In the
story of how Russell and I got together, there’s a funny moment – a Freudian
slip on my part – that gave him the extra push of courage he needed to initiate
the conversation that dissolved our friend zone and made me his
girlfriend. I mentioned that I talk in
my sleep and he said he did too. I began
to say, “Oh, we’re…” and then rapidly changed what I was about to say, which
would have been “We’re going to have conversations in our sleep together,”
totally giving away the kind of thoughts I couldn’t help having occasionally,
since I’d been attracted to him for months.
Since
Russell and I have gotten married, we haven’t actually had conversations in our
sleep together, but we’ve caught each other talking in our sleep – mostly me – and
definitely noticed differences in how long we sleep. Although I’m smaller than he is, I actually
can sleep several hours longer than he does on a regular basis. And when I was in England as a student
missionary, I had hypersomnia, which is the opposite of insomnia. What that meant was that my depression at the
time was making me sleep excessively as a way of coping with how overwhelmed I
was by various stressors. I could curl
up in a chair, in a room full of people, in broad daylight and just go to sleep
pretty quickly…! I never could do that
before and I haven’t really been able to do it since.
Some of
us have a love-hate relationship with sleep, because there’s so much we want to
get done, yet we cannot do without sleep!
To some of us, sleep is almost a necessary evil; we view it as slowing
us down. Sleep is so crucial, yet we
seem to get nothing done while we sleep – we just lay there. Our visible activity is stilled.
Though
from the outside it seems like nothing is happening when we sleep, there are
several, complicated and crucial things happening on the inside. We look like we’re inactive and useless, but
what is happening invisibly to an onlooker is nonnegotiable in the long run.
In stage
1, we have light sleep – we’re between being awake and really falling asleep.
In stage
2, sleep begins, we become disengaged from our surroundings, our breathing and
heart rate are regular and our body temperature drops.
In
stages 3 and 4, we experience the deepest and most restorative sleep. Our blood pressure drops, our breathing slows
down, our muscles are relaxed, blood supply to the muscles actually increases,
tissue growth and repair both occur, energy is restored and growth hormones are
released. 25% of our sleep is REM
sleep. It happens about 90 minutes after
we fall asleep and it recurs every 90 minutes, getting longer later throughout
the night. REM provides energy to our
brain and to our body. REM supports
daytime performance. During REM the
brain is actually very active and our dreams occur. Our eyes dart back and forth under our
eyelids and our body becomes immobile and relaxed. The muscles are actually turned off.
So in
light of all this, we can see that to get the most out of our sleep, both
quantity and quality are important. We
need uninterrupted sleep to leave our bodies and minds rejuvenated for the next
day. If sleep is cut short, the body
doesn’t have time to complete all these phases.
Then we wake up less prepared to concentrate, make decisions, or engage
fully in our activities.
When we
don’t get enough sleep, I found that there are at least 8 negative affects we
receive.
#1: We have a lower stress threshold
#2: Our memory is impaired
#3: We have trouble concentrating
#4: Our optimism and sociability are decreased
#5: Our creativity and innovation are impaired
#6: Our resting blood pressure is increased
#7: Our appetite is increased and we eat more than we actually need
#8: Our risk of cardiac morbidity is increased
#1: We have a lower stress threshold
#2: Our memory is impaired
#3: We have trouble concentrating
#4: Our optimism and sociability are decreased
#5: Our creativity and innovation are impaired
#6: Our resting blood pressure is increased
#7: Our appetite is increased and we eat more than we actually need
#8: Our risk of cardiac morbidity is increased
In other
words, when we don’t get enough good sleep, we can’t handle as much, we can’t
remember as much, we can’t focus as much, we’re difficult to live with, we’re
less helpful, we eat too much, our health is worse and we’re more likely to die
from heart issues!
I’m very
convicted – and have been for several years – that much of the Adventist church
in Western culture is suffering from spiritual sleep-deprivation because of how
many of us tend to respond to our desire to get a lot done for God. Now, let me be clear: the desire to get a lot
done is a good thing. Productivity is good. Results are good. Service is a nonnegotiable of the Christian
life. We are not called to be lazy. But as an author I love tends to repeatedly
say: “There is a way things work.”
We know
that if we are harsh and unreasonable with our physical bodies, inevitable
disease and even trauma are no surprise.
I had a client who passed away a few years ago and he was an extremely
driven man. He accomplished a lot and he
built one of the top 5 electric supply companies in the country. He was wealthy and he had a big family who
adored him. But he had a debilitating
stroke fairly early in his life that forced him to slow down, and a second one
after that that required caregivers to attend to him 24-7 until his death. His lifestyle before his strokes was
basically being a ruthless workaholic throughout the day, eating whatever he
wanted with some martinis sprinkled in and then he’d sleep about 4 hours and do
the same thing all over again…and again…and again. That he eventually had health issues is a not
surprising to most of us…!
The
spiritual sleep I believe many Adventists are low on is our time alone with God,
nurturing our relationship with Him.
