What is the Point?: Discovering Life's Deeper Meaning and Purpose (14 page)

Do not let your imagination run away with you, and do not trust your imagination over the written Word, but use your imagination to interact with the Scripture. God is the designer of your mind, and He designed you with the ability to visualize for a reason. As long as you stay within bounds of Scripture, you will encounter God here in the sacred space of your mind and your spirit.

I have had powerful times with the Lord by putting myself in the text. I saw myself as Peter refusing to let Jesus wash my feet. I saw myself as Mary wasting my inheritance on Him. I saw myself as the thief on the cross who deserves eternal hell looking into His eyes of mercy, through the blood that dripped through His eyelashes. I saw myself there when the tomb was empty.

The Word of God comes alive when you see yourself interacting with the Word Himself, Jesus. Jesus is the Word, and these stories about Him are revelations of His heart. They are given to us so that we know what He is like. Because He never changes, we know if He is this way with Peter, then He is this way with us. That is why we have these stories.

Oh, they are rich, and the Bible has a wealth of conversation material for the one we love. Though we are not literally at the table with Him, we are with Him in spirit, and the truths of these stories are real. Prayer is a real interaction with Jesus in real time. He is watching us, and in the Spirit He is with us. The exchange is real, not only imaginative, though the actual story is in our mind’s eye. Jesus is more involved with us than we know.

Remember, you must believe He is there and that He is paying attention and talking to you if you are going to be pleasing to Him. Write down your thoughts and what you have learned from your meditation. You will be surprised how quickly an hour goes by, and you will find yourself wanting to spend more time with Him if you stay with it.

One of my goals is to go to bed meditating and to wake up in the Word. The way you go to bed meditating is by taking a scripture, maybe one or two sentences, and repeating it over and over slowly in your head, emphasizing a different word each time. I’ll use Psalm 17:7 as an example: “Show Your marvelous lovingkindness by Your right hand.” You would slowly say this in your mind, directing it to Jesus. The first time you say it, emphasize the word
show
and think about what it means for God to show you something. Then repeat the text again, this time emphasizing the word
Your
. Do each word until you fall asleep. You will be memorizing the scripture, and it will affect your dreams.

All too often, if you are like me, you fall asleep on your computer or in front of some kind of TV screen, watching randomness in order to “dial down.” This is such a waste of time, and it hinders the dialogue between you and Jesus. We cannot take an hour a day in our devotional lives to try and start a fire if we spend the rest of our days and nights pouring water on the wood.

W
AIT TO
B
E
E
SCORTED
I
NTO THE
H
EART OF
J
ESUS

When you are interacting with Jesus through His Word, give the Holy Spirit time. Wait. Ask Him to increase His presence. Acknowledge He is there. Ask Him to escort you into Jesus’s heart. Wait on the Lord, and your strength will be renewed. Focus on the Spirit and commune with Him. He is literally there.

Sometimes you will experience Him in a more heightened way than others. The measure of experience is not up to us, once we do our part. If prayer is mostly dull or if we feel a lot, either way we take what He gives us, and we thank Him for it.

For more on this kind of prayer, I highly recommend these resources:

•
“
Fellowshipping With the Holy Spirit” by Mike Bickle (teaching series),
www.mikebickle.org

• “The Power of a Focused Life” by Mike Bickle (teaching series),
www.mikebickle.org

•
Celebration of Discipline
by Richard J. Foster

•
The Spirit of the Disciplines
by Dallas Willard

•
Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ
by Jeanne Guyon

•
Prayer
by Hans Urs von Balthasar

•
Fire Within
by Thomas Dubay

•
The Way of the Heart
by Henri Nouwen

W
HERE
T
HIS
I
S
G
OING

Where is this holy love taking us? It is moving us into the burning heart of God Himself. Our God is an all-consuming fire (Heb. 12:29). His name is Jealous (Exod. 34:14), and He never changes. He is not jealous because He is insecure, but because He is fiery love and wants to consume us. He is exclusive and gives all; therefore He wants all. The nature of fire is to consume. It cannot stay in one place. Either you are growing colder or hotter in love and devotion to Jesus.

Our lifelong journey is to stoke the flame by setting the Holy Spirit on our hearts and by meditating on Jesus. Love is not passive. Love is passion. Love demands everything. When we desire to get rid of everything in our lives that hinders this love, this love will propel us into radical, life decisions that affect our internal and external lives. We love Him in this kind of abandonment because this is how He loves us.

We must look at Him, day and night, feast upon Him, and meditate and be obsessed with Jesus if we are ever going to live in the wholeheartedness we were created to live in.

If you want to become a fiery, abandoned man or woman of great faith and love, behold Jesus, and you will be transformed into His image. This is what you were created for. In pursuing this, you will fulfill your primary life purpose, which is to be conformed into the image of love, satisfying the heart of the Creator who Himself is love. But it will cost you everything. It’s simple but costly.

7
AS DEMANDING AS THE GRAVE

T
HE FIRE OF
love that is being poured into our hearts is transforming us and escorting us right into the heart of God’s story. The Father is preparing a wedding for His Son (Matt. 22:2). Our ultimate purpose in life is to become the eternal companion for Jesus and a family for the Father. We live to become this and to bring as many people as possible to the wedding (Matt. 22:9).

