My wife, Kathryn (who is even more beautiful on the inside),
recently decided that she wants to lose some weight. She has a vision
of what she wants to look like and how she wants to feel after losing a certain
amount, and everyday she allocates (disciplines) her eating and exercising
resources to accomplish her goal. She has a desire to look and feel a certain
way and to generally be in a state of better health, and she is well on her way
to experiencing her vision!
It is a fact that we all live life like this. We give ourselves – our energies, our
passions, our time, our money, our creativity, our passion – to those things of
which or people for whom we have a vision;
a vision so compelling that we are willing to sacrifice to accomplish it or
experience it.
As I wrote in my post of March 17, in March of 2016 I had
the desire – a vision – of having a
24/7 conversational relationship with God.
I wanted to be able to hear and
recognize His voice every waking moment of every day. I wanted to experience that. Just having
that desire was itself a gift from God.
Like Kathryn, this vision (desire) was so compelling I was willing to
allocate the resources to realize the fulfillment of my desire. So in the first week of March 2016, I began
to do just that.
A conversational relationship with anyone means you’ve got
to spend time talking and listening
with that someone, and that includes getting to know them better (or more
intimately). I recognize Kathryn’s voice
because I happily get to spend so much time with her. In fact, I love to hear her voice. And that is especially true of a
conversational relationship with God. If
I was going to have that kind of relationship with God, I was going to need to
spend a lot more time listening for
Him and to Him, and I was going to need to know Him much more intimately. And that meant that I was going to have to
dedicate the time to listening and
knowing.
I’m a morning person.
I’m much more productive, creative and effective in the morning than at anytime
of the day. The morning is the best part
of my day. So I dedicated the first part
of everyday to investing time in getting to know God and fellowship with Him much
more intimately.
If you’ll look back over what I’ve written so far, you will
notice a lot of “I’s” and “my’s.” But
that’s not how any of this has happened.
Just like God gave me the desire
to have a conversational relationship with Him, He enabled me to act – to commit resources (initially primarily time)
– to developing that relationship. This is all His work in me. I’m just getting the exciting thrill of
getting to cooperate with Him in that
work.
My commitment was very simple. I would give Him the start of every day, and
I would trust Him to develop that time as He desired to work in me.
For most of the mornings of the last 40+ years, I’ve read
five chapters in the book of Psalms and one in the book of Proverbs using “the
day of the month” regimen. For instance,
on the fifth day of each month, I read Psalm 5, 35, 65, 95, and 125 and Proverbs
5. So every month I read through the
books of Psalms and Proverbs. The Psalms
are inspirational and help me worship, and the Proverbs are enormously valuable
for practical daily living.
I kept that regimen as part of my commitment but I knew I needed
to know Jesus much better than I did, so I added a study of the four Gospels
(Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) to my morning study. And I initially added three more elements to
my mornings: more time to just be quiet and listen to God, more time for intercessory
prayer, and more time for memorization of passages
of Scripture. And I made a commitment to
not “hurry.” I think I’ve been in a hurry for most of my life, so this was a
big commitment for me. I didn’t realize
at the time how very significant this commitment would be to my going forward.
These mornings with God have been like drinking from a fire
hydrant. The Third Person of the
Trinity, the Holy Spirit, began opening my understanding and the Scriptures in
dimensions I had never known. And on
many of these mornings, I have been just overwhelmed. I don’t know how else to describe it.
Wonderful verses I’m certain I’ve read hundreds of times
before sometimes seemed to suddenly appear in my Bible, like this beautiful
verse in Psalm 68:19, “Blessed be the Lord, who daily loads us with benefits,
even the God of our salvation.” He loads
me with His benefits – daily!
And I began to understand and experience David’s longing for
God when he wrote, “As the hart pants after the water brooks, so pants my soul
after thee, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God: when shall I
come and appear before God?” (Psalm
42:1-2). “My heart and my flesh cry out
for the living God” (Psalm 84:2). And
O God, you are my God;
I will seek you diligently.
My soul thirsts for you; my flesh
longs for you
as in a dry and weary land
without water.
(Psalm 63:1)
But reading through
the Gospels was a different story. I was
shocked at how often this Bible college graduate and former seminarian simply
did not understand what Jesus said! In
fact, as I write these words I’ve been working my way through the Gospels for
the past 13 months, and I’m only now about half way through Luke’s gospel. And I haven’t even begun this iteration of my
study of the Gospel according to John.
I needed help. And I also needed help to understand a lot
more about how to pray effectively. God
provided the help I needed. But that help
also put me on the path to discovering that God had something more in mind than
only a conversational relationship (more about that in future posts).
Not every morning has been “glorious.” There have been times when the Holy Spirit
has put me on the operating table and opened up my heart to let me see
disgusting, filthy, repulsive trash and junk in my flesh that needed to be
removed. It made me so sick and sad – so
much that I wanted it gone – a
necessary precursor to the transformation God wants to accomplish in me.
I mentioned the importance of my commitment to not
hurry. These morning times with God have
grown in breath, depth and delight – most often now taking all of the morning,
but sometimes spilling over into the afternoon, and evening, and the next
day. These “expansions” have been effortless. On some mornings my plan may have included
reading a certain chapter in a book in the New Testament. But the Holy Spirit would carry me along
through the rest of the book and on into the next and the next. He at once gave me a hunger for the Word and
opened it to me as I followed Him. I’m
convinced this happened in large part because I was willing not to hurry.
“To bring the mind to dwell intelligently upon God as he is
presented in his Word will have the effect of causing us to love God
passionately, and this love will in turn bring us to think of God steadily. Thus he will always be before our minds,”
wrote Dallas Willard.[1]
And – oh yes – that conversational relationship? I’m recognizing God’s voice. It is quiet and gentle. And loving.
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