In 2011
at one of my pastoral practicums, I heard a statistic that might have changed
since then, but I saw in the General Conference booklet last summer status
updates that seemed to confirm it. The
statistic said that Adventists are next to the bottom amongst worldwide
denominations on regular Bible reading and that we score at the very bottom when it comes to our prayer
lives.
And yet
we have the truth.
In
Desire of Ages, Ellen White says, “There is a tendency to pray less, and to
have less faith. Like disciples, we are
in danger of losing sight of our dependence on God, and seeking to make a
savior of our activity. We need to look
constantly to Jesus, realizing that it is His power, which does the work. While we are to labor earnestly for the
salvation of the lost, we must also take time for meditation, for prayer, and
for the study of the word of God. Only
the work accomplished with much prayer, and sanctified by the merit of Christ,
will in the end prove to have been efficient for good.”
I feel a
strong conviction that because of our unique light on prophecy, we get caught
up in it at the expense of the personal love relationship with God that we are
commanded to have. And please hear me: I
am opposed to prophecy-bashing. I believe our unique light on prophecy and
knowledge of the truth adds an exotic dimension to our faith. A friend of mine tweeted this back in
February: “Nothing juggles all the disciplines – mathematics, linguistics,
philosophy, history, science – like the study of prophecy.”
Prophecy
is stimulating, exciting and informative.
I greatly value it. I am thankful
for it. Although prophecy is sometimes
abused to motivate people with fear and guilt, prophecy adds peace to my life. Prophecy is a complex masterpiece. I’m stimulated by prophecy. I love it.
Prophecy is a gift from God. Prophecy
is beautiful.
But
follow me to 1 Corinthians 13:2 and let me know when you find it.
1 Corinthians 13:2: “If I have the gift of
prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith
that can move mountains, but do not have
love,
I am nothing.”
And skip
down with me to verse 8.
1 Corinthians 13:8-10: “Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues,
they will be stilled; where there is
knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part,
but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.”
And then
skipping to verse 13:
1 Corinthians 13:13: “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.
But the greatest of these is love.”
What is
greater than prophecy is love. What will
remain and continue to be paramount after prophecies cease is love. As amazing, helpful and crucial as prophecy
is, I believe we need to be reminded at times about what is even more important than prophecy. And this reminder is meant to be a refreshment
that realigns us to the right relationship with God.
Turn
with me to Exodus 20:3, and let me know when you find it.
Exodus 20:3: “You shall have no other gods before Me.”
God
knows that there’s no one else like Him.
He knows that nobody and nothing can replace Him; that nobody and
nothing can do what He does or love the way that He loves. But I believe He gives us this commandment as
the first of the ten, because He knows the damage we will experience and the
damage we will do if we start giving the best portion of our love, energy and
time to anyone or any pursuit that is not our relationship with Him, even if
that pursuit is meant to serve Him. When
we wander into replacing Him often without meaning to, despite our best
intentions to be good witnesses, we damage and sin against ourselves as well as
damaging and sinning against others.
I
believe in the great commission. I also
believe that we have focused on it so much that it eclipses the Greatest
Commandment in many of our minds. Upon
re-reading the great commission, I was reminded of something – let’s read it
together in Matthew 28:18-20; let me know when you find it.
Matthew 28:18-20: “Then Jesus came to them and
said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all
nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey
everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very
end of the age.’”
I was
reminded that the great commission mentions the commandments. That we are to teach others and encourage one
another to obey all that Jesus has commanded us to do.
Now, in
Revelation 19:13, we are told that one of Jesus’ many names is the Word of
God. I think we can all agree that the
great commission is not saying we should only teach people to obey what Jesus
said, strictly in the gospels at the exclusion of everything the Old Testament
and the rest of the New Testament have to say.
Jesus certainly didn’t feel that way!
Come
with me to Matthew 22 starting in verse 36; let me know when you find it.
Matthew 22:36-40: “’Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?’ Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest
commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as
yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.’”
This
text here tells me that while breaking any of the commandments is always a sin,
all the commandments are not created equal.
Two of them are more important and one of those two is paramount and
must dominate our Christian experience. Breaking
one of the lesser commandments is like cutting your wrists. You will eventually bleed to death, but it
will take longer because your wrists are not as vital to you as other parts of
your body. Breaking the greatest
commandment is like shooting yourself in the head. You will die instantly, because the body
cannot live without the mind.
There’s
also a small word in this verse that I think makes a crucial point in helping
us realign our lives back into God’s design for our spiritual health. It’s the word “like” in the phrase that says,
“and the second is like it.” We are
supposed to give of ourselves to people.
We are supposed to work and
serve. But I don’t just believe – I know
– from all I’ve witnessed as a lifelong Adventist that it is far too easy and
far too common to give more of ourselves to people than to God. We must remember that our duty to people is
not the greatest commandment. It is the
second greatest. Our duty to God is the
greatest commandment. Turn with me to
Revelation 2, beginning in verse 2. Let
me know when you find it.
