- Pride = blindspots. When you are proud you can’t see what is real.
- thing that are cheap and fast are nearly always meaningless
- my strength can accomplish 0% of the will of God
- my failures have no bearing on my identity
- I can’t earn anything from God ever
- love never fails but is always very costly
- sincerity is incredibly valuable and purchased with blood sweat and tears
- when i begin to feel wise that is evidence i am beginning to become deceived
more later
I was seeking the Lord as to why we as the people of God have such a hard time truely turning from our ways and throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into the heart of God for our lives.
I know people who have followed the prophetic movement for many more years than I. Some of them know some of the major leaders in the prophetic movement before they were ever famous and had large ministries. The romance of the office of the prophet doesn’t affect them. They know they are just messed up errant people just like anyone else. This is good to a degree.
But think of Jesus and John the Baptist? In Matthew 11 Jesus makes the statement “Blessed is he who is not offended because of Me”…He then goes on to give an indictment against that generation as one that was unresponsive, one that called John the baptist demonized, and called Jesus a drunken sinful fool.
The issues with making judgments about Jesus and John the Baptist has less to do with finding fault with them and more about NOT UNDERSTANDING them. We are naturally disrupted by that which we do not understand, we are provoked in our flesh to make judgments about that which we do not understand.
To bring this full circle, we may have had a history of seeing the weakness of true prophetic leaders in the body of Christ, but if we let judgments take root in our hearts, it will dull our hearts from the word of the Lord coming to them.
A generation with a critical spirit will be HARDENED by the prophetic word of the Lord. They see the gulf between where they are and where the prophet is calling them, and because they don’t understand the heart of the Lord, they are pressed to make judgments in their hearts towards the prophets, thus allowing them to be unresponsive. It’s a way of exalting ourselves above the knowledge of God.
bunny trail – one of the main ministries of Paul was commending himself unto the conscience of men as to not hinder them from receiving the message because of this propensity latent in the human heart to cut people down in our minds when confronted with the burden of the prophetic word of the Lord.
While my heart is to contend for Jeremiah 23:22, one who stands in the counsel of the Lord and hears his word that people may turn…I am feeling the weight of this reality, that if the hearts of men are drawn to cut themselves off from the word by seeing weaknesses in my life, I would only serve to harden their hearts.
It really puts discipleship in context to proclaiming the word of God. But at the end of the day I cannot be held responsible to the conditions of the hearts of men ultimately, they called the spotless lamb a drunken sinner and the “greatest man born of a woman” a demonized maniac.
So here we find a tension. The people of God need a word to emerge that would turn their hearts. They need a vessel that would commend itself to their conscience, but they also need that root of pride to be unresponsive to the word of the Lord to be uprooted.
Lord grant to your people wisdom in Jesus name…
“Longing is the compass on the journey” – Dana Candler
God creates longings.
God awakens longings.
God sustains longings.
God ANSWERS LONGINGS!
Psalm 42:7 AMP “[Roaring] deep calls to [Roaring] deep at the thunder of Your waterspouts; all Your breakers and Your rolling waves have gone over me.“
God delays the answer of the longing in order to cultivate the heart to receive the desire he placed in it. The deep ache comes with deep power. The two most influential influences on the human heart are pain and beauty. The beautiful God imparts transcendent longings upon the human heart. This wonderful and awful pain shapes the heart and increases the capacity for fulfillment.
- In the Garden, Adam named all the creatures, cultivating the ache which God answered with Eve
- God promised the Seed, the one who would crush the serpents head, in the garden of Eden. Jesus Christ was born, the minister of the new covenant, thousands of years later. To this day we are 2000 years into longing for Him to return.
…and there comes the revelation. God is love, and love is patient. You are never more alive when you are aching with longing. To be patient is to suffer long, which in it’s truest sense is the very definition of longing. We experience this truth daily in the form of hunger, you long for food and it’s answered when you eat a meal. What you will discover though, is that if you skip a few meals, all the sudden food tastes alot better!!! Go for a jog in the sweltering heat, and come home and chug an ice cold glass of water! Wow, what an experience, but the ache of the hunger and thirst is what made the possiblity of pleasure.
