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How to Love God without Faking It: Part 1

How did you come to love God? How did I come to love God? What does it take to love God? Sort and classify. What in your experience tells you that you love God? We love with the mind. We love with the heart. We love best when love in the mind reaches to connect with love in the heart. Full-circle love encompasses the whole being: heart, mind, and soul.

Do YOU love God?

Back to the original question. How did you come to love God? Was it practice? (sure) Was it intentional? (sure) Was it desire? (most certainly). Was it in response to God’s love for you? (absolutely) Or was it incremental, a little more each year? (probably) Maybe it isn’t true love quite yet but a growing fondness for God. (heading in the right direction)

Let’s be honest here, loving God isn’t something you can manufacture. (that’s true) But it is something you can desire, experience and grow. (now you’re talking)

How did I come to love God?

I plumbed the depths to sort and classify how I came to love God. For many years I loved God without thinking about it. I loved God for what he did, who he was, his majesty, his attributes and for everything I knew about him. I had a holy reverence and a healthy respect for God. I believed in God and knew his goodness. Spending time in bible reading and prayer fostered this closeness with God.

But my love for God fell short in one particular aspect. (didn’t know it) Although my love for God was meaningful and real, it came up short. (Oh no!) My love had not moved me as in partaking of living water. (not enough, anyways) Loving God wasn’t that inner connection you find in intimate love. The kind of love where your hunger is filled, your soul is joined together, (we’re talking soul-mate), safe and secure, to know and breathe as one.

Prior to intimate joining with God, I loved God in a limited, but sincere, way. (not enough)

You don’t know what YOU don’t know.

How did I change it up? Well, for starters, I didn’t; but God did. God lit the flame and grew a desire. Love for God, like love for others, takes openness on our part. An apt question, “Is God on the throne of your life?” When God takes center stage in your life– things begin to happen. (like what?)

Love takes God entering in—being invited in—and him placing his love, his being, into our heart and then taking over wherever we allow him to. The path of least resistance is to compartmentalize our faith, to manage our spiritual walk. (not good) But when God is managing it, when God is in control, you can’t fake it or maintain business as usual.

As a result of God being given the reins to our lives, we change our mind about how we’re going to live out our faith. Our determination to love God is acted upon. Soon our desires change. Our bent to rebel becomes more obvious (and we nip it in the bud), and our capacity for love increases exponentially (becomes part of who we are and how we think).

It works like this. For example, when we determine to love our neighbor, a choice is made to begin loving them. Reality sets in and effort is required. But the part we may lack, the ‘loving them,’ is a God thing. (so we ask God for it, hint, hint) God places the love for our neighbor in our heart. The mind says, this is what we’re going to do. The heart says, okay, let’s get started. The Spirit says, I’m going to enable this, show you how, and make it happen.

We may ASK for God’s love.

All love is related to God’s love. How do we come to love God?  Can we change our desires? Yes, we can, but this is only part of the solution. On the heels of that, comes a harder question. How can we worship a God we don’t love? (pretty hard to do) Or maybe it is an infantile love. Worship may be wrapped up in form and may be real (unless we don’t mean it) but worship can become much more meaningful when passion for God accompanies our love for him.

In that scenario, we are worshiping ‘what’ God does and has done, who he is—the greatness and goodness of God—but we are not fully engaged in worshiping his very eternal essence.

To be continued next week. (yippee!)

Y’all come back now, y’hear. (counting on it)

 

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“In Christ” You Can Overcome Obstacles

When You’re Living in the Desert Dark

Overwhelm crashed like sheets of rain in a storm. I scolded myself for being such a chicken about life. Others had been through what I was going through, and they’d made it just fine. Why was I feeling like I was losing myself? The burden bore down hard, but I didn’t want it to. My blood pressure was up, I could feel it; and my heart pounded; and the tension headache. Too much. The sadness of depression nipped at my heels as it tried to push me to surrender to its despair, but I could not let it win.

I don’t like it when I am like that, but it happens. Know what I mean? We get worn down by the troubles and our worries. Circumstances claim us and rob our joy especially if we aren’t refilling our God-tank. Like a car running on empty, we are not getting the fuel we need, the time of silence to pray and unite with God to regain the ‘charge’ we need. Prayer, reading the word, praise and thanksgiving; and then our spirit begins to lift.

