The more I grow in loving and knowing Jesus, the more I see how utterly dependent I am upon His upholding of my heart. I cannot keep my own heart alive. Every point of progress and each forward movement is marked and undergirded by His tenacity over me – His zeal that I would be fully His. Many seasons, and this one included, I’m leaning into that tenacity. It’s one of those periods that little of my own strength arises to offer itself and I am left painfully and accurately aware that it was never such additions of my own that keep my heart alive anyway. He causes me to remember in these days that He alone upholds my heart, opens my eyes, converts my soul, and furthers my growth in love. I am utterly reliant. A desperate willingness I bring. A refusal to live in less than His fullness, I renew. Yet in the end, He alone blows the fires of these embers and keeps alive the steady burning.
And in these days, like many days in my history, I am leaning into the hope and assurance that that’s just exactly what He is doing and will do. I tremble beyond measure at the thought of future dullness, of subtle sinking into lethargy, of only memories about a heart alive in years past. But this fear has forgotten the backdrop of my every morning – how God has set the sun in the heavens to each day blaze forth like a bridegroom from his chamber, every morning rejoicing as a strong man to run his race (Ps. 19:4,5). Each dawn a telling and a portrait of God Himself in all of His strength and zeal and ardor, rejoicing in the circuit of love’s race, energy everlasting and vigor always young. He never tires of bringing forth love in the human heart – never. He takes a weak ‘yes’ and untiringly cultivates it into the perfect maturity of finest gold. He takes the hunger of a needy soul and ushers it to completion. He takes the open space of a listening heart and plants His Word, as sweet as honey, never to be taken from its possession (Lk. 10:42). My love for Him, my burning heart, was always His gift, always His initiative, always His awakening, always His sustaining power.
Thus, today I fix my eyes on this jealous part of His nature and bring my soul into the rest that comes in beholding His unrelenting tenacity. Even in the in-between days, the months of seeming silence and distance, when my heart pants for Him and yet I cannot feel His nearness, even then He does not withdraw His gaze or His absolute involvement in my movement forward. He is piercingly near even when I have no present discernment of His proximity. Surely, His jealousy keeps me. His tenacious love oversees all my days and undergirds all my nights. And it will be Him, each step of the journey to bring that steady burn into fullest blaze…til that blessed Perfect Day (Prov. 4:18; Phil. 1:6).