We as a generation have been deceived that instant gratification is the answer to our longings, and it is only producing dullness, boredom, and emptyness within our beings. The slightest discomfort sends us running to media, relationships, food, entertainment, anything to answer the cry of our hearts. Even in the church, we see epidemic of spiritual dullness and we are FULL of all the secondary forms of satisfaction. But Jesus addressed this in John 4, lets take a look at it.
The chapter starts out with the disciples going off to town to get food (seeking the answer 
to their hunger) and Jesus was tired and sat down by Jacob’s well. A Samaritan woman is at the well and Jesus asks her for a drink (brings up the subject of thirst). She asks why a Jew would ask a Samaritian for a drink. Jesus answers and says ‘If you had only known and recognized God’s gift (answer to her longing), and who it was your talking to, you would have asked me for a drink and I would have given you Living Water.’ Jesus also explains to her that if she drinks from this well she will thirst again, but if she drinks Living Water, she will NEVER be thirsty again, but the water will become a spring of water flowing continually unto eternal life. He goes on to give her a word of knoweldge (awakening fascination, and kindly leading her to repentance), tells her the Father is seeking worshippers in spirit and truth, and tells her He is the messiah. She leaves her water jar and runs off to town. Then the disciples show up and try to get Jesus to eat. He tells them his food (nourishment) is to the will (pleasure) of the Father.
A couple points to consider in this passage:
- Like the disciples, our natural response to longing is to seek a quick answer apart from Jesus. (not saying the disciples getting food was wrong necessarily)
- We do not recognize Jesus as the answer to our longings.
- Jesus invites us to ask Him for a drink, that we will never thirst again. We likely have prayed this and felt nothing. We likely stand before him as this woman did not even realizing who in the world Jesus is!? As we mentioned before, it’s the delay in time, the patience and long suffering of love that we experience when we come before Him and ask Him for more. The pain when we read His word and pray and sing to Him but feel nothing. You are coming smack dab into contact with your own cold, dull, unmoved heart. STAY THE COURSE. Do not give up, do not give into instant gratification, keep pressing in till it hurts. Till you can’t stand it anymore! When you can’t take it anymore, start fasting! Become more hungry. Allow your heart to begin to truly tear, and allow yourself to be brought to tears because of the lack of His presence in your life. When you keep pressing in, you are making a place for Him! You are cultivating a capacity to receive and experience transcendent love like you have never known. Don’t wait for the power of God to give and serve and love and seek Him out, if you do you lost the point!
- If you look closely, the conversation has little to do with water and more to do with the thirst of the spirit. Jacob’s well is representative of the Jewish history and faith. There was a momentary answer to the cry of the heart in the Jewish religion, one God provided through His promises, but one that was incomplete. Judaism was never intended to be an end in itself, but actually something meant to create a longing God fully intended on satisfying in Messiah. It was designed by God to cultivate longing, but provided no sustaining answer, the peoples relation to God was distant and required maintenance through the sacrificial system. Imagine how powerful it is that the promised Messiah, the wondrous one who would shed His own blood for this woman, was standing right in front of this woman!? She is actually thirsting for Him, His love. The truth is you don’t have to imagine it, by the Holy Spirit, God has never been nearer! He is yearning to be a fire inside of you, to be the great ache inside of you because He desires to answer that pain with deeper revelations of the love of Jesus upon your heart!
- I believe “never thirst again” does not speak to us never drinking water again. I also don’t think it means that our spiritual desires are just always answered. I believe what Jesus is speaking of is the Holy Spirit, the very capacity within us to experience nearness to God without the guilt or shame of our sin because of the blood of Jesus. We will never be dominated by our flesh nature’s drive to seek instant gratification to answer our true longing apart from God.
- The Father is SEEKING worshipers! Is that not amazing?! Does that provoke wonder in your heart? Jesus was seeking to bring her into relationship with a God that is pursuing her, and desiring her worship! This is a critical revelation your soul is yearning for whether you are aware of it as you read this or not!
- Jesus opens up to the disciples a whole new realm of true hunger and the true answer. Jesus found sustainance and nourishment by seeking to answer the FATHERS longings! To fulfill the Father’s pleasure?! When is the last time you got home from a rough day of work and recognized that you would find more satisfaction and nourishment in seeking to bring pleasure to the Father then by eating dinner? This isn’t romantic language! Jesus actually said this, not to set Himself in a league of His own, but to INVITE US INTO IT!
