My heart hurts tonight. It's knotted in upon itself, clenched tightly in the grip of the One who sends the tears to run coursing down my cheeks, welling from the store of the great love He bestows upon me.
Whoever said love hurts is right.
The tears remain within tonight. They spill out over
the fingers holding my heart, drip out from beneath to run down His arm and
land on the ground, at my feet.
I do not cry for myself alone. These tears are mine,
but they are not of me. No, I am crying tonight for God, for the world,
for all of His children, be they enslaved by sin or enslaved by Christ.
And as I cry, as I hurt, I think about the things that seem
to hurt the most.
"Our Lord Jesus Christ said: Hear O Israel, The Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."
(Book of Common Prayer, ©1962, The General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada, pp. 69,70.)
Love God. Then love your neighbour. The parable
of the Good Samaritan tells us that everyone, even those we hate and those who
hate us, is our neighbour. (Luke 10:25-37) Corinthians and
Galatians teach us that love is to be treasured and shared above all other
gifts of the Spirit. (I Corinthians 13; Galatians 5:22,23) We
are shown throughout the Bible that our God is a god of love.
I make no claim to position of teacher or prophet. What little I know of God I have learned the hard way - by learning on Him and
seeking Him and trying to listen to His voice. When I write as I do now,
it is because something has been laid on my heart, and I need to express it.
When Moses encountered God in the desert, he was commanded
to remove his shoes as a sign of respect. (Exodus 3:5) When
Isaiah saw God and the seraphim in the throne room, he cried out because he
recognized how unworthy he was. He begged to be cleansed, to be made holy
before his Lord! (Isaiah 6:5)
How often do we remember to come before the Lord our
God on our hands and knees, trusting not in the strength of our will or
our deeds to save us from His wrath, but in the love and mercy of
Christ? "We are not worthy So much as to gather up the crumbs under
thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, Whose property is always to have
mercy..." (Book of Common Prayer, ©1962, The General Synod of the
Anglican Church of Canada, p. 83.)
All have sinned and fall short of the glory of
God. (Romans 3:23) If it weren't for Jesus, we'd all be toast. Nothing could save us from the fires of Hell, because we would all be
sin, through and through, and God cannot abide sin.
Somehow we miss the awe and wonder and terror that should be
a part of our relationship with God.
I fear that at times we become complacent, comfortable,
familiar.
God is beyond description. He is beyond understanding,
beyond the capacity of our feeble minds to even come close to grasping just a
tiny piece of what and who God is. He created with one word. (Genesis
1; John 1:1-4) He can destroy with the wave of a hand. (Genesis
19:24,25) It is a privilege to be invited into His presence, to be loved
the way He loves us.
There is something almost ridiculous in the way we come to
God, whining and begging, confident in our own worth and how we deserve this
or that. We 'deserve' nothing. (Exodus 19:5)
Everything we have in this world and the next comes from
Him. It is only through His grace that we have anything of
value.
How do I explain grace?
Grace is God's love for us. We don't deserve it, but
He gives it to us just the same. He gives it to all people, all of
the time.
Mercy is different. Mercy is the result of grace.
Grace sent Christ to the cross; mercy allows us
the certain hope of Heaven. (I Timothy 1:13,14)
Don't get me wrong here; I'm not saying that we're just
supposed to be scared of God, and that's it. No, if we spend
our lives afraid of our Creator, we will miss out on a lot of what He has in
store for us.
But there is a certain amount of respect that His presence
should command, and all too often, we do not show this respect. (Exodus
3:5,6)
We come before God singing our love and praises for who He
is and what He has done, confident that we are clean and pure in His
sight. (Romans 3:20a)
But are we really dressed in those robes of righteousness? (Zechariah 3:1-3; Revelation 7:9) Or have we allowed them to
get dusty with the sin of our world - our sin - and forgotten to
clean ourselves again? We need to come to the cross humbly, in the
knowledge of just how inconsequential and unworthy we really are, crawling on
our knees through the mud... look up through tear-filled eyes at our Lord and
Saviour as He dies - for us, even as the sin is hardening on our
clothes... and bathe in the cleansing power of His blood.
