Experiencing
God's Love pt 2
Let’s continue on with the
thought of how we experience God’s love in our hearts. There is a hymn song in
many churches that touches upon the idea.
There
is a place of quiet rest near to the heart of God,
A
place where sin cannot molest, near to the heart of God.
There
is a place of comfort sweet, near to the heart of God,
A
place where we, our Savior meet, near to the heart of God.
There
is a place of full release, near to the heart of God,
A
place where all is joy and peace, near to the heart of God.
That beautiful old hymn
paints a picture of the Christian life in its most complete form. It speaks of a
place near the Holy One, where, when the child of God has quietly slipped into
its confines, there is a kind of holy hush; a place where the winds of adversity
that blow upon us are transformed into the gentle breeze of the presence of God.
It is a place where the
hurried and harried child of God can find refuge from the harshest of storms,
and crawl up into the arms of their Jesus and rest in perfect peace.
Perfect peace. Oh, what a
mirage that seems to be. And yet God promises, just as the songwriter did, that
such a place and such a promise really does exist. And the thing that makes it
so attractive is not just the relief that it promises us, but rather the fact
that it is near to the heart of God.
God’s grace is His way of
giving to us all that He is, and enabling us to let Him live His supernatural
life in us. We long to be holy, but we can't. Then we pray for grace, and there
are times when God moves in our hearts, guarding the gateway to the eye,
monitoring the movies in our minds, creating in us a desire to be lifted above
the mind of the world. And as that grace flows, a whole new awareness of the
holiness of God fills our souls. We are suddenly near to the heart of God.
We long to be able to love
the way God loves. We want to love the unlovable, the needy, the hurting, the
crying. But it isn't natural. So God in His mercy, when we pray, begins
to release agape grace. Our eyes begin to be opened; our hearts begin to
become sensitive; our minds begin to see prejudices dissolve, and priorities
change. Soon, we are experiencing a kind of love we never thought we could
experience, and we realize that it is a gift; something we do not deserve and
cannot ever repay, but something that is eternal in nature. God is changing our
lives by enabling us to do supernaturally what we could never do naturally, give
our lives away to the undeserving, the unappreciative, the unworthy, the
unlovable. It's a miracle. A miracle called grace.
We find ourselves loving our
enemies, loving those who persecute us and say all manner of evil against us,
falsely. ‘That isn't me,’ you think. No, it isn't. It is Christ in
you, living through you, demonstrating His amazing grace. And for a time, at
least, you find yourself. . . Near to the heart of God.
Like I did recently, you
pass through one of life's great trials, and the pressure is more than you can
bear. It may be the death of a loved one, and through it all, there comes an
incredible calm, an inner strength, physical stamina, and you are amazed. Then
you find that people have been praying that God would give you comforting
grace. It may be a lingering illness, where the future seems unknown, and
you begin to be crushed under the weight of the uncertainty. But as you pray,
and as others pray, there comes over you a kind of quiet confidence in the
sovereignty of God, and an uncanny peace settles over your soul. It is
comforting grace, and you are seeing life from God's perspective. You are loved.
You are near to the heart of God.
It may be unceasing pain;
pain that is tearing your life apart, but in the midst of the pain there comes a
kind of rest you have never experienced before. It's grace. It could be a sudden
trauma, an accident or an unexpected intrusion into your normally placid
existence. Suddenly, your world is torn apart. Once again, after the initial
shock, there seems to come a time when you are carried by the very hand of God
where sin cannot molest, and you are, in the midst of all that turmoil, at rest.
You are, by grace, near to the heart of God.
It is as though a loving God
has seen you trying to carry a load you could not bear, and heard you whisper
amidst your pain, ‘Too heavy’, and as you did, that precious God sent His
Spirit, whom He has named ‘The Comforter’ to come alongside you and lift
that burden from you, taking you as He did, into that place of comfort sweet,
near to the heart of God. What a precious experience. What a wonderful promise.
What an incredible God we have. And it is all of grace.
I started to wonder: ‘Must
we be in trouble to find that garden of rest? Must my world be falling apart
before I run to the quiet place?’ I know that "tribulation worketh
patience." I know that God's strength is made perfect in weakness. Do I,
then, sit around with a bucket on my head waiting for God to rain down fire from
heaven, so I can pray for grace?
I don't think so. I think,
like Job, like Stephen, like Paul, like Joseph, like Moses, we will grow in our
walk with God as life's cannonballs fly in our direction and we crawl up into
God in utter dependence and pray. But somehow, the Scripture seems to indicate
that there is, in the center of the will of God, like the eye of a hurricane, a
place of quiet rest, where a man and His God can be such intimate friends, that
God is literally doing the living, and the man or woman is a wonder-filled,
awe-struck witness to the life that is being lived out in their body. Some call
it the ‘exchanged’ life. I would prefer to call it ‘the normal Christian
life’.
Whatever you call it, it is
of grace. We don't deserve it. But it is of God, therefore, we don't need to
earn it. It is the supernatural rest of God so captivating and overpowering the
child of God that he or she can cry out like Paul:
Ga 2:20 I am crucified
with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the
life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who
loved me, and gave himself for me.
‘I'm living, but I'm not
doing the living’, Paul cried out. ‘I'm dead. Christ is alive, and I am
watching Him live His amazing life through me’. And then Paul gives us God's
definition of love: He says, ‘He loved me, and gave Himself for me.’ That's
love: God giving Himself away for those who do not deserve it, cannot repay it,
and may not understand it.
That same Paul, in the midst
of years of imprisonment, persecution, hardship, and the facing of certain
death, used a prison cell as his personal post office, and wrote letters from
his heart to the hearts of those outside who were wondering what kind of fear
and frustration Paul was suffering from inside those cells of death. In every
case, Paul began those letters the same way: He wrote:
‘Grace be unto you, and
peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.’
(1 Cor 1:3, 2 Cor 1:2, Eph 1:2, Phil 1:2, Col 1:2, 2 Th 1:2) Grace and peace.
The Pauline twins. Like two hearts that are woven together by threads of divine
design, grace and peace seemed to be both the cause and effect of each other. Only
the grace of God can bring about the peace of God. Two sides of the coin of
the enabling life of Christ in us.
In the same way, it is the
grace of God that allows the presence of Christ in our lives and it is the
presence of Christ in us which brings about the grace of God in our life.
For he hath made him to
be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God
in him. 2 Cor 5:21
It is the grace of God which
enables us to fully experience His love in our lives. It is not earned. It is
not merited. It is fully and freely given. But, it is the peace of God which
allows us to experience His love.
Pastor John