What is the Point?: Discovering Life's Deeper Meaning and Purpose (12 page)

It is stunning to me how our human frame was created. At the core of every person there is a sacred space reserved for God Himself. The inner life of the human is a severely neglected reality. From within you are defined, and what happens on the inside of you shapes what you do and how you live on the outside. It all starts in the center.

G
ARDEN

There’s a place within,
where no man can go,
in the secret reservoir of the soul.
In Your jealousy, You’ve created me
as a garden enclosed
for You alone.
Here it’s You and me alone, God.
You’ve hedged me in
with skin
all around me.
I’m a garden enclosed,
a locked garden.
Life takes place
behind the face,
where it’s You and me alone.
I don’t want to waste my life,
living on the outside.
I’m going to live from the inside out.
So, come into Your garden.
¹

God created humans with layers, and at the depths we are reserved for Him alone. No man can reach those depths. As I mentioned in a previous chapter, there is a world within every human. Each of you reading this book right now has a world within that no one can automatically know. You have feelings, thoughts, images, and conversation going on inside of you. Life takes place “behind the face.” The majority of our lives are lived in our thoughts, our heart, and our soul. This is why three of the four ways that Jesus commanded and prophesied that we would love Him are internal and out of the sight of man. We have utterly underestimated the power of the mind, and we have criminally wasted the most sacred space in creation— the internal world.

Think about it. Most of your life you are either sitting quietly in your own thoughts, having perpetual conversation in your head, or you are asleep where you are deep in your own soul. You cannot turn the conversation off, and you cannot turn the images off. This is because you were created for prayer. Prayer is a dialogue with God and a meditation on Him, which involves words and pictures. Each of us is designed for God, and He has fashioned our hearts individually (Ps. 33:15). Only you can give Him your love. No one else can.

We will never be fulfilled or satisfied until we encounter God at the heart level, because by design this is what we were created for. It would be like a bird never flying for a human to never experience God. We were made to soar the heights of encounter. We will never be content with our feet on the ground. If we do great acts of service but don’t have Him, we are empty.

The Holy Spirit is divine fire, the very being of God Himself, and we must continually encounter Him. “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3). This is experiential knowledge.
Eternal life
here is not only speaking of quantity but quality.
Know
in this passage speaks of experience. There is a quality of life that He gives that is a literal encounter with the living God. It is not a metaphor or only symbolic. We must come into contact with God Himself, who is an all-consuming fire (Heb. 12:29).

Set me as a seal upon your heart . . . for love is as strong as death . . . its flames are flames of fire, a most vehement flame.

—S
ONG OF
S
OLOMON
8:6

Jesus commands us to set Him as a seal on our hearts. He urges us to cry out to know Him as the God of all-consuming love. We set Jesus on our hearts simply by asking Him for it with a spirit of faith and obedience. To set Jesus as the seal on our heart means to beckon His fiery presence to touch or seal our hearts. By the very definition of love we must invite Him. He will not force us into a relationship of voluntary love. He waits until we invite Him in the matters of our heart.

We can’t live without a greater reality of Song of Solomon 8:6, because life is too lonely, empty, and aimless without a greater depth of the love of God. We must put this vision before our eyes over and over again. When God promises to write His name on us, this is in essence the same as putting His seal on us (Rev. 3:12; 22:4; Heb. 10:16). The theme of Song of Solomon 8:6 is God’s commitment to supernaturally seal our hearts with His fiery love. This refers to the supernatural anointing of the Holy Spirit to love Jesus as the Father loves Him and to fellowship with the burning heart of the Trinity as our greatest prize and primary destiny.

God wants to release the anointing of love as a seal. This seal is the guarantee that we will be brought forth in love (Rom. 5:5; Eph. 1:13). His plan will not fail, and the first commandment will prevail. God will have a people in unity with Him, and He will help us to love Him in the way He loves us. Jesus prophesied over us by not only commanding that we love Him but also declaring that we
shall
surely love God with all our hearts. He will help us. We must intentionally pursue this anointing of the love until the first commandment is in first place in our lives and ministry (Matt. 22:37). To set Jesus as a seal on our hearts is to call on Him to visit us by His Spirit until the influences of His love are progressively imparted more and more to our mind, emotions, and ministry. We set Him on our heart over and over again.

There is a literal encounter we have with God when we commune with the Holy Spirit. It is not imaginative or just a metaphor. It is a literal contact with God Himself. I am not talking about perpetual ecstasy or unusual encounters that are “supernatural” in the way that we typically define supernatural. I believe we will have those encounters on occasion. But what I am talking about is a steady stream of fire that is God Himself being poured into our hearts (Rom. 5:5). That steady stream will become a raging torrent until we are one with that holy, pulsating heart of divine fire.

We cannot fathom what we have been invited into in the “fellowship of the burning heart,” and the Holy Spirit is the guarantee that we will enter into the Creator’s original intention by becoming one with Him in the baptism of fire (Luke 3:16).
“
Our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29). Notice this is an action word, and it implies a continual consuming. He doesn’t look like fire, He doesn’t “put on fire” or “use fire,” He is fire. He is light, and every light that shines is a light that burns, and He is love (1 John 4:16). Our God is fire, light, and love. This is the essence of who He is. Who can dwell with everlasting burnings (Isa. 33:14)? Who can contain the fire of God?

Scripture says that Jesus longs to baptize us with fire (Luke 3:16). In the Upper Room they were given a down payment of this flame (Acts 2:1–4). The very essence of God is supernatural fire, and every heart is a furnace. His Word is the fuel, and His Spirit the flame.