Revelation 2:2-5: “I know your deeds, your
hard work and your perseverance. I know
that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to
be apostles but are not, and have found them false. You have persevered and have endured
hardships for My name, and have not grown weary. Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first.
Consider how far you have fallen!
Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and
remove your lampstand from its place.”
Chronologically
we are living in the time of the church of Laodicea, but Jesus’ letters to the
seven churches have three applications.
First, they were literal churches Paul was writing to. Second, they each represent eras of church
history beyond Paul’s lifetime. And
third, they contain personal applications for us today. So, even though the verse we just read is
from Jesus’ letter to the church of Ephesus, I absolutely believe that it
contains convicting truth for us today.
This
verse convicted me this last Christmas.
I was so busy as a pastor’s wife, busy in ministry, doing all the right
things. But I was mostly running on the
memories of how God had loved me in the past, not giving God my heart in
private. I was not treating Him like the
Personal God of Love that He is. I was
working for Him, but I was disconnected from Him. I was treating Him like my boss rather than
my Father and Lover of my soul.
I was
grateful for the conviction in this verse, because I missed God. I missed feeling closer to Him and being more
conscious of His love and goodness. And
this verse gave me permission to pursue those experiences again. It was important that I learned to submit to
Him, obey Him and follow the truth more carefully, but I needed to let Him love
me again. When the prodigal son came
home to his Father, he let the Father love him again. He didn’t insist on staying a servant and
remaining distant from his father to do penance.
I also
needed to give my love to God again
the way that Mary Magdalene poured her perfume over Jesus. When she performed her act of loving worship
on Jesus, many people did not understand.
It looked strange. And it looked
like a waste. It didn’t appear
practical. But Jesus told them to leave
her alone because she had done a beautiful thing to Him! I mean, just think about that for a
second! I can’t recall anyone else in
Scripture who is described as having done a beautiful thing to God. In that story, the Greek word for beautiful
is kalos, which means beautiful and
chiefly good, valuable, virtuous, better and worthy.
And
think of what it says about God’s heart that He mandated that the story of
Mary’s act of worship would be told wherever the gospel was preached! It was Mary’s impractical act of personal,
loving worship that has been made famous by order of God Himself.
I
believe that we need to receive God’s personal love for us afresh and that we
also need to seek Him out to love Him again.
We need to know how to enjoy God’s personal Presence and both revel and rest
in His love for us.
But as
poetic and beautiful and true as all of this sounds and is, it brings us to an important question – a question I struggled
with a lot when I was first beginning my relationship with God: what does it
look like to do this? It’s so much
easier and clearer to practice loving tangible human beings than to practice loving
our invisible God in heaven.
Here is
where I want us to revisit our key text – turn with me to Psalm 46:10 and let
me know when you find it.
Psalm 46:10: “Be still and
know that I am God.”
This is
a very famous text. It’s been made into
many cover photos on Facebook, many posters, many songs… It’s almost become a platitude; you know, one
of those spiritual clichés people toss at you when your struggle is complicated. It’s also been used to defend mystical
practices. New Age and Emergent brands of
Christianity use the English translation of this verse as affirmation of
practices that empty and endanger the mind rather than engage it.
When I
was in Michigan, I had someone try to tell me, “What if you just stopped for a
day?” and I said, “And do what?” and she said, “Exactly!” Her point was that she thought I was too
focused on doing – even in the realm of my private relationship with God. She literally advised me to do nothing. And that didn’t make sense to me, because the
last time I tried to stop applying myself to my spiritual life I had the worst,
darkest and most depressed year I’ve ever known. And when you’re in a love relationship with
someone, you don’t do nothing with them and expect that the relationship will
improve. The minute we stop doing
something on every level, we’re dead – not alive. We were made to live not to do nothing! We
were made to relate to God, not to do
nothing.
I didn’t
feel comfortable with this person’s advice and so I decided to do my version of
being still rather than hers, which was to still journal and read – it was
still activity through it looked inactive and was very quiet.
And that
brings me back to the metaphor of understanding our relationship with God
through the metaphor of getting enough sleep at night. When we pull away from external busyness –
the kind of spiritual activity other people can see and measure – and we
retreat to spend time alone with God, we can appear to others to be doing
nothing for God, in the same way that when we go to bed and sleep at night we
appear to others to be getting nothing done.
Yet, in a realm they can’t see a lot of complex restoration is happening
in our being.
Spending
time alone with God to return to our First Love every day looks like you’re
trading active service for inactivity, but it’s not true. When we sleep at night, we lay down the
activity that is contingent on our conscious decisions and we surrender to a
different kind of activity that people can’t see – the activity that happens in
the 4 stages of sleep we went over in the beginning. It’s an activity that recharges us to be
active again the next day!
When we
spend time with God, we lay down the activity that is busy and noisy and
extroverted. We set aside our
relationships with people for a time and focus on our relationship with
God. We also have to set aside hobbies
and push against the urges of past or current addictions in order to spend time
with God. It’s an activity that
recharges us to serve and minister again afterward!
We
cannot be long term, loving Christians without daily spending quality time with
God.
