Until the Day Breaks

My Father is the kindest One…always kinder than I had imagined… always surprising me by levels of gentleness unexpected, levels of tenderness unanticipated. So often I imagine that I am twisting His arm in my asking for a greater revelation of His heart. Yet as the years unfold, time after time, when light breaks in upon my heart and my eyes behold yet more of who He is, I find the opposite to be true. It is not me twisting His arm, but rather, Him continuously seeking to convince me. The culprit of many a delay in my journey in God is not God’s stingy withholding but my stubborn resisting. I refuse to believe and I hang on to my false ideas of Him…while He patiently chips away at my clenched fists of false ideas about His heart.

Right now IHOP is in a corporate 40 Day fast with the cry of “Show me Your glory” in our hearts. And thus far, if I had to highlight what it is that He is re-writing within my heart, it is the very things that He spoke to Moses on the mountain so long ago—that He is gracious, compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love (Ex. 33). When Moses cried, “show me Your glory,” this was the goodness of the Lord that passed before him and oh how slow is the human heart to receive it.

I do not want to doubt these truths about the Lord in the deepest places of my heart, imagining disappointment when there is none to be found or ever so subtly accepting accusations that God is somehow stingy with His abundance and His free Self-giving. His eyes of gentle love pierce through my soul and beseech me to stop my spinning round and round and to be conquered by a love that is unutterable in its heights of kindness. Will I go on imagining Him to be withholding His heart from me, when in truth, it is ever open to me as one hidden wholly in the beloved Son? Oh that I would not be guilty of saying the words about God’s enjoyment over me, yet somewhere, deep within still resisting these truths about His heart. Yes, it is the goodness of the Lord that we are slowest to receive.

I do not want to be a skeptic of God’s love in even the remotest sense. I would rather be a FOOL for love, spinning wildly and childishly through my days with every kind of presumption of just how grandiose His enjoyment, just how extravagant His delight in me, than to stand on the side lines with arms folded, waiting for the “real” rendition of His love, the “actual” account of the story. The skeptic thinks himself to be smarter than the foolish masses, a notch more in touch with reality than the childish crowds that simply believe the farfetched fairy tales. Yet at the close of this grand story—that story which is God’s story from the beginning of time—it is the fools for love who will be deemed most wise. It will not be the skeptics who got nearest to the truth but the fools—those who believed in the most ridiculous and radical heights of God’s love. These will be those most “accurate” to the actual truth of the magnitude of His kindness—and even their wildest presumptions will not come near to the actual excessiveness of Jesus’ love. Yes, I’d rather be a fool than a skeptic.

As a child does not argue with his father or mother when they lay their hearts bare in a love indescribable, God invites us to receive HIs incomprehensible love. Oh that we would be fools for love. Instead of second guessing, that we would rush in with arms outspread…with speed and diligence that no cynic would employ…that we would know and believe the Love He has for us. Wisdom in this age is not to be modest in faith, hope and love, but to be excessive and unhindered. May we be counted with the fools that believe beyond what is perceivable, that reach past what is tangible and visible to the unknown regions of the incomprehensible love of God.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength. Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: “Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.” (I Cor 1)

Yesterday we sang through Song of Solomon 1 on Grace Kim’s Worship with the Word set. As we ascribed to the Lord His worth, so much better than wine or any other earthly pleasure, as we testified of having tasted and seen that He is good, I again became convinced of the potency of Jesus’ love upon the human heart–more powerful than any other pleasure, satisfaction or reward.

I have tasted…I have seen…the Lord is good. His love is better than wine (Ps. 34:8, S.S. 1:2). And this right here is the power of His love. I’ve only ever had but a taste. I’ve tasted of Him so little…barely witnessing His delights, His beauty and His satisfactions. And yet, one taste has ruined me, has wounded me, for life. The world and all of its trinket-pleasures, all of its stifling satisfactions require great excess and overloading to touch the human person, while at the same time, having extracted all possible pleasure, one is left still painfully unsatisfied and greatly disillusioned from these empty and broken cisterns. But Jesus—how opposite is true of Him. One taste and one is wounded with love, one touch and one is ruined for anything less. So potent is His love, so piercing is His touch that one slightest experience of Him is enough to leave me in the wilderness all of my days, refusing the comforts of this world and reaching with arms outstretched toward the eternal pleasures found only in Him. This is why John of the Cross cried out, “Why, since you wounded this heart, don’t you heal it? And why, since you stole it from me, do you leave it so, and fail to carry off what you have stolen?”

Well have the saints of history called this divine tasting a wound of love. For this painful burning, incessant and incurable will not leave my heart alone, will not allow me to return to the old chasings. Only one wound of love from the God of love is needed to keep my heart pining for years on end. I am left as a pilgrim just as the Lord planned, wandering as a stranger in this life, just as He so desired. O painful and precious wound that leaves me all alone except for when I am with the One in whom my soul loves.