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.”