We are
not our own spiritual energy source – God is.
We
cannot love others on our own. 1 John 4:19:
“We love because He first loved us.”
We are
not our own source of peace. Micah 5:5:
“And He will be our peace…”
How can
we cope, how can we captivate people for Christ if we have no love and peace,
if we’re just white-knuckling it, if we’re just going through the motions?
We
cannot give what we don’t have. And on our
own, we are leaky buckets.
We must
constantly refill and recharge ourselves by investing in our relationship with
God. We must guard against viewing God
as an abstract concept we live our lives by and fight to know God as a Loving
Person we live our lives for and with.
Sadly, there
really are some Christians who view time alone with God as more of a luxury
rather than a necessity. And others have
let fear of Satan so fill them that they won’t pray at all because they are that petrified of opening their mind to
him! Satan knows how crucial a
relationship with God is to having a vibrant Christian witness, to our personal
joy and to our ability to persevere and so he seeks to destroy it from any and
every angle.
Turn
with me to 1 Thessalonians 5:17 and let me know when you find it.
1 Thessalonians 5:17: “Pray without ceasing.”
Now,
this is such a short verse but there are 2 Greek words in it that I want to
unpack, and then we’re going back to Psalm 46:10. The first word is Pray. The word in Greek is proseuchomai and it is translated to
mean to exchange wishes; to interact with
the Lord by switching human wishes and ideas for His wishes as He imparts faith.
Prayer
takes on a much richer meaning with this understanding, doesn’t it? Prayer becomes a task of relating, of talking to Him, of
telling God what we’re feeling, telling Him what we think, telling Him what we
want and then asking Him to remove whatever displeases Him and replace it with
what He knows that we need. You could
even think of it as spiritual replacement therapy…! Prayer becomes the process of learning who
God is and grounding ourselves in His goodness.
Prayer is the process of changing the negative and faithless patterns in
our minds because – as Romans
14:23 tells us, “Everything that does not come
from faith is sin.”
And turn
with me to 2 Corinthians 10 beginning in verse 3 and let me know when you find
it.
2
Corinthians 10:3-5: “For though we live in the
world, we do not wage war as the world does.
The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to
demolish strongholds. We demolish
arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of
God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”
We need time alone with God. We need
prayer because it is in prayer, in interacting with God in a focused way, with
an open heart and through faith that we are changed on the inside. Proseuchomai
– exchanging, switching, replacing our thoughts and ideas for God’s thoughts
and ideas is how we change our thinking, it is how our minds are renewed. The Greek word for repentance – metanoia – means to change your
thinking. Many people become Christians
externally, they change their lifestyle (which does require a lot of work
sometimes), but they never change their thinking and so they either burn out
quickly and return to the world, or they become Christians who misrepresent
God, because they still have sin-based thought patterns and habits on the
inside.
This
verse articulates two particulars I don’t want us to miss: demolishing
strongholds and taking every thought captive.
When we read throughout the New Testament – not just in this verse – we
are reminded that it is totally possible for believers to have spiritual
strongholds of evil or strongholds of demonic oppression in their hearts and
minds, pinning them down from experiencing victory and being more greatly used
by Christ. In postmodern America, I
think Satan has opted for subtlety rather than scare tactics so we don’t see
full demonic possession frequently like the early church did, but we would be
fools to believe that there is no spiritual oppression assaulting our
lives. These strongholds can only be
demolished through strong, heartfelt and repeated prayers in the name of Jesus.
Also, we
must take our thoughts and make them captive to Jesus in every particular,
because our thoughts lead our
feelings. And if we are having trouble
with our feelings, the problem is actually in our thoughts. Our feelings are affected by agreements we
have made with lies from Satan and we need to articulate those agreements and
break them in the name of Jesus to reclaim more and more of our minds and
hearts for Him. This is a realm of healing that God won’t
magically do for us if we’re not interested or involved. He will supply the power if we will get
involved and resist the temptation to think that praying on such deep levels is
silly.
And so 2
Corinthians 10:3-5 is about taking ourselves back from Satan through
Jesus in prayer; it is about purifying
our hearts by re-training our minds so that we can see God.
Matthew
5:8: “Blessed are the pure in
heart, for they will see God.”
Now, going
back to 1 Thessalonians 5:17’s “pray without ceasing,” the English phrase
“without ceasing,” is just one word in the Greek: adialeiptos.
It basically means “without ceasing,” except there was one additional
translation that caught my eye. It can
also mean, “without omission.” And so
this verse can also be understood as: pray without omitting anything. I know we’ve heard the phrase, “pray about
everything,” but it has a different feel to it than “pray without leaving
anything out.” I believe that often, we
write off certain trials or annoyances as unworthy of prayer or we consider
hunkering down to pray about them as too much of a hassle. And so we try to just shrug them off. Sometimes we do this about trials that are
quite heavy that we really need to be
praying about! I have done this a lot,
and not about small issues, but about big ones.