“In Christ, help me get through this, help me manage this, help me know what I am supposed to do,” the thought appeared out of nowhere. I was praying my heart, speaking words of despair, when “in Christ” entered my thoughts. “‘In Christ’ show me what to do,” I pleaded. The old familiar phrase was one I once upon a time prayed day after day, month after month. It relaxed me, gave me a smile, helped me lighten up, and boosted my trust.

“In Christ,” spoken a couple of days ago, ministered to me much as it had in the past; giving me hope, giving me strength, giving me courage to face my mental fog and inability to think clearly. Yes, in Christ I can make it and will make it. Fear lessened. Thoughts cleared. Emotions stabilized, and my mind corrected itself. Christ can do that for us.

Long ago when my world was rocked with sorrow and sadness around the time of my divorce, I often said “In Christ” as a way to face each obstacle head-on, and there were many: emotional, physical, spiritual, financial, familial. . .  My family was dependent on me and life didn’t wait for me to recover. I was unable to grieve my loss. In my desert dark I learned that “in Christ” I could get through each day without crashing. That phrase, in Christ, helped me manage many a crisis.

Resting “in Christ” is wonderful comfort. In our own strength we crash and burn and all feels helpless and hopeless. I prayed “in Christ” because of overwhelm. I am a sensitive person and the complications of several things were weighing me down. One fairly broke my heart as I prayed for a minister and his family, who are going through it, during another sleepless night; and prayers for a loved one and serious decisions ahead; and the constant concern for my elderly parents and the very real issues they’re facing; and my own self-doubt, wondering if I have what it takes as I walk along side them.

And then there was this. Separation in now distant friendships and now former places of ministering had taken a strange toll and caused a negative outcome in me, one that I had not anticipated. This bred a lack of confidence in my ability to minister, to share the message of life. This grew feelings of loneliness and uselessness, like I was becoming a shadow of my former self. I was despairing, afraid, running low on spiritual vitality with little to cheer me up, with little to look forward to: Butting against barricades rather than opening gateways. I’d become silent, too silent, lost in thought. I was retreating, disappearing, losing my grip. Friends had begun to take notice.

I was thinking about the future, “I don’t know if I can do this” when “In Christ” came out in a prayerful sentence.  Upon praying those two words, my inner being strengthened immediately. One cannot remain at the bottom of the trenches when you claim Christ to help you deal with a situation. Two days before, I had asked God to show me how to live above the caregiving without it pulling me down, without feeling vulnerable and inadequate. I imagined myself above it, returning to a life with joy and happiness. I’d been spending lots of time in prayer about all these things, but the despair (and grieving) continued to deplete my spiritual energy.

I was accustomed to experiencing the joy of dailyness with God. But now, the difficulties robbed me of joy. I wanted to be alive and joyful as I used to be even during times of struggle. I missed the light of Jesus that enlivens in the inner self. It had been months of this plodding on but without the vigor and energy that breathes liveliness in the soul. “In Christ,” my will to do His will is reclaimed. We live for Him, for Christ. Our identity is in Christ.

“In Christ” is a phrase to remember for those times of despair, when we don’t know what to do or how to proceed. In Christ, is applicable to almost any situation. It provides confidence in Christ’s ability to help and sustain us no matter the situation. Some of my joy is back. Praises to God.

-In Christ, you can face the giant.

-In Christ, you can hold your head high.

-In Christ, you will be strengthened.

-In Christ, you will get through this, move forward, and build again.

-In Christ, you will overcome and find your hope.

-In Christ, you will be sustained.

-In Christ, the victory will come.

“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Philippians 4:13 NKJV

“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 2:5 KJV

In Christ we gain hope and can live above the circumstance. It is not up to us, nor is it something we can do in our flesh or by human willpower. We receive strength and clarity by placing our trust in Jesus Christ to face the difficulty, and then we surrender the outcome to him.

Are you in your own desert dark? Does despair visit you daily, weekly, more often than not? It’s pretty normal for this day and age. Life is hard, troubles abound . . . but God is good and He is kind. “In Christ” you will find your rest, direction, and hope. The light of the world is Jesus. He is your light, help, and strength.

God bless you, my friend.

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I welcome your comment:

What helps you face the dark times?

What verses give you hope?