The wound of love…

Every believer encounters it. Some call it spiritual dryness, the wilderness, or some other negative term. The saints of the Catholic Church called it, “the wound of love” and to them, though it felt negative in its out working, it was a blessed experience that established the soul in divine comforts.

All of us endeavoring to pursue our Beloved wholeheartedly and without compromise will come up against this season just like David came up against Goliath. St. John of the Cross referred to this reality as the Dark Night of the Soul, in which all previous comforts of our spirituality are driven away like the early morning fog so that perfect love can be established through the purging and refining of all fleshly hindrances. It is indeed a dark night.

But joy comes in the morning! We should rest assured when we find ourselves in this place, knowing that the author and perfecter of our faith is laboring to work in us an eternal weight of glory. Blessed are those spiritual persons when they can see the discipline of the Lord for it is nothing other than His counting us as sons and daughters. He disciplines the ones He loves. This wound of love causes us to be restless with anything that is not God. All consuming love is the object of Jesus’ labors on our behalf. Maturity is the goal and a sign of that maturity is the depth of love’s sacrificial nature.

Look at me my God, and let me know You are looking, for then I can endure anything!

What does love really look like?

I don’t think anyone really doubts that our western mindset and paradigm of love is slightly skewed. If I could find a more descriptive word to use than “slightly” I would; horribly, terribly, sadly, painfully, extravagantly, etc. There you have it.

The media, arts, and every form of entertainment available have all given the general public a “castle made of sand” concerning the concept of true love. Glitz, glamour, passion, and ideals are the earmarks of love in the west. The painful thing about all this is that it is all formed and molded from a concept of beauty that is worldly. What the world calls good is usually just bad with nice packaging. Think about it, every romantic movie I’ve ever seen is based on what the main character gets out of the prospective relationship. It has nothing to do with real, gritty, sacrificial service to another for the betterment of the other, which is how love is portrayed in the life of Christ in the gospels.

Sadly, when it comes down to differentiating between the world’s standards and the church’s on this point, it’s a little hazy. Everyone is longing for love, it is THE stream of human emotion, and it’s supposed to be that the church stands as a beacon of light to cast that light through the shadows of wrong paradigm and misguided belief. But the church and the world tend to have the same guidelines concerning love. We tend to follow Hollywood instead of the Cross. It’s no big surprise though, Hollywood pays a lot better…..on this side. Jesus knew differently, He knew that real love, when given away, cannot decrease. It’s like the singer said, “love is the currency of heaven forever.” The more you give, the more it grows.

Man, I wish there were more people who challenged the world. Man, I hope I can be one of them!

Are you burning yet?

The Lord loves incense. God did not create mankind as vessels of service only. Lest we forget, we cannot do anything apart from Him animating and moving us by His own life, which is our source. So, why would we venture to believe we could offer any work or activity that could ever be considered complete or good enough in and of itself?

Oh, how we need the breath of God’s spirit upon our lives. A life offered for service must first be burning with the incense of love. Work, apart from the aroma of infatuated desire for the Beloved, is as filthy rags.

I believe that God the Father is restoring the incense ministry similiar to what the Levitical priests operated in during Old Testament days. Instead of merely outward and physical incense though, the new priesthood, ones who love the dwelling place of the Lord, will burn inwardly with a living flame of love. Levitical priests in the O.T. tabernacle and temple only offered the purest pressed olive oil for burning in ministry service. This pure oil was used because it gave off no smoke or soot so as to not bring any defilement into the temple. Similarly, God is raising up vessels to burn His light and fragrance through, to burn clean and bright with no excess or compromise.

Our Christian activity may very well be good and appropriate but are we on fire with love? It’s not enough to be a vessel for the use of burning just anything. We must be a vessel and provide the pure oil of living love. Are we burning and if so, what are we burning? To stand, minister, and burn is the chief operation of God’s people. How much then should we ensure quality fuel and extravagent sacrifice for Him whom we so much want to minister to!?

The kingdom continued

Can there be a kingdom without a King present? Yes and no. A kingdom must have a leader but if that leader is gone or absent for some reason for any amount of time then the fullness of that kingdom will suffer want for lack of the King to rule it.

The church is an aspect of the kingdom but in no way is it the fullness. In order for the fullness of the kingdom of heaven to be expressed in the earth, Jesus must be present.

The first apostles understood the kingdom to be ruled by and through the Messiah. They held no end time doctrine or theology, their idea of the kingdom was a political entity ruled by Jesus their Messiah as King and Judge.

