For the past while, I've been reading a book entitled, RARE Leadership.[1] It is discipling me in these four central qualities:
Remain Relational
Act Like Yourself
Return to Joy
Endure Hardship
I can see that Father has been working these things into my life for a long time, but now I see his concentrated work to make these central to what I do in life, particularly at those times I am seeking to lead anyone in the things of the kingdom.
This morning I focused on what it looks like to remain relational, and the first thing that stood out is what Father is like. What we have in his word is a relational being constantly calling his people to walk with him in intimate love-relationship. As I have been focusing on Jeremiah for a couple of weeks, it makes clear to me that all the prophets are telling a sinful and disobedient people that God wants relationship with them even though they have turned away to commit adultery with their false gods.
In other words, no matter how gross and abhorrent the people are in their sin, the prophets announced Yahweh’s desire for them to return to relationship with him. He remained relational unlike any remaining-relational we can imagine!
This brought to mind a Scripture that blessed me a lot way back in the days of my ministry in the institutional church.
But from there you will seek the LORD your God
and you will
find him,
if you search after him with all your
heart
and with all your soul.[2]
We know that our Father has no difficulty assessing when his people come to him with their lips while their hearts are far away from him.[3] In fact, as I look up that verse, the meaning of the word for “far” from Yahweh, means, “to be disassociated ⇔ be far v. — to be unconnected relationally with another, conceived of as being far away from another.”[4] Father knows our dissociation! He knows our disconnectedness!
The above verse from Deuteronomy has encouraged me for such a long time that, to consider it from the standpoint of Father’s characteristics of remaining relational, just makes it stand out more beautifully.
The context[5] is that God has reminded his people through Moses of what he had done for them in giving them the law on Mt Sinai. His point is that there is no other nation in the world that has ever had their gods give them such a righteous and holy standard of living as the Ten Commandments. No other god has revealed its glory in deliverance as Yahweh did to bring his people out of Egypt.
However, since God knows the depravity of our hearts, he wants his people to know what to think of him if they ever turn away from the law and find themselves in some foreign land under judgment because of their sin (as per the later prophets dealing with this very thing). What will God be like when the people have rebelled, turned to adultery with false gods, and lost everything to go into captivity in foreign lands?
Answer: they will find him reminding them that, right there amid their much-deserved judgment, if they would only once again seek Yahweh with all their heart and soul, they would find him. They would not need to first return to the land. They would not need to first get their lives in order. They could call on him right there in the midst of their captivity, right in the worst of it, letting their hearts and souls open up to him as their one and only, and they would find him right there waiting for them.
So, what about the whole issue of searching for God with all our heart and soul?
The heart is the center of our mind, will, emotions and conscience. The soul is our inner self. The connection between the heart and the inner self is not a new concept in the New Testament. The thing that is new in the New Testament is that we no longer express our hearts and souls by keeping the law, but by attaching to God by faith. Jesus has fulfilled the law on our behalf so that we can now have heart-and-soul fellowship with the Triune God by faith.
Which brings me back to Paul’s prayer of Ephesians 3.[6] Look at the central issues of our heart and soul (inner being).
Paul prayed, “that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being”.[7] We know our inner beings are dissociated from God; here is what we ask him to do by faith that we could never do by keeping the law.
Paul continued, “so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith”.[8] We are to remain relational with God because he seeks constant relationship with us in our hearts. Again, that remaining relational happens by faith, not by works.
Paul then prays that we would both comprehend and know the agapè-love[9] of Christ in the real and personal way that saturates Scripture,[10] but with this clarification of result: “that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”[11]
This is our Father’s initiation! The Scriptures come first, calling us into something because it is what God is already doing. We enter this wonder of the Spirit filling our inner beings, Christ dwelling in our hearts, the fullness of God filling us, by faith that attaches to the love already pouring into our hearts.
The point of all this is to show why everything in the church must focus on how we are doing in our heart-focused relationships with God and his people. No one benefits from pretense. Our role-playing isn’t helping anyone. Only searching for God from where we are, calling on him from our hearts and inner beings, will give us the attachment to the Triune God to the core of our selves so that we can remain relational with him and each other.
Now, our sarks (flesh) will likely tell us how impossible this is (because it can only interpret everything through the filter of independently trying to be good), and so God adds this glorious benediction:
Now to him who is able to do far more
abundantly than all that we ask or think,
according to the power at work within
us,
to him be glory in the church
and in Christ Jesus
throughout all
generations,
forever and ever.
Amen.[12]
And, even in that, Father is initiating “remaining relational” in order to give us the greatest experience in all of life, that we could remain relational with him and his children in the greatest love-relationships anyone could ever know.
© 2019 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8
Email: in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.)
[1] RARE Leadership: © 2016 Moody Publishers. Authors: Marcus
Warner and Jim Wilder.
[2] Deuteronomy 4:29
[3] Isaiah 29:13
[4] Bible Sense Lexicon
[5] Deuteronomy 4:1-49
[6] Ephesians 3:14-21
[7] Ephesians 3:16
[8] Ephesians 3:17
[9] Agapè love is that distinctive love of the kingdom of God that
seeks God’s best for others instead of selfishly seeking our own interests.
[10] Ephesians 3:17-19
[11] Ephesians 3:19
[12] Ephesians 3:20-21
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