Satan
has used emotional trauma to assault my relationship with God. There are times when the idea of praying and
opening my heart to God literally makes my head feel heavy and I just want to
lie down and go to sleep. And other
times when I’m impressed to spend time with Him over something painful that’s
just happened, I feel a sudden restlessness that gives me a strong preference
for just checking out with watching something instead. This is what spiritual warfare looks like
these days. It’s subtle and it doesn’t
seem like warfare. Satan uses subtlety
to make us doubt because he’s learned that when he uses scare tactics, we’re
more likely to run to Jesus because the evil is so clear. But everything that does not come from faith
is sin.
Whatever
takes the edge off of our relish of spiritual things is sin. Whatever influences us to move away from God
rather than closer to Him is sin. Even
as we start making progress in our prayer lives, we can never let up, because
our old way of faithless thinking has the power of alcoholism. We know that it’s not enough for an alcoholic
to get sober in a treatment center. He
or she has to stay away from alcohol and from environments that contain
alcohol. The alcoholic has to live
intentionally for the rest of their life to stay clean. It gets easier over time, but the minute a
former addict starts trusting to their own strength, thinking they can handle
it without their higher power, they’re in deep trouble and there’s often a
relapse.
So
really, this tiny verse in 1 Thessalonians turns into: pray all the time
without leaving anything out. And now
that we’ve taken this deeper look at what prayer can do and why we need it, it makes sense that Ellen White
has written to us that, “No man is safe for a day or an hour without prayer.”
So now
let’s go back to Psalm
46:10 – be still and know that I am
God.
There
are two Hebrew words in this verse that have impacted me deeply and I also
believe that they are key to the biblical application of this verse as opposed
to the empty, emergent applications. The
first word is the Hebrew translation of the phrase “be still.” It is the word raphah, which can mean: sink, relax, fail, alone, abandon, become
helpless, cease, collapses, courage, dropped, fall limp, feeble, forsake,
leave, let it go, loosens, lose courage, slack, subsided, and wait.
These
words all imply actions. They’re all
choices of surrender. They all speak of
setting down our methods of controlling our lives and becoming helpless in
God’s presence; of acknowledging whatever messy, unresolved, disorganized, hurt
state we might be in and not pretending it’s anything less. Getting caffeine out of my life was an act of
raphah, of becoming helpless with
God.
I
thought I needed it for all sorts of things, one of which was to get up early
to spend time with Him. I thought I
needed it to wake me up and make me alert and receptive to Him. It was an idol. Caffeine was something I’d given my heart and
trust to more than God. Rather than getting power from God, I was
trying to get it from a substance.
Staying away from it – even after making a promise to Russell – is still
extremely hard sometimes. But God has
shown me that I can still be just as and even more sensitive to Him without
it. I don’t need it to worship Him in
the morning.
But
being still isn’t all.
We are
to be still and know. Not separately know after being still, but be
still and know. The Hebrew word for “to know” is yada.
Yada is a special word that covers several contexts. It not only describes abstract knowing – the
way we know 2 + 2 = 4 – but it can also describe the experiential knowing of
intimacy, including marital intimacy between a husband and wife, as in Adam knew Eve and she conceived.
This
isn’t to imply anything inappropriate about what our relationship with God
should involve, but it is to say that we should know God through experiencing
Him in our hearts as well as knowing things about Him on faith. While it is true that feelings are not more
important than faith, that doesn’t mean feelings don’t matter. God created them. And even though Satan hijacks them sometimes,
they still serve the good purposes God intends. And as we saw earlier when we looked at 1
Thessalonians 5:17, thoughts lead feelings, so if we are making our thoughts
captive to Christ, our feelings gradually become safe, not suspect.
Ellen
White says, “We need to have a living experience in the things of God; and we
are not safe unless we have this.”
Wow. We are not safe unless we have a living experience
in the things of God. The Christian life
is a symphony of both feelings and faith, just as our human bodies need
both bones and our softer, more sensitive components to fully function. We need personal experiences of God’s
personal love because otherwise Satan will supply his own version of personal
spiritual experiences that will ruin us.
We need to know what God’s love feels like and be transformed by it as
much as we need to know the truth. Satan
and the demons know the truth and believe in God’s existence, but their
relationship with Him is not one of love or surrender.
In Matthew 7:16, Jesus said, “By their fruit you will know
them.”
Ten
years ago when I was 16, I had my first spiritual experience of God’s personal
presence. And the fruit of it was conviction and surrender. Although it actually took me 9 years after
that moment to permanently give up caffeine, that night on January 13, 2006 was
the first time I flushed my stash of caffeine.
God moved my feelings; I was sobbing for at least an hour. And did you know you have toxins in your
tears, which is why you feel better after you cry? It’s literally detox – having emotional
moments is sometimes exactly what we need.
God also
simultaneously impressed many things on my mind about how He had been taking
care of me and would continue to do so.
Two songs were playing that drove home important messages. The songs were “I’ll Trust You Lord” and “How
Great Is Our God.” And for someone like
me who struggles with control and anxiety, I have needed the reminders that God
is bigger than me and therefore deserving of my trust. I needed that emotional experience. It melted my grip around what I was addicted
to, if only for a few months so that even when I went back to caffeine to
“worship” God in the morning, I was never able to forget that my first personal
experience with God led me to get rid of caffeine and so something wasn’t
adding up.