I am writing this because I am coming off a profound week of encountering the Love of God, experiencing profound breakthrough in the Spirit and in my heart, and seeing worship arise in my heart. The truth is…I am experiencing a profound ache in my soul, and emptyness in my heart. I am longing to fill it with ANYTHING. I want to surf facebook, try to connect with someone, play a video game, make music, anything to distract myself. Anything to rot my brain! I am longing and all the Word and worship is doing is awakening my heart to it’s barrenness and it’s painful. Typing this out maybe gave me some instant gratification, but it served as a reminder.
The pain is good.
The ache is there for a reason.
God is faithful always.
He will answer the longings of my heart.
…..in due time.
with love,
Rob
It’s been a long time since I have blogged. I have been trekking through the wilderness of life, learning love, faith, obedience, on my way to becoming a man. I am discovering this faithful God who stays the same through all life’s seasons as they wax and wane.
Humiliated. Yes, humiliated. That is where God has brought me in His wonderful, gentle grace. You see I was so firey and filled with energy that I thought my heart was alive before the Lord. The reality was, I was filled with energy and zeal which was more of a testimony that I am an energetic person than of a true living desire to pursue the Lord of Glory. I seriously thought it was below me to become stale, backslidden, and off track. I thought it was below me to burn out. It happened. I was burnt. Toasted.
Pressures from relationships and jobs + tough times financially + failures in ministry + Lack of disciplined/focused pursuit of God = BURNOUT
So here I am not far off that base, still striving in myself to make something happen that I can’t make happen in my own strength. I am in desperate need. That will never change. I completely dependant on mercy to survive. I cannot create a life independant from it. It is not easy to throw all your eggs in the God basket and bank on Him to bring it forth. It’s painful to be that vulnerable, just waiting, yearning, broken with no hope but that he come and visit you with His love. I am longing for Him to move my heart from it’s current place of dormancy.
This just doesn’t fall on you. You don’t just wake up one day filled with desire for Jesus and tenderness and a meek heart. God is so gracious but gives us a dynamic role in bringing this forth. It’s called FREE WILL. It’s simple and it’s for anyone who wants it.
Choose God.
In your next decision.
With your time.
With your money.
With your words.
When you are alone.
With your thoughts.
With your actions.
In every season.
In every moment.
WITH————–FOCUS.
Love is focused. Love is not asleep. Love REMEMBERS. Love is not bound. Love has joy. Love is not afraid. Love is ALWAYS relevant. Love is not a popular way. Love is in great demand. Love isn’t fickle. Love is paying attention. Love is not later, love is NOW. Love is redeeming. Love is not controlling. Love has secret. Love shares openly. Love is consuming. Love is not a consumer. Love stores up treasures. Love throws away garbage. Love is wise. Love is powerful. Love is resilient.
So it is in this context I am seeking to be fully yielded to God, with all the pain and glory that comes with it. I am seeking to focus in on what is real. (?!) I desire to use this free will in a focused way to put myself before the Lord in a serious way. I desire to set my life to seek Him out for the rest of my days. There are trials to be endures, and glory to be revealed.
Lord I ask for a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of your will. Lord that you might set my feet on a rock! Lord have your delight in me! Oh, that I might be a resting place. Lord equip me by your spirit to focus deeply upon you. In Jesus name.
“…no record of any serious scholar doubting the Isaianic authorship…”
Did you catch that? Now I love using unnecessarily complicated words to describe simple things sometimes, I just think it’s fun to use grandiose language sometimes, but this could be a pitfall from me. Had I not caught how rediculous that quote was, you likely would find me spouting it off out of context to a group of people who have no idea what I am talking about, and feeling really cool.
“…We know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge puffs up, but love edifies.”