H
OLY
S
PIRIT

The Holy Spirit is the fire of God living in us, burning continuously. Jesus even said that it was better if He went back to heaven in order that the Father would send the Holy Spirit. He said it was better, because then He would be in us and we would be in Him, even as He is in the Father and the Father is in Him (John 14:10–11; 16:7).

Wow! What did those twelve young Jewish boys think about these shocking words? Jesus spent three and a half years walking with these twelve guys, living with them, and traveling with them. They were well acquainted with one another and loved one another deeply. They knew Jesus as their Messiah, the one that they had been waiting for, and they believed He was going to overturn Rome and take over Jerusalem at any point. They could see the momentum building as the multitudes began to follow Him. They saw the miracles, they heard His words, and they saw His interaction with the leaders of Israel. It was all culminating into what they thought would be the fulfillment of Scripture where the Son of David would take over the throne in Jerusalem and rule the world from that holy city. Arguing about who would be the greatest and who would sit at His right hand, the disciples began to make plans for the future. They were clueless to the great delay they were about to enter into. They didn’t grasp that He had come to die.

Before arriving in Jerusalem, Jesus told them He would be killed in the city (Matt. 17:23; Mark 9:31). He told them He would fulfill what He came to do, and He came to die. Imagine the drama of this moment. The man they knew to be the Anointed One, the deliverer of Zion, the man they knew personally as friend was telling them He was about to die. They had hopes in Him as their future King, and they had love for Him as their dearest friend. These guys had walked with Him day after day and had grown accustomed to His words, His smiles, and the light in His eyes. They loved this man. He looked at them and said:

Because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart. Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you.

—J
OHN
16:6–7

He also said:

I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever—the Spirit of truth . . . He dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.

—J
OHN
14:16–18

Imagine your best friend looking at you and saying, “I am going to die, but it is good. Don’t worry, because when I die my spirit will be in you, and we will actually be closer than we are now. We will be closer than me sitting in front of you talking, because I will be in you and you will be in me. We will be one.” These young guys must have been utterly confused by His words.

Oh! I tread upon this sacred text with awe. I know I am only peering into the mere edges of what Jesus was saying. God living in humans! Humans living in God! What? Oh, beloved! Who are we? What is this treasure in the earthen vessel of you and me (2 Cor. 4:7)? Christ in us is the hope of glory (Col. 1:27).
Christ
means anointed; this is talking about Jesus’s Spirit. Christ in me is the hope of glory. His presence in me is what transforms me into His image, which is the image of love and therefore my ultimate purpose and destiny.

I cannot transform myself. I need the aid of God and God Himself in me. The Potter is molding me into what He desires, which is love. All of life is a journey of transformation from a cold heart to a raging fire of love for Him. He gives us a little at a time, because we cannot contain much. But the Holy Spirit is the guarantee that the work will be completed and we will be brought forth in love: “You were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise” (Eph. 1:13).

A
BIDE IN THE
V
INE

The value of the gift of the indwelling Spirit cannot be exaggerated. The Holy Spirit is the most underestimated person. We have grown accustomed to language about Him, but rare is the man or woman who actually lives in Him and stays there. This is the thing that you must know: the Holy Spirit is a real person, and if you have come through the door of Jesus and accepted His sacrifice, you have been born again, or born of the Spirit. At this point the Holy Spirit was given to you and lives inside of you. It is not imaginative, it is not an analogy, but literally God Himself lives in you. He is Spirit and lives in your spirit. It is as though your spirit was empty and void, but when you received Jesus, the Holy Spirit came, and there was light in your spirit. It is a literal, creative work. A supernatural thing happened when the Spirit came to live in you. He is a real person, and the power of life is in talking to Him. You have all of the resource of God Himself living inside of you. We cannot fathom what happened when Jesus said that He would send the Spirit to be in us and that we would be in Him.

I remember the day that we were doing a “Worship With the Word” session here at IHOP-KC. This is a session where we take a passage of Scripture and sing through it, spontaneously developing it through prayer and song. It’s like having a Bible study through song. We were singing around John 15:4–5: “Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.” Mike Bickle was prayer leading that day. Before we went on stage, he told us how to interpret the text so that we could better understand it. He said, “Every time it says the word
abide
replace it with ‘talk to,’ and the passage will come more alive.”

Abiding in the vine is not only talking to Him, but it is a large part of it. It’s simple: “Talk to Me, and I will talk to You.” You will not abide in the Spirit more than you talk to Him and listen to Him. Talking to the Holy Spirit, as a real person, is the power of Christianity. We need to get rid of anything that hinders this conversation. We are not just reciting memorized liturgy; we are talking to a real person. He knows everything. He will even speak to us about the most practical, basic things such as how we should live, our finances, and even our relationships. He is our friend in a literal way. This continual dialogue is the key to sustaining a life of prayer and therefore a life of connection with God, which is our ultimate destiny. Everything else falls into place when we keep this one thing the center.

We are meant to be men and women of the spirit, and when we fellowship with Him, we are fellowshipping with the power that transforms both us as individuals and society around us. I once heard a preacher say, “The chariot the Holy Spirit rides best in is the Word of God.” We must never go out of the bounds of Scripture, but talk with the Holy Spirit and listen to Him. He will give ideas, impressions, pictures, and words. He doesn’t typically speak aloud. Just be with Him.