Some
people have emotional highs at worship services and they later rewrite those
memories when they leave the faith and become atheists. They chalk it off to the music. But that night in my life was an experience
that I knew was completely beyond me. I knew it had
to be God. And even though it unhinged
me and convicted me to throw away something I was attached to, it felt so good to have my feelings be telling me the truth in harmony with faith – that there
is Someone bigger than me and more
powerful than me to rest in. I know
there is a God because I have felt
Him and He is the deepest relationship I have ever wrapped myself up in. I know there is a God because I do not know
who I’d be without Him and I don’t want to know. I just want to keep knowing Him.
That experience and others like it is why I wrote to God once, “You’ve
ruined me for less and my heart will always long for You.”
Turn
with me to John 17:3 and let me know when you find it.
John
17:3: “Now this is eternal life:
that they know You, the only true
God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent.”
This
verse lets us know the key to eternal life. And that key is knowing God. And it’s the
same kind of knowing as what Psalm 46:10 is mentioning. The Greek word for “to know” is ginóskó, and it also has the same
richness of definition as yada. In Luke 1:34, when Mary asked Gabriel how she, being a virgin,
could conceive the Son of God, she said, “How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” and the word is ginóskó.
The kind
of knowing that yada and ginóskó talk about in Psalm 46:10 and
John 17:3 are intimate. They’re the
knowledge of experience. You can’t be
known by someone else without being aware of it because you have to allow it. They can know things about you without you knowing it, but they can’t know you without you participating and
allowing it…it doesn’t happen without interactions. God calls us to this. He calls us to come away with Him and rest
and be restored by Him. Ellen White
says, “We respond to His invitation, Come, learn of Me, and in thus coming we
begin the life eternal.” Turn with me to
Matthew 11:28 and let me know when you find it.
Matthew
11:28-30: “Come to Me, all you who are
weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in
heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”
Just
like Jesus talked to the Samaritan woman at the well about spiritual thirst for
living water, I believe He’s talking to us in this verse about the restoring
spiritual sleep and rest we need, which only comes from spending quantity and
quality time with Him. Only Jesus can
make our hearts truly rest. And although
I’ve certainly had my fascinations with feelings of ecstasy through my
addiction to caffeine among other things, I’ve grown to know that there is
nothing more healing or more deeply moving to
the core than the rest only Jesus can bring us to.
Ellen
White says, “As through Jesus we enter into rest, heaven begins here.” And it’s absolutely true. When I am resting in Jesus, my restlessness,
my worries, my desires are all calmed and for awhile, the noise in my mind is
quiet, the smog is cleared up, there’s blue sky and I realize that this is all I want – to be close to God,
learning about Him, thinking about Him, experiencing that He loves me, to know
that He knows me perfectly. David the
Psalmist also had this experience.
Turn
with me to Psalm 139:1 and let me know when you find it.
Psalm
139:1: “You have searched me, LORD,
and You know [yada] me.”
Again,
it’s yada. God knows us intimately and He calls us to
know Him intimately as well.
Ellen
White says, “Heaven is a ceaseless approaching to God through Christ. The longer we are in the heaven of bliss, the
more and still more of glory will be opened to us; and the more we will know of
God, the more intense will be our happiness. … As we walk with Jesus in this
life, we may be filled with His love, satisfied with His presence. All that human nature can bear, we may
receive here. … Heaven is to begin on this earth…”
Do you
think Satan wants us to taste this heaven
on earth and see that it is good? Absolutely not.
Do you
know what Ellen White’s favorite hymn was?
Jesus, Lover of My Soul.
So, with
that in mind, let me share with you a quote from the book Captivating: “To
pursue intimacy with Christ, you will have to fight for it. You’ll need to fight busyness (Martha’s
addiction). You’ll need to fight
accusations. You’ll need to fight the
Thief that would steal your Lover’s gifts to you outright. … Getting time with
your Lover is worth whatever it costs.
Ask His help in making you desperately hungry for Him. Ask His help in creating the time and space
you need to draw close to Him. Ask Him
to come, to reveal Himself to you as the Lover that He is.”
We were
made to know that we are loved, and only in the heaven to come will not have to
fight to abide in that knowledge. But
until then, we are given such grace in being able to have heaven in earth in
moments, sometimes hours with God.
Turn
with me to Matthew 16:25 and let me know when you find it.
Matthew
16:25: “For whoever wants to save
their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for Me will find it.”
Living
close to the Lover of our souls and being able to sense His presence is indeed
heaven on earth and is worth any sacrifice.
And I
know this fact through experience as well.
Back in 2010, God was asking me to make a decision and I refused. And He withdrew His presence from me. And since I was stubborn, my separation from
God only grew and it ended up contributing to my post-traumatic stress disorder. Finally in 2013, I was so spiritually worn
out – even though I was feasting on all my old addictions to my heart’s content
– and I was so desperate to have God’s presence back in my life that I was
willing to be shown whatever I’d done wrong that had brought such living death
on my experience.
