FIRST Love! (The discipline of a disciple. Part 6)
God created man to love Him. And He is jealous of our relationship and Intimacy. Why? Because in Him are all the right values for life, and he doesn’t want us to deviate after other gods and idols. As a good Father, He wants to guard our attention and our heart from going astray.
God wants a genuine relationship with His children. “God is Spirit, and His worshipers must worship in Spirit and in truth” (Jn 4:24).
In His last prayer, what you may call His “deathbed” prayer, Jesus asked the Father that we all be ONE — One with Him and ONE with each other and ONE with the Father. That we as His followers may have an intimate relationship as deep as He had with His Father.
“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in Me through their message, that all of them may be ONE, Father, just as you are in Me and I am in you. … Father, I want those You have given Me to be with Me where I am… in order that the LOVE You have for Me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”
Intimacy is a very big part of our relationship with Jesus and with the Father. Christianity is a union, an intimate relationship.
God does not want formalities. Jesus addressed the religionists of His day and said, “You nullify the Word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: ‘These people honor Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me.They worship Me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules” (Mat 15:8-9).
We can be as close to God as we want to be. We decide because He says, “Draw nigh to God and He will draw nigh to you” (Jam 4:8). The closer you are to someone, the more you know him/her, and the more intimate you are with them. Friendship is a very powerful union, but it comes short of true intimacy. A best friend is not as close as a spouse.
Intimacy equals trust and interdependence. It dispels insecurities. It is the greater closeness, the desire to know all, without any reservation. As in a marriage when we desire to know each other to the core. It is total acceptance and total surrender. A melding of hearts and of wills.
All of the essential values of discipleship are built on intimacy. Intimacy is great trust, great love, great dependence and great surrender. Therefore, discipleship is to be a Christian to the core. No neutrality, but passion. Total ONENESS.
The more you meditate on God’s Word, the more you receive His love. And the more of His love you discover. Intimacy offers more, …and more. We can always get closer and go deeper in our relationship with God. Psalms 119 expresses the passionate love that David had for God. And God called him “a man after His own heart” (1Sam 13:14). You can get to know God more, deeper, and be more consumed in His love through loving His Word. His Word must be your FIRST LOVE.
And when you’re FILLED to overflowing, you overflow on others. “We love him, because he first loved us. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.” (1Jn 4: 19-21)
He’s made Himself ever so close and available to us. He made Himself our provider, our peacemaker, our healer. Just look at all the names God has. –all for OUR benefit.
How much of yourself are you offering to God? You are the one who chooses where you’re at in your relationship with Him. Are you hot, cold, lukewarm? Rev 3:16 says, “So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”
If you love the material world more than the spiritual, then it becomes a form of worship of the creation more than the Creator, & God in His spiritual world refuses to take second place in our affections and in our interests or even in the activities of our life.
Jesus calls us to deny ourselves in order to be His follower. Following implies an ongoing process, an ongoing discipline.
To seek first, means foremost & above all!–Before everything else, above everything else, beyond everything else, & more than anything else! It means working for God & others more than for yourself, more than for money, more than for riches, more than for pleasure, more than for anything else.
Christianity is a long-term relationship. It’s not a weekend fix, an instant-faith pill, where we microwave our blessings, and we expect instant spirituality, and spare tire miracles. It’s not a religion made easy, nor a part-time job. It’s a long-term personal growth, in a long-term intimate relationship with the Creator of the universe and His son. That’s why it involves reverence and honor. “And now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, to keep the commandments of the Lord, and His statutes” (Deu.10:12,13).
The most displeasing approach to God is a set of rituals without heart. That’s why Jesus was so adamant against religiosity. A form of godliness without the POWER. Not an authentic relationship but a membership only. Paul warns the church in 1Tim 4:1-3, “Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron;”
The rituals, just like the law, don’t give us the power to keep the law. It exposes you as a sinner but it doesn’t fix you. ONLY a relationship with the giver of life gives you the POWER to change. People want to use God, but don’t want to be changed by OBEYing His life giving Word.
Paul said, “That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death” (Phil 3:10).
“And this is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, Whom Thou hast sent” (Jn 17;3-5).
So our goal is to know God and never stop knowing Him.