I share this with all of you; because I just like everyone else struggle intensely with my formed habits of self-reliance and self sufficiency. I also share with some of you that over the last month, our Father has led me back into the wilderness. The wilderness is a place of great pain and sorrow, because there in that quiet place apart from all the noise and business of life, both God and our own hearts begin to speak loud and clearly to us once again. But it is also a place of great joy and comfort, because God in the wilderness manifests Himself to our hearts in a way that He does not when we are engaged in the business of every day life and the stuff of religion. In this place I have once again discovered that God is not so much interested in what we can do for Him. What He wants the most is that we seek Him out and everyday give Him our hearts. This is so hard for us to do, because there is a conspiracy against us. That conspiracy is such that in the things that this world throws at us, we lose our own hearts. After a time we begin to define ourselves not by what our hearts are screaming for us to see, acknowledge and live out before the world, but by what we do, the jobs we work, the roles we play in society at large. Everything that is acceptable to God must flow out of honesty about how much we need Him and how much we need Him to continue to do heart surgery on each and every one of us. The scriptures tell us that man looks upon that which is external, but God looks into the heart to see what the motives are. Do we do what we do as Christians because we love Him and see that in the end He is the only hope that any of us have of passing though this life and all of its garbage and storms with some assurance of peace? Or do we do what we do out of a sense of doing something to get something?
The nations around the Israelites worshipped what we call “Household God’s”. One placated the household god’s by various means in order to obtain something from them - whether it be good crops, healthy children, or defense from their enemies. You see, they were doing something, to get something. If we make our approach to Jehovah in this way, we are treating Him as just another household god. This, scripture says repulses Him, breaks His heart and He wills always reject it.
These people draw near to Me with their mouth, And honor Me with their lips, But their heart is far from Me. (Matthew 15:8)You see, we don’t have to placate Him, we don’t have to win His approval. That is already a done deal because of what Christ has done for us. In the realization of this truth comes the freedom and understanding to love Him for who He is and what great lengths He has gone to bring us into His family. In short what He’s looking for and what He wants is our Hearts. The funny thing is, that at one time, we all started this way, we were in it to be close to Him, to get to know Him. Yet the years go by and life assaults our lives and our hearts. Without our perception, we move over the course of time from seeking the relationship above all else to seeking what the relationship brings with it. Imagine the pain of being in a marriage where you know the only reason the person that you are married to is still there not because they desire to know and engage your heart, to be intimate with you, but because of the security they will lose if they do what their heart wants them to do and that is leave? Only by putting ourselves for a moment in this horrible scenario can we even begin to feel how our religion hurts the heart of God. And yet, in spite of the pain, in spite of our infidelity,(I say infidelity because it is a rare occasion when the heart of a husband or wife disengages from the heart of his or her spouse that they have not made the decision to bind their hearts with another),God does not give up, broken hearted and walks away from the relationship! He’s always there; He’s always wooing us back to the place and the time when the love between us and Him was fresh, new and passionate.
I have in my life found that wooing to be best described as a feeling I can best describe as a haunting that goes deep down into my soul and is a dull ache that screams that all is not well. That haunting is usually followed by a crisis experience by which God drives me into the wilderness. In the wilderness, I am haunted by past experiences that are brought to memory, too late realizing the preciousness of those moments gone forever, the walks with my children up the road where we live, the days when we as a family would go to a local pond. The nights sitting around a campfire at our home with all the young people of our church many who are no longer with us. Why is it that we never realize how precious those moments are until many years later when they are gone forever? In that longing for those precious moments that we wish we could revisit just one more time, we come face to face with the reality that this can never be. At that precise moment, that feeling, that haunting is God and our hearts calling us back to Himself calling us back to what is really important, calling us to remember and keep in mind that the future holds for us an eternity without end of precious moments. God gives us small tastes of the joy that is before us. I remember back to the time when I first asked my wife to marry me and she said yes. The time when I looked upon my son for the first time after he was born, or the time that we finalized my adoption of my eldest son , the first night at home with our new daughter. Your particular memories are probably different, that does not matter. What matters is the remembering of the joy in those moments. This is what lies ahead of us. In spite of our unfaithfulness to our Father, these days still lie ahead of us. And so daily I can’t help but give my heart to Him. How could I do otherwise? For all these years He has not dealt with me according to my sin. Time and time again He woos me back to remember what my heart is and that it is so easy to not only be unfaithful to Him, but to be unfaithful to the new heart He has placed with in me. When Jesus called out to the Christians at Ephesus, He commended them for their religious deeds, yet we can read in His words His heartbreak because they somehow came to believe that those deeds could take the place of what He really wanted, their hearts. “You have left your first love.” This is what I think He was talking about. This is what I think the wilderness experience is about and why it is so important for all of us.
These words that I have written to you were not planned as I sat to write, I just knew that I needed to share something . I guess this is what it was supposed to be. I don’t know if any of this makes any sense to you who will read it. But it makes perfect sense to me. And it has come straight from the depths of my heart. The heart that I never want to forget belongs to Him who has given me life and joy inexpressible!
So, affectionately longing for you, we were well pleased to impart to you not only the gospel of God, but also our own lives, because you had become dear to us. (Me)
(1 Thessalonians 2:8)