When I’d
cry and break down about it – as I occasionally did to a friend or in a journal
– I mostly wouldn’t say, “I just want to feel better,” (which I sometimes say
these days) but I would usually say, “I miss Him…I miss when I felt close to
Him…” I was living in separation from God.
I was living in sin, I could feel
it and it was killing me. The
temporary feelings my addictions gave me did not compare to the spiritual rest
I had known in Christ. He had ruined me
for less and I am so thankful that He did.
It saved me in the end and made me willing for my pride to be broken.
In Steps
to Christ, Ellen White tells us that “A life in Christ is a life of
restfulness. There may be no ecstasy of feeling,
but there should be an abiding, peaceful trust.
Your hope is not in yourself; it is in Christ.” No one can slake our thirst for rest like
Jesus. And isn’t it beautiful about God that the greatest, the paramount commandment is
to love Him with all of ourselves? That
the paramount commandment is draw near to Him, give Him our love and receive
His love? That the paramount commandment
is to rest in Him and know Him intimately and experience being known by Him
because that is the way to eternal
life? Our God is so kind…! He is the polar
opposite of the Pharaoh Moses had to go up against. Truly, all His commandments are for our good…!
He is good. He is so
good and kind and thoughtful toward us.
So what
will we do with what we’ve heard? I
needed this message myself. Badly. It was a journey to write this sermon. I cannot in good conscience finish giving you
this message without making a change in my own life. Remember that our old ways have the power of
alcoholism – we must ever be intentional in fighting darkness and choosing
Jesus, in making time for Him daily to
open our hearts up to Him so that we can clean out our hearts and keep them
clean and have Jesus in our hearts. In early February, I was sharing a testimony
with all of you after a 3-day retreat I did.
And in the time since then, I’ve counted twenty trials and negatives that have popped up in my life. I only counted them just recently because in
sharing with two friends what all I was dealing with, they were saying, “Chloe,
this is a lot…!” and I wasn’t realizing how much it really was.
When I
wrote it all down in a list, it was clear to me that Satan had been attacking
me for pursuing God. He’d been
deliberately trying to rob me. And I’ve
kind of been letting him…! It’s hard to
keep fighting for joy and rest in Jesus.
I think Satan arranges for us to be shamed into thinking that joy and
rest in Christ are luxuries, and that we should always function in cold,
emotionless faith but all of that is a lie.
Joy and rest should be staples in our Christian experience – even during
trials. The fruits of the Spirit are
love, joy and peace – those are the first
three!
Those of
us who are married know that you can keep conversations with your spouse going
throughout the day either through texting or through whispering during an
event, but all of that is nothing compared to the depth and safety of
conversation you can have when you’re alone together with no one else around. We
as Christians can stay in touch with God throughout the day by talking to Him
in the car while we drive and sending up little popcorn prayers, but it doesn’t
compare to blocking out a portion of our days to spend just with Him, alone.
It
doesn’t compare to giving God our full and undivided attention for at least one
uninterrupted hour, if not more, every day.
And we know that when our marriages or our close friendships are having
issues, we can’t go on without one of
those long and difficult but ultimately rewarding conversations. Yet too often, we don’t treat our
relationship with God that way, and He is our First Love. He is our most
important relationship, our spouses and children are second, and the people we
minister and witness to should be coming in at third place.
Luke
14:26 and Matthew 10:37 both tell us that if we love
people more than God that we are not worthy of Him and cannot be His disciples. Loving God with our whole hearts, minds and
souls and with daily, quality time is the Paramount Commandment. We don’t just give God our time on Sabbath,
and even Sabbath can get filled up with only external activity if we’re not
careful. Sabbath, being holy, is a day
when God draws especially close to us.
Just think about how much richer our time alone with God could be on
Sabbath, if we’d make the time for it…!
We should be planning our lives and our ministries around God, rather
than attempting to fit God in where we can because we’re so busy ministering to
others. That’s backwards. I know many of us do that with good
intentions, but we have all been reminded of the truth today, so I hope we’ll
leave here intending to rearrange our priorities.
Turn
with me to John 17:26 and let me know when you find it.
John
17:26: “I have made You known to them, and will continue to make
You known in order that the love You have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”
Wow. Jesus’ prayer, His desire is that both the
love of the Father and His own holy, wondrous presence would be IN US…! It’s the desire of Jesus that we live with
our hearts full of heaven. Do you see
how good and kind He is? Imagine how much
more bearable all our trials would be if we were obeying the Paramount
Commandment so that intimacy with God and His personal presence in our hearts
would be our new normal…! All our pain
would feel peripheral in comparison to how it feels without God’s presence in
our hearts.
Turn
with me to Psalm 19:7 and let me know when you find it.
Psalm
19:7: “The law of
the LORD is perfect, refreshing the soul.”