I think we forget that God is three distinct Persons. He is not just the terrible, powerful being of the Old Testament. He is
not just the friendly, frail-yet-strong Man of the Gospels. He is not
just the rushing wind of Acts.
No, God was, is, and shall forever be all three of these.
We do not need to live our lives in fear. God is not
Zeus, sitting in his mountaintop palace, looking for places to throw his
thunderbolts.
Neither should we dare to always treat God as casually as we
treat our friends and family members. Christ is friend, lover,
brother. We can tell Him all, bring our problems and weaknesses to Him,
and rejoice with Him in our triumphs.
And never underestimate the power of the Holy Spirit.
God is not dead, He is not asleep. He still sends
visions and prophecies to His children via the Spirit. He still performs
miracles in the name of His Son. He is a living, acting entity on us and
in our lives. He is not to be worshiped only on Sunday mornings at
church. We should not save our prayers only for when we need things.
No, we should be worshiping and praising an praying every
moment of our lives! (Ephesians 6:18) The Creator of all
that is deserves nothing less.
Jesus said that we are to love all men, no matter their
station or situation, as if they were Christ Himself - because they are Christ. (Matthew
25:31-46)
Jesus loved everyone. He spent all of His time on
earth with the dregs of society - the people nobody wanted to have anything to
do with. He touched sick people, (Mark 1:40-42; Matthew 8:2-4; Luke
17:11-19) talked of God with people who had no idea what or who God really
was, (all the Gospels) and He was a friend to the
friendless. (John 4:1-26)
Above and beyond accepting His friendship, I believe we are
called to share that friendship, that love, with others, with everyone we
come into contact with in a given day.
Sometimes a smile and a wave from a stranger will make
someone's day. The girl you sit beside on the bus may be lonely and in
need of some kind of decent human contact. The loud, rude bully probably
has never had anyone really care about him. And the disruptive drunk
deserves just as much consideration and dignity as anyone else in your life.
When Christians get together, 'church' becomes a social
event. We say we come to worship, but do we really? How many of us
attend events simply to hang out with our friends?
We turn against outsiders who threaten (challenge) our sense
of what is right and good, and we argue with insiders who try to tell us - show
us - where we have strayed from the path set before us.
In all things, love. (I Corinthians 16:14; I
Peter 4:7-11) Acceptance. We are called to love everyone,
to accept everyone. It's a challenge, but God wouldn't ask us
if He thought we couldn't do it. And when it is difficult,
then we have Christ to lean on and the Spirit to give us the words to say and
the actions to show others. (Acts 2:14-41)
I haven't come across a Christian community yet that has
done well with teaching all of these concepts to its members. Cliques
still form, some still feel rejected, and the community is no longer a true
reflection of Christ.
I am an Anglican by denomination, but a Pentecost Christian
by faith. I love the first two chapters of Acts. I long to be
touched by God in that kind of intense, loving way. It hasn't happened
yet, but I feel Him moving in my life from time to time, gifting me as needed.
My heart is hurting again as I write these last words. The tears are there, just below the surface.
They are tears of grief, of sorrow, of longing for the lost. The pain is real - that of a heart broken in two over the waywardness of
the saved.
At the end of Brian Doerksen's album, Father's House,
there is a song called "Father's House Lament." These are the
words he wrote in the liner as a dedication of this song:
"John 2:13-17, Mark 11:15-17... One of my deep passions is for the union of worship and intercession. This song was written in direct response to the gospel accounts of Jesus clearing the temple and Paul Cain's prophetic word. Laments are plentiful in the scriptures, but they scarcely appear in our worship services. Life is hard and the place to express that pain is in the Father's house. This is also a song of repentance. If we could see the prodigals and the children... one by one... waiting... longing for the Father... we would weep... and reach out."
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