Archive for November, 2007

Come to Me

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

Today we sang out of Matthew 11 in our Noon set with Ron Downing’s team—and today Jesus found my heart through this passage. As we came to the words, “Come to Me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest…” I heard His voice all over again and this invitation arrested my heart in a new way. I felt the comprehensive nature of this call—the universal plea of it—for we are all weary and heavy laden if we will be wise enough, and poor enough, to recognize it. When Jesus issued this beckoning, it wasn’t as though to say: “If you happen to get weary, come to Me, and I will help you.” Rather, He was pointing at the innate weariness of the human drama, the intrinsic over-burdened state of mankind’s plight.  He was narrowing His gaze on the inward dilemma known to each one of us and crying out to any who will hear to come and find their answer in Him.  It is the nature of broken humanity—the propensity of our fallenness—to burden ourselves with a thousand things and laden our lives with all the wrong efforts and strivings. If left to itself, the human heart will spin off into an endless cycle of self-propagating and self-sustaining efforts—all tiring attempts to keep my world working and revolving around “me.” Unless purposefully yielded in humility to the great Source of life, we will automatically run the “rat race” and chase after the wind. Knowing this natural proneness of the human heart, Jesus gave the invitation for the weary to come to Him, and He was saying in effect, “By the way…you’re all weary in some dimension…for only in as much as you are wholly and fully drawing every sustaining breath from Me and drinking of my life in every circumstance and every moment, are you truly at rest.” This is why it is the poor in spirit that are blessed. It’s in our poverty that we reach for freedom.  It is wisdom to recognize that we have unnecessarily burdened ourselves and put upon our backs many unnecessary encumbrances—making ourselves weary and heavy laden in the process. If we see this weariness and perceive our poverty therein, we will be prepared and made able to receive the rest that Jesus so lovingly desires to give to us. It is only those who know their spiritual poverty—the poor in spirit—that enter into the blessed state of living we were created for. Today I felt those traces of weariness that I hadn’t even recognized were there. With Jesus’ words so fresh, ringing in my heart, I felt those dry parts of life, even in my present journey as a mom, where I’ve lost touch with the great Fountain and have been seeking unaware to draw strength and life out of my own dry well. I felt those spinnings of the rat race and the weariness therein. His light shined upon these fruitless strivings with empty yielding and in my poverty, I heard His voice. With His voice of many waters He said, “Come to Me” and I recognized my own parched heart and my great need for quenching.   To come to Him in this way—to respond to Him and actually approach Him in my heavy laden state—is not a onetime or even an occasional event. My heart is a constant pull toward wearying propensities. I am continually drawn and drug back to that heavy load of pride, that arduous burden of fighting for myself. I must come every day, and all throughout my day, continually and constantly aware of my spiritual poverty and always and at all times calling upon Jesus to be my Source and my Strength. The meekest Man of all did not consider it too much to lean upon His Father for all things, refusing to do anything a part from Him—even stating His inability to do anything a part from Him (Jn. 5:19). This is our Teacher and our Master, and we are not greater than He (Jn. 13:16). He has given us example that we might live as He lived and walk as He walked. This is where the burden becomes light and the yoke becomes easy. This is where we cease from all the frenzied fight for ourselves and enter into the rest of humility.   

 

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The Unseen

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

I have joined myself to an Ocean, and I cleave to a world unseen. It is not only a joining that we embrace but a free-falling. In our descent, a drawn out cry comes forth as our last request, “Have Your way!” I freefall with arms spread wide, holding nothing for myself and keeping not the slightest grip of ownership upon my life. My life is not my own. I have been bought with a price. And I have willingly surrendered to my position of hiddenness in Him—hidden with Christ in God. When He appears, I too will appear with Him (Col 3:4).
When we leave the places of living before men and begin to live before the Eyes-of-fire alone, we cross over into unknown territory. As we looked at in the process of His awakening, He has brought us to a certain wilderness of transformation. And here in this place we are no longer able to measure our worth by the tangible reality of our success before men. We leave the old measuring sticks at the door, for they are not suited for the ways of God. We depart from the false identity that was based on how respected, known, gifted and influential we were in the eyes of men and leap into the vast unknown realm, the hidden reality, of who we are eternally in God. In this hurdle, we take great risk for we leave every familiar comfort behind us. To abandon the realm of the seen that we might freefall into the unseen is a daring endeavor and only faith anchors our souls. We voluntarily jump off the cliff of our old identity without an absolute clarity of our new one. Though we know who we are in the corporate sense of the redeemed-body-of-Christ, the mysteries that He formed in us individually and the details of who we are personally in the hidden places, are nearly entirely hidden from our understandings.
We are trading in what we have always known and what others have always told us of ourselves for a book of blank pages. We leave all the old voices, however true or false, for the One voice who is temporarily very silent in our experience. He shows us so little of who we are in Him in the beginning because He wants us to experience the “drop off” from the old ways and be willing to plunge into the unseen realm with eyes of faith. We face the pain of the barrenness of our souls. We face the reality of all that we do not yet know of Him when we once thought we knew so much. We spend a season in this dangling-in-between place—no longer identified as we once were, yet still so foreign and distant from who we truly are in Him and our eternal identity. As we dangle, we pray, “Let me be weighed on honest scales, that God may know my integrity” (Job 31:6).
In this season of “dangling,” we slowly and nearly imperceptibly experience a transfer of all of our wealth. Our “gold” and all that we are are moved from what is seen into the hidden realm of the unseen. “Then you will lay your gold in the dust….Yes, the Almighty will be your gold and your precious silver; for then you will have your delight in the Almighty…” (Job 22:24-25).What we cling to is no longer of the essence of what is temporal but what is eternal. We are hidden with Christ until He is revealed and us with Him. We leave the realm of what can be communicated and stake our territory in the temporary silence of eternal reality.
In this place, the cost is the silence. The price is the hiddenness. No one, except those rare few with eyes into eternity can perceive who we are anymore. We cannot communicate except by such feeble words that never do justice to the beauty or the wonder of what He Himself calls us in Him. The pain is the namelessness. Though we are far from nameless in truth, we simply have not heard the very real name He has given to us and that we will possess for all eternity. This is the cost and, oh, how worth it is the sacrifice. It is this struggle that brings forth strength within us in time. We place all of our riches and all of our inheritance in the realm beyond. We wish we could reach it, but we cannot. It is hidden. It is behind a veil. Yet it is there. And we begin to know by the testimony of the Spirit within us that we own a very real and genuine reality in that place outside of the seen.  

 

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