Oh, ancient mystery, unspeakable majesty, overwhelm me with Your unfathomable Presence.
Holy fire, set Your flame into the marrow of my bones and consume me.
Cry Your Spirit words until “Abba, Father” wells up and overflows my heart with exquisite glory!
Anneli Anderson, original acrylic, 2013
The last couple of days I’ve spent a little time looking back at 2016 and rereading my journal. I don’t journal every day or every week, but I periodically pencil my prayers and thoughts and God-words. As I browsed the pages, I felt again the heartbeat of my prayers and felt the pulse of His behind it.
The page dated 1/1/16 begins with this prayer: “This year, Lord, I want to go deeper with You, abide more fully in Your love and taken into Your secrets and into rare intimacy with you. How my heart yearns for You, but quakes before my weakness and failures….Oh, wondrous love that accepts me as I am then fills me and lifts me to infinitely more than I deserve, more than I can conceive…and all that You desire. So, breathe in me a yearning for more of You. Stir the embers of my heart into a fiery love for You, and take me deeper and deeper into the secret place of rare intimacy with you, O God.”
This yearning for a deeper relationship and for rare intimacy with God continued pouring onto the pages of 2016. My inclination now is to judge how well I did in that pursuit and whether I achieved my goal, but there is a fatal flaw in that thread of thinking. Tug on it a bit, and my life unravels.
The intimacy and depth I long for isn’t something God awards to high achievers and do-gooders. It can’t be achieved by even the most spiritual or the rest of us in our more spiritual moments. If it could, then my relationship with God would be performance-based and not grace-based. If my faith rests on my faithfulness in the pursuit, then I am doomed and will surely fail…I have failed.
I wrote on June 12 that God doesn’t dangle something in front of me and ask me to attain it. Instead, He offers freely what only He can give and what I could never attain. He doesn’t demand that I muster up more doing power and greater faithfulness. I am called in my weakness to entrust my unfaithful self to the Mighty One who will do in me all that He wants of me and from me.
Deepening intimacy is the fruit and power of redeeming love, indeed, it is the aim of redemption…that I may be filled with all the fullness of God and enjoy a deepening experience of His nearness until the perfect image of Christ is formed in my soul.
So, I think it’s summed up like this: My part is to yield all I am and trust all He is. To just be who I am in Him and let Him be all He is in me.
It’s not just a 2016 or 2017 pursuit, it’s a calling to a lifetime journey. It’s yielding my time and my focus to sit every day at the feet of the Living God lost in wonder, love and praise.
Stir the embers of my heart into a fiery love for You, and take me deeper and deeper into the secret place of rare intimacy with you, O God.
…His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot. Jeremiah 20:9
God has been stirring up a fire in my soul to know Him more deeply. I want more than an ordinary experience, I yearn for rare intimacy with Him. I want to be filled to the measure with all of His fullness, walk in the power of His Spirit and have the image of Christ more fully formed in me. However, it requires death to self, and that’s not an easy path.
There has been a growing sentiment in Christianity that God exists for us and for our comfort. Some are cramming Him into a magic lamp to be roused by our wishes. There has been a gradual shift away from God-centered Truth to self-centered truth. We’re losing our moorings to the solid Rock and are drifting into individualized reality. It’s a much easier path, but not the one I will take.
I don’t need a therapy God who only empathizes with me and affirms me and makes me feel good about myself. I don’t need a Concierge who will pander me, prosper me and grant my every wish. I don’t need a God invented and reinvented in the fickle winds of culture.
I need the real God in my real world. One who calls me to a higher path, to be more than I am and all He has designed me to be. I need a God bigger than I am and bigger than my world.
I need the only One who can free me from myself and my bondage to sin. I need a God who calls me to repentance and obedience, then gives me the will and strength to obey and who will do in me the very thing He asks of me.
I don’t need a God who will keep me from the storm or from suffering but a God who controls it and walks with me through it to deeper places of His heart. I need a God who will purge and refine me until He is the very center and pulse of my soul.
I want to be undone and my heart set ablaze by the consuming fire of His fierce love and holiness. I need the one True God, the immutable Eternal God, who reigns in Sovereign power and is clothed with splendor and majesty.
So it is with those in the Society of the Burning Heart.
For the past few years, I’ve not approached the New Year with a resolution but instead with two questions: “What, God, do you want to teach me and change in me this year? What scripture do you want to use to do this in me?” Then I wait and listen.
The first year, He gave me Galatians 2:20 and helped me better understand what it means to live by faith every moment of every day. He showed me the insufficiency of my self-effort and brought me to a decision of accepting Him as my “every day get up in the morning walk through the day and slip into bed at night” Redeemer and Doer of it all.
The last two years He gave me Romans 12:1 and called me to absolute surrender. It’s been two years, and I don’t think He’ll ever be done working that verse into my heart and life. I’ve always struggled with the failings of my will and determination toward complete surrender. God has patiently let me fail to help me realize that absolute surrender isn’t the outcome of my determination or will. I don’t have to muster it up. I need to give it up, then He gradually and absolutely works it into the fabric of my soul.
