love will pour upon you like snow in a globe.  You CAN BE covered in my love, but you must be still and allow me to rain down on you more love than you will ever be able to contain.  Don’t think!  Don’t listen for me.  For I have nothing to say to you right now.  I only have something to give you.  I have only to love you right now.  Rest and BE LOVED my wonderful child.

The Pain of In To Me See

Intimacy is often defined in Christian church-talk as “Into me see”. Denial of intimacy with the ones you love the most is hiding what is really inside of you. You are not willing for them to see who you really are inside, and you make all sorts of attempts to hide it all…subconsciously or not. This is not only applicable to my marriage, but to God as well. Though he already knows all that is within me, how much am I willing to reveal to him. THAT determines my desire for actual intimacy.

God, into me see!

Another great nugget is “The deeper the love, the greater the hurt.” [click to tweet that] This basically means people you do not know cannot hurt you. How true if you do not know someone, you could care less what they say. But our biggest wounds and hurts are inflicted by the ones we love most.

SOOOOO….

Why does our sin hurt our God so deeply? Because he desires us and is truly in love with us. The intimate God of love is hurt deeply because he really does know us….

Why does the church hurt us so badly?
Why do other Christians hurt us so badly?
Why am I capable of hurting my wife more than anyone else can?

WHY IS GRACE SO BEAUTIFUL….AND TRULY HEALING?

Let me love you

There are days when it seems God just wants to love me. There are days when I sit with open Bible and heart, and I wait….and wait…

There are days when God does not speak to me in His Word, even when I come faithfully to it. There are days when I will sit and stare at the pages, reading a text without affirmation of any message or lesson. There are days when I will sit silently awaiting God and all I will receive is a challenge to my heart to close my Bible and let God love me.

There are days when I am ready and prepared to discover God in his Word and I am challenged to sit and let God love me. Searching the word of God will not prove necessary every single day. There are days when my heart truly needs to be still and rest in God’s love; to sit and pray, “Abba, I belong to you. Please love on me today.”

Some days bring my heart to a place where God has a different challenge than I realize coming into it. I cannot depend on the word speaking to me every single day I come to it. If someone desired to know me, they can only ready my journals so many times before they would need to step away from them a little while and let me love them, get to know them, talk with me, get a cup of coffee with me and let me relate to them. There are days when I need to step away from the word and sit with God and allow him to love me…to accept his love.

There are days when my mind has soaked up all the love God is pouring on to me, leaving my heart and soul a little dry. There are days when my heart aches to know the love of God and engaging my mind just will not cut it that day.

Some days God desires to lavish his love upon me. If I would only but receive it. It is on those days I have to really test my faith and abide in Abba’s love. Because studying is easy when the words are there to understand and dissect, but my heart and soul operate on another faith which simply allows itself to be loved. There are those days when God desires to pour his love out on my heart, and I need to willingly receive that tender love. Today is just one of those days.

How to love as God loves

“Love is the loftiest preference of one person for another, and spiritually Jesus demands that this sovereign preference be for Himself.” – Ozzie Chambers

The Bible reveals to me that I must learn to love people. I am not always very good at loving others. God has loved me not at all because I am worthy of it or that I am lovable in any way, but because it is His very nature to love. How can I actually love in a way that is GOD’s nature? To love someone as God has loved me!?

God will likely bring people purposely into my life who I do not like much. He will bring people who are not at all easy for me to love.

God: the great patronizer? No, it is His love. That is His kind of love, which I am called to.

My problem is I most often try to force it and make this kind of love happen. I do not think this kind of love is going to happen within me overnight, but I also do not think God is forcing me into it. Yes, he has called me to it. He has demanded it of me, but I do not think he expects it so promptly that he pushes me forcibly into it either.

In fact, 2 Peter 3:9 tells me that “The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” I cannot overlook Jesus’ ability to wait for me. I cannot forget that Jesus knows I am incapable of loving as He does, and yet he patiently waits as I learn.

But it is that patience which should compel and drive me to be better. It is that patience, which should drive me to love more. I have to go to the hard to love and not only love them more, but love them as Jesus has loved me, which as I have revealed, is PATIENTLY!! There will always be irritating people who are very difficult for me to love, but the call still remains. Love others as Jesus has loved me. Love with patience!

But it all must be nurtured. It is not an overnight change. I must learn to grow that kind of love within me. I have to learn that kind of love as I daily learn to accept that kind of love.