1 Corinthians 8:1-3
I definately in this season of my life want to be watchful as to what I am filling my mind with, and what I am doing with my heart. Knowing what “Isaianic authorship” means is of no eternal value, especially if my heart has not been deeply moved–deeply acquainted with the King of glory high and lifted up, the suffering servant, or the judge who crushes the nations in the winepress; each revelations which Isaiah himself saw. Oh that I with eyes of purity and simplicity of mind would peer myself into the mystery of all mysterys! Oh that God would grant to me the coal to place upon my lips! Oh that I might refrain from blabbering on about “Isaianic authorship” but with clarity and authority that I might speak the mysteries of God with clarity and power because my heart has been struck by the raging, untamable ocean of the glory of God. Oh that a man with a history of communing with Christ, fellowshiping in the glory of transcendant love, would be able to open his mouth and unfold the marvelous scandal of Christ the son of the living God born of the virgin, who preached the coming kingdom and rose to glory by plunging the depths of humility being willingly crushed by men just like us who hated God and all Gods ways, and took the most valuable posession in all the cosmos, the Son, and gave him over mercilously to the death of a trator and a blasphemer, ripped to shreds beyond even recognition as a human, and nailed him to what turned into the most glorious altar of worship before God, the shame he bore becoming His own throne when God gave all power and dominion over to the lamb who he gladly raised from the dead and lifted up high above all principality and power and ruler of this age and all the ages to come, who is soon returning as a lion to judge the nations of the earth and prepare all for wholly subjection to perfect love in the coming of the Father to planet earth. Or is that too many words?
Either way, you won’t have to dispute the Robianic authorship of this blog post!
I find myself satisfied with religion. With going to meetings and praying for people and reading the Bible with no real expectation. I am doing the God 2-step and I am sure he is cool with it so I am. The problem is there is no encounter in it. Prayer is a one-way monologue, reading the word is boring, and in the end its all a game.
But then I hear his voice….he speaks and I am ruined for all else. I realize now, I have been striving for what is freely given. I want to be done with the games. I want to hear His voice! I want to know His presence because I am actually living for Him alone. I have a heavenly Father. There is nothing else for me.
I will be especially candid in openly admitting that these past few months of my life have been some of the more wayward in my Christian walk, at least in my opinion. I have learned my discernment, though, is pretty off most the time considering I base my judgments on temporary circumstances, fleeting emotions, and corrupt understanding of the knowledge of God’s leadership in my life. So I am elated to surrender my ability to produce reasons for why my life and the peoples lives around me are the way that they are. The temptation to do so is the same thing as being tempted to carry a backpack full of lead around for a couple hours for no apparent reason.
Psalm 37:8
Cease from anger, and forsake wrath;Do not fret—it only causes harm.
None of that probably made any sense to anyone except me…but that said, I will move on to the point I originally posted this for. I am sick of my fatalistic human thinking about everything!!! Every morning I wake up in this particularly difficult season of my life, I am tempted to believe that I am going to live a crappy boring life that is going nowhere with no hope of breakthrough and no desire or energy to seek God for breakthrough let alone just to know Him because He is worthy of being known. I am not kidding, EVERYTHING IN ME IS TELLING ME THIS, EVERYDAY! Every now and then I read the word a bit, pray a bit, and receive a bit of encouragement or circumstantial blessing. It generally manifests in a shallow hopeful feeling emotion that is gone as quickly as it came. Things get a little better and I am only reminded that it actually was actually 10 times worse than I originally thought.
The truth is that I chose this path! I made mistakes and claimed God approved them, I compromised many areas of my life little by little, I let sharp convictions in my spirit grow weak and dull. In the end I got bored and regressed into past sinful cycles. My life looks much like it did as an infant Christian (although I shouldnt be tempted to think of my spirituality as anything to begin with). What started this was a gradual unfolding of my depravity. I did not respond properly when the Lord showed me how deeply fallen that I truely am. What was I sapposed to do when my spirituality progressed from innocent genuine devotion to manipulative props I used to comfort myself in my unresponsiveness to the progression of maturity in my life? I was shattered and left bankrupt deep inside while trying to juggle an unfulfilling job, painfully difficult relationship with my fiance, friendships that were eroding, financial struggles, and a ministry that was and is going nowhere near the original vision of my heart.