For us to be “equally yoked” to Jesus in love, we must love as He loves. He loves with His all. He is the lamb slain before the foundation of the world, which means He was sacrificial love from eternity past. Sacrificial love was always in His heart, and He set His heart to be a sacrifice for fallen man. This is love: to pour out one’s life for someone else. This is love: to live and die for someone else. It is the opposite of our self-centered mode of living.

Love is the opposite of being self-preoccupied. Love is being occupied with someone else. Love is expressed the greatest in a sacrifice of one’s self for the one he loves. Jesus Himself said, “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends” (John 15:13). He is talking about Himself and saying that His death was the greatest expression of love. Since His humility and death on the cross are the greatest expression of love, it is God’s definition and therefore the image toward which we are moving as people who love Him.

We must never seek to pay the price for our sin, because He paid the price once and for all when He was crucified. Death no longer has dominion over us when we receive the gift of redemption. I am not talking about paying for salvation or earning His attention. I am talking about love’s definition.

T
HE
B
RIDEGROOM
M
ESSAGE

Throughout the Gospels we hear the voice of the Bridegroom, looking for a bride who will be equally yoked to Him in this kind of love. The Bridegroom message is beyond an emotional, sentimental worship song, although emotions are a significant part of love. Part of the Bridegroom message is knowing that He loves us in our weakness and enjoys the process of our maturing, but the Bridegroom message is incomplete without abandonment. The Bridegroom message is about His abandonment to us and our abandonment to Him in response. When He was rich, He became poor, giving all so we might share in His riches (2 Cor. 8:9).

The power is in the all. It is in holding nothing back, not in heart, body, word, or deed. The Bridegroom is the one who jealously wants our all, because He generously gave all. (See Philippians 2:6–8.) This is a beautiful truth that strikes the cords of the heart of one who loves. Paul the apostle describes the Bridegroom message like this: “For this reason a man shall leave his father . . . and be joined to his wife. . . . This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:31–32).

He defined love as abandonment. Paul said that the Bridegroom message involves leaving to cleave in order to become one. He makes it clear that He is talking about Jesus and His church. Jesus left the riches of His Father’s house and the glory He had with His Father to put on flesh. He allowed Himself to be confined by skin, and then walked on the earth in humility and restraint, in obedience to the Father. He is fully God, but as a man He committed His way to the Father and lived to do His will. He left His Father’s house to cling to humanity in order to give the Father the family He desires and to obtain His eternal companion.

Until we see His great abandonment for us, we will never respond in equal abandonment. When we see the lengths that love went, it creates in us a response that wants to love in the same way. This means that we too must leave all our old ways to walk in oneness with Him.

Jesus said, “He who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me” (Matt. 10:38). This is the voice of the Bridegroom. He also said, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me” (Luke 9:23). When He looked at the rich young ruler, the Bible says that Jesus loved him and then said, “One thing you lack: Go your way, sell whatever you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, take up the cross, and follow Me” (Mark 10:21). This is the voice of the Bridegroom beckoning. Jesus appealed to their desire to love Him. This kind of love is based on desire for God. It is more than receiving forgiveness, but it is the lifestyle for those who want to go all the way in love.

When I picture Jesus saying these words, I see light in His eyes, like the look in the eyes of a man in love who is saying, “Marry me?” To
marry
means leaving your old life and becoming one with another. It is entering into a covenantal partnership that leaves an old life for a new one. It is changing your name, your home, your future, and leaving the old in order to cling to Jesus in this way. He said, “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:26). We know from the testimony of Scripture that this doesn’t literally mean “hate” your family, but it means in comparison to the measure of love you have for Him, all other relationships are secondary.

Jesus wants to be our obsession. He has fire in His eyes and is eager to take us on an amazing journey of love. He says to count the cost before we start because it will cost us everything (Luke 14:27–29). He also said not to look back once we start: “And another also said, ‘Lord, I will follow You, but let me first go and bid them farewell who are at my house.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘No one, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God’” (Luke 9:61–62).

When we receive Jesus as Savior, we also get Him as Husband (Hos. 2:16). This is invasive and exclusive. The cross is a covenant where Jesus hung, arms wide open, heart exposed, beckoning the world, saying, “Marry Me!” When we receive His forgiveness, we said yes. And it is not a one-sided thing. It’s an exchange. He says, “What’s yours is Mine, and what’s Mine is yours.”

The Father also defines the Bridegroom message as abandonment in Psalm 45. We know by comparing Psalm 45:6 with Hebrews 1:8 that this is the Father who is talking about Jesus as Messiah. This is a psalm about the royalty of Jesus. First the Father gives a stunning description of events related to Jesus’s second coming when He will judge the earth for the sake of humility and righteousness (Ps. 45:3–5). He talks about Jesus’s beauty and majesty, saying that the throne of Jesus will endure forever. He is the King of the universe, and, as a man, He will rule from Jerusalem (Isa. 2:3; Jer. 3:17; Matt. 5:35). It is a glorious passage on the majesty and beauty of Messiah.

Then right in the midst of this beautiful song the Father sings about Jesus, I can imagine the Father looking over the balcony of heaven, right at the heart of humanity, saying, “Do you want to know the secret to My Son’s heart? This Man who holds the stars in place, who sits in the center of it all on His throne of glory . . . this Man who will rule all of the created order forever and the increase of His government will know no end . . . this Man who holds you together by the words of His mouth, He is fully God, yet fully a man. Do you want to know what He wants? Do you want to know what moves His heart and what He calls ‘beautiful’?