We in modern times have gone so far away from what the first apostles and fathers of the church held that I wonder how much clarity we actually have on this topic. For the small majority of believers who actually have an eschatological paradigm, which is few and far between, we argue and debate over end time time-lines and means of interpretation when in reality we should be asking ourselves if we really believe that the Lord is an actual King, coming to put all nations under subjection to His Father. It’s not just an issue of how to delineate eschatology but whether we believe the implications of Psalm 2. Is Jesus really our King and will He really be so in the flesh! Knowing how we think about this aspect does so much in clearing up why we believe what we believe and what we should be looking forward to. The apostles knew no kingdom without Jesus being the head and King, in the flesh.

Is the church the kingdom of God??

What is the actual kingdom??

I took a class last fall about this very topic. In some ways it answered this question but in some ways it only served to raise more of them. Though a clear cut yes or no may be impossible to figure out pertaining to this reality, it is expedient in these last days to raise such a question to the forefront of the conscious of the church. Answering this question places us into a school of thought regarding how we see end times, the Jewish people, and the point of the ingrafted Gentiles. What is the kingdom and how do we harmonize different seemingly contradictory thoughts about it?

What are your thoughts??

Thoughts on the Condition of Man continued..

So what then is needed? What is the answer to the dilemma.

Love. The reason that love is the chief end goal and resource in the kingdom is because it is impossible for love, when it increases to turn hearts away from God. Since God is love, loves increase only betters our situation in regards to relationship with Love itself.

The sum; if our end goal and chief good is a thing, then that thing will lead us astray. But because love is a thing and also a person, then love cannot fail in reciprocating itself. And since it can do so, it will never diminish, it will only increase.

This is the wisdom of God wherewith the wisdom of man cannot summon enough strength, ingenuity, resource, or desire to compare to this beautiful reality.

Love the Lord your God with all your mind!

I am afraid that an entire generation has forgotten to think. It is so easy these days to just flip on the tube, relax, and check out……veg out man. That’s the current context and sentiment for an entire generation plus some. Do you realize how many ads you see in a day? All of them telling you what to think, what to eat, what to wear, what to say, what to believe, what to love, what to do!!!

Do we realize how much our culture is in us, in the church! I think maybe we have failed to fulfill more than one element of the great commandment. Love must have the preeminence, strength must be given to the Lord, our hearts need to be tender and engaged, yes yes yes, all of these. But our minds, our minds need to be enthralled in thoughts of God.

I fear we have left theology to the academics. We are all called, however, to be theologians. For what is theology but thinking upon God? We were all made, fashioned, and designed to dwell upon the mysteries of the God head. We must think again, we need to give our minds to Jesus.

What does it mean to love the Lord with all our minds? Can we start by filtering what we look at, what we give our time to, and what we read?

Travel makes one think

I’ve recently been in Macon, Georgia doing some ministry at the house of prayer there. I was amazed to see the hunger and the desperate need for God’s presence while I was there. It was a great encouragement to my heart as an intercessor to see that God is truly raising up a people to be completely set apart for His purposes in the earth. Glory awaits those who take the kingdom by force. To suffer it violently to receive its glory, that is our call now and the greatest test for the church in this age. God be with us.

It takes discipline to receive.

To him who has, more will be given. To him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him.

The Lord gives extravagantly. And he asks us to do the same. The reality is that He will give more to those who can receive more, and receiving takes discipline. It’s hard to take something you don’t deserve, well, sometimes.

There is a renewal of the mind that needs to occur in order to see the Lord rightly, as He is. There is a shift in our inner man when we come to faith in Christ but that shift continues to happen throughout the process of the Spirit sanctifying us. Some of these shifts comes by free grace and the complete work of God’s mercy on our hearts but some of this transformation is completely up to us; we still have free will when we choose Christ and we still have free will when we receive the baptism in the Holy Ghost. And so, we still have free choice when it comes to sanctification. I believe this is what the apostle Paul meant when he commanded the church to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

It takes discipline to receive because our way of life and our culture is so contrary to the way of Christ and the way of His kingdom. In order to receive supernatural mindsets and paradigms, we must of necessity, discipline ourselves out of our current context of living in the world and being of the world. The Lord initiates and provokes us into this but the response must come from us. Righteous response comes from disciplined habits. The best conditioning for life in the Spirit is to walk in the Spirit, with the Spirit.

Thoughts on Music…

I wonder how closely music and the making thereof parallels the laws of the universe. It seems to me that creating, writing, and performing music imitates, more than any other medium, what God actually did in creating the heavens and the earth; the universe and the laws that sustain it. I think maybe this is why music is so spiritual and moving to us.

When God made man in His own image He put a creative drive within us similar to His. For some reason or another, whether by design or by coincidence, man has developed in the area of music far more, in my mind, than in any other arena besides in sin.

What this tells me is simply that God is an artist or more specifically a musician. Think of a world without sound. Imagine how uninteresting it might be. Think of waves and wind and trees and animals and everything creating a symphony of sound that ascends into the heavens. Music makes life special and humans more than any other creatures make music beautiful. God has given us this gift and I believe it is one of His most precious endowments to the natural order.