Now I stand at the first day of 2016 and ask again, “What, God, do you want to teach me and change in me this year? What scripture do you want to use to do this in me?” I’ve been waiting and listening, and this morning He confirmed it.
This year, Lord, I want to abide more fully and deeply in Your love. How my heart yearns to abide with You more consistently but quakes before my weakness and failure. So, I give You my frail humanity and propensity to wander. Oh, wondrous love that made me frail and accepts me as I am! Stir the embers of my heart into fiery love and take me deeper and deeper into an abiding rare intimacy with you.
After writing out this prayer, God nudged my heart with these thoughts…Oh child of Mine, it is My own yearning that cries out for rare intimacy. It’s what you were made for, it’s what I died for, and it’s what I call you to each morning. Follow Me, stay close to Me, and abide with Me. I will sweep you into the heights and depths of My love and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not yet know. Just stay close…and hold on to your hat.
Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love. John 15:9-10 NASB
I think His lessons about faith and absolute surrender were His preparation to draw me into this abiding intimacy. I’ve been reading Andrew Murray’s book, Abide in Christ, and realize now that God has been connecting the dots over the past three years: faith…surrender…abide. Murray wrote:
“As the Father hath loved Me, so have I love you.” What a love! And it is with that same infinite love that His eye still rests upon each of us here seeking to abide in Him, and in each breathing of that love there is indeed the power of eternity. “I have loved thee with an everlasting love.” With the tenderest compassion He bows to our weakness, with patience inconceivable he bears with our slowness, with the gentlest loving-kindness He meets our fears and our follies.
Love gives all, but asks all. It does so not because it grudges us a thing, but because without this it cannot get possession of us to fill us with itself…our surrender to it must have no other measure than its surrender to us. O that we understood how the love that calls us has infinite riches and fullness of joy for us, and that what we give up for its sake will be rewarded a hundredfold in this life!
But is it possible, can I always abide in His love? Listen how that love itself supplies the only means for our abiding in Him: It is faith in that love which will enable us to abide in it. If this love be indeed so divine, such an intense and burning passion, then surely I can depend on it to keep me and to hold me fast. Then surely all my unworthiness and feebleness can be no hindrance. If this love be indeed so divine, with infinite power at its command, I surely have a right to trust that it is stronger than my weakness; and that with its almighty arm it will clasp me to its bosom and suffer me to go out no more….there is one thing my God requires of me….He cannot force all this blessedness on me; He waits till I give the willing consent of my heart.”
The alarm goes off and I finally rise after a couple snooze cycles. Tea in hand, I shuffle to my chair and sit in the presence of God. It takes a few moments to corral wandering thoughts and turn toward Him. He watches me settle and waits. Sometimes I become acutely aware of His Presence and my humanness falls silent. Sometimes I just stare into my tea.
I don’t know how I should pray, but the Spirit begins to pray His heart and will for me in the unutterable language of Deity. In the quiet of the morning, a deep upwelling stirs my soul and the unutterable becomes my prayer.
Weekend before last I sat in a condo overlooking the Pacific Ocean and stared out at its waves. My view of the ocean was framed by the window molding. My simple mind might think the ocean exists only within the boxed area of my perspective. Yet standing in the surf, I’m dizzied by the rush of it around my legs and overwhelmed by its expanse and motion.
It’s too easy to define God from my boxed view and think He exists only within the parameters of my understanding. I attempt to make Him fit the predictable and comfortable. It’s hard to wrap my mind around something bigger than I can perceive and deeper than my surface perspective. It’s much safer to look at Him from a dry condo rather than stand in the dizzying rush of His power, off balance and overwhelmed by His endless expanse.
As I sat gazing out the window, I watched black cormorants bobbing on the surface of the sea, rising and falling with the waves and occasionally diving to catch a fish. One flew along the foamed-laced translucent surface of a cresting wave. It struck me that there are those who live out their lives flying through the spray of a cresting wave. They bob on the surface occasionally diving when need drives them deep. But they don’t live in the deep.
As I pondered the cormorants, my mind went to the whales who live and move and have their being in the sea. They move in its currents, are enveloped by its power, and sustained by its bounty. Their other-world songs echo in the depths. Humanity has been captured by their haunting melodies and study its complex compositions and evolving patterns. We wonder at their song.
Perhaps they sing for the joy of the song. Perhaps they’re humming to themselves, and perhaps they’re praising their Creator. Is that so outlandish? In Revelation 5:13, John wrote, “Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing: To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power for ever and ever!”
O God, stretch the boundaries of my limited perspective. I don’t want to live out my life on the surface only occasionally going deeper. I want to be deeper, live deeper, and stay deeper. I want to feel the surge and rush of Your unrestrained power in my life, carried by Your currents of love, and fed from the bounty of Your depths. I want to live and move and have my being in You. I want Your Presence around me carrying me, lifting me, challenging me, and sustaining me.
As I prayed and pondered this, a distant spout of spray and a dark glistening back broke the grey-green surface of the sea. Then a great tail lifted and disappeared again into the deep.
…in Him we live and move and have our being. Acts 17:28