I mean I am just crushed as a person. What got me here is that I truely am in desperate need for reality in my life in discipleship. I didn’t necessarily need more divine encounter or mystical contempletive experiences, I needed substance in my life. I needed to mow the lawn and balance my checkbook and learn to serve a woman and friends and to REALLY love others with my actions. If anything is evident in this midst of all this, more than my weak frame, is my lack of faith in the goodness of God. It just struck me today one of my greatest hinderances in moving forward is my lack of openness to receive the love and grace of God in the most humiliating parts of my life, like cleaning the bathroom. It’s just a root of pride and false thinking patterns about a God who is in Bible study but not in my boring monotonous job. My fiance doesn’t necessarily enjoy these towering fortresses of sloth, and wicked doublemindedness in my heart, so I can’t draw strength from her. I am sapposed to be leading her into the wonder and enjoyment of this God who enjoys to serve us in the places we are most humiliated. I heard a quote once:
God serves us in such a way that it is like everyday we pee the bed and all over ourselves. And each time we do that God comes and changes our sheets and washes us and puts new clothes on us with a joyful servant spirit just enjoying us through it all. If you have ever potty trained a child you know the shame that comes with wetting the bed, but all the while His love covers our shame, and he cleans us up… (Allen Hood-paraphrased)
At this point I am convinced that nothing can cause me to move forward apart from a supernatural working of His grace–and I want to fully cooperate with it. There is no other place to be than abandon, and when we find ourselves attached to things we can either let go or go through the tearing process. and its painful, but it’s His gentleness. True freedom is not being controlled by nothing, but being abandon to the will of God.
So that brings me to the title of this entry. Facing that wall I wake up to everyday–[life is boring mundane painfully horrible and it's going to stay that way with no energy to seek or know God or do anything to please Him] Today I decided that I can’t live under that anymore. I have to look higher than that. So I began to praise God for His goodness and thank Him for blessing and breakthrough and that there IS good things for me. I began to look past everything infront of me into something beyond it that I can’t see or feel at all but I began to declare that God is good and He loves me and when he begins to bring me into that place of receiving His love that it will ruin me! I can no longer live in fear, there has to be something more. And though I don’t feel it I declare: God is good and He has great things for me and he loves to serve me and He will bring forth His promises and what He has done in the cross is so scandalous so incomprehensible that I cannot just continue like I am but I must be so captured in His mercy and grace that I am forever LOST! I have no where else to go and no other hope. He is for real when He said he would never leave me and I will be among wisdoms children. I will be vindicated. I repent and I turn from this corpse and through faith I inheret the nature of Christ. It will be manifest in my life because He loves to glorify himself through weak broken people just like me.
Amen! Hallelujah!
I have not posted on here in a while, so I figure I can include a short life-update:
Around late august I left the FSM program and moved to the St. Louis metro area. Shortly thereafter, I was engaged! My fiance and I began a small young adult group called ACTS 2, where we are seeking to cultivate community.
Since about November of 2007, I realized I was coming into one of the most challenging seasons of my life. Everything seemed desert and wilderness with only short oasis’s in my spiritual life. I still to this day am yearning for my roots to reach that place where I can receive the rich sustainance that Christ has provided for me. I don’t fully understand it all the time but I tell you this I am being re-made as a man. I once heard lou engle say “There are no shortcuts in discipleship”
So here I am on this desert road seeking after this thing called transcendant love which leads to eternal life. If you see my beloved tell Him I am lovesick.
-Rob
The foundation of union (in christ) is essential. Otherwise disciplines are trying to earn our way into something we cannot buy.
We mistakenly are waiting for the experience to confirm the truth of our union, when it is the truth of our union that actually prepares us for the experence of communion.
Do you believe this is true? Really? Do you really really believe it?
I am banking on somehow this will be so real to me, that I posess this. That I live this. That this is me in the flesh. My flesh finds so much comfort in fear and shame, but why bother? I don’t have time to be afraid or to live in shame! Jesus Christ is really God in the flesh, he really hung on that cross, he really washed the disciples feet. It’s really YHWH!
If this is real, then love then must be real. My wounds aren’t just being stirred for no reason he is really healing me. My zeal to run and lose all for love is consuming me. The fire that burns isn’t such a charismatic hand clap and dance type thing, but its real tears…it’s real lives, it’s real faces. My little love really matters, my response is genuine. It’s real. My love stirs his jealousy. Yes. He is jealous for me. He is coming for me. My prayers will never be in vain, he hears me. He really loves me. This is an honor that I could partake in this. In His infinate wisdom, God created this context, this existance, this backdrop to unravel my story. My heart is bursting all over this canvas and splashes of new and bright colors are spilling out. I am really dancing, in fury, but in awe. I tremble as I offer the sacrifice of the fruit of my lips “MY GOD IS HOLY”
Soul, be reminded of these moments when things are hard.