Russell
made me aware that the word “refreshing” can mean restoring. The Hebrew word is shub, and it means to return, bringing back. Obeying God’s law, especially the Paramount Commandment brings us back from the
shadowlands, from the shallows where everything is potholes and gray
skies. Obeying the Paramount Commandment
gives us back to ourselves. Have you
ever felt like you’ve lost yourself and you have no anchor? Intimacy with God is our anchor. But as Revelation 3 tells us, Jesus waits at
the door of our hearts. He knocks, but
He doesn’t insist. We have to let Him in
and make a place for Him to stay.
In Matthew 5:17, Jesus says “Do not think that I have come
to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to
fulfill them.”
The
Paramount Commandment is still
paramount. It still stands as the
command that should dominate our lives.
And obeying the Paramount Commandment will not detract from our teaching
others about prophecy and witnessing to them about it. It will make us better at it! When we are spending the quality and quantity
of time with God that we need to, people will see the love in our eyes for what
we believe, for who we believe. Rather than seeing paranoia in us about the
time of trouble, rather than seeing anxiety in us about being prepared, they
will see our heartfelt longing to be ready because it’s almost time to go Home,
because we want them to experience the beauty that graces our spirits because
of the supreme relationship we are in that is bigger than ourselves. They would see that we are a people
captivated by God’s beauty – not held captive by fear of getting it wrong – and
that that is why we live the way we
do, worship on Sabbath and believe in prophecy…! We are who we are and live the way we live
because we are a people in love with our utterly, completely good God; because we are captivated by His love.
In John 14:15, Jesus says, “If you love Me, keep My
commands.” Especially the Paramount Commandment! All the rest is meaningless and forced
without a relationship with God.
And in John 15:9-10, Jesus says, “As the Father has loved me,
so have I loved you. Now remain in my
love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love,
just as I have kept my Father’s commands
and remain in His love.”
And
Jesus absolutely kept the Paramount Commandment. Ellen White tells us in Desire of Ages: “No
other life was ever so crowded with labor and responsibility as was that of
Jesus; yet how often He was found in prayer!
How constant was His communion
with God! … In a life wholly devoted to the good of others, the Savior found it
necessary to withdraw from the thoroughfares of travel and from the throng
that followed Him day after day. He must turn aside from a life of
ceaseless activity and contact with human needs, to seek retirement and unbroken
communion with His Father. As one
with us, a sharer in our needs and weaknesses, He was wholly dependent upon God, and in the secret place of prayer He
sought divine strength, that He might go forth braced for duty and trial. In a world of sin Jesus endured struggles and
torture of soul. In communion with God
He could unburden the sorrows that were crushing Him. Here He found comfort and joy.”
The
Paramount Commandment does not suggest that we should become monks and
recluses. But it bids us change our
priorities for our own good and for God’s glory…!
1
John 2:3: “We know that we have come to
know Him if we keep His commands.”
1
John 5:3: “In fact, this is love for
God: to keep His commands. And His
commands are not burdensome.” This echoes Matthew 11:28-30,
wherein Jesus Himself told us that His yoke is easy and His burden is
light. The Paramount Commandment heals
and restores us. It is beautiful.
John
17:3 taught us that eternal life is knowing God.
Matthew
22:36-40 taught us that the Paramount Commandment is loving God.
Loving God and intimately knowing Him by experience go together. You can’t love someone without knowing them. And because God is love, we cannot know Him without loving Him! And to know Him at all is to be gripped with the conviction to love Him with our all.
Psalm
40:8: “I desire to do Your will, my
God; Your law is within my heart.”
When we
are Christ’s, His commands are in our hearts, they’re part of us. They don’t feel like foreign objects. On the contrary, we cannot live without them. And although my addictions push against my
love for Jesus, I have fallen in love with Him enough to still testify that He
has ruined me for less and I know that nothing else can satisfy me except His
love and healing presence.
I am
imperfect, but He has my heart. I want
more of my thoughts to be His, but He has far more of my thoughts than He ever
has. I love to talk about Him. My warmest affections are His. I am at my best when I am focused on
Him. I have not been the most faithful
lover of Him, but I know I am Christ’s.
My thoughts are with Him and my sweetest thoughts and memories are of
Him. I am doing all I can to completely
consecrate and give myself to Him more and more over time. I am a work in progress, but He is committed
to finishing what He has begun in me. I
long to bear His image and breathe His spirit, do His will and make Him happy.
This
experience with Jesus is the best and most beautiful thing I could wish on
anyone. God longs for all His children
to have it and that is why it is so sad that so many will sacrifice heaven for
their own small ideas rather than surrendering their own concepts of control to
a beautiful God of love who is graciously bigger than we are. Do you want this same experience? Do you want to join me? I pray so.
I’m
going to play a song and while we all listen, I invite you to close your eyes
and think about how your life needs to change, what ideas and habits you might
need to sacrifice in order to make loving God paramount. And I’d invite you to pray to God during this
song to give you the strength to make your convictions a reality.
(The song was "Abide in Me" by Ana Laura: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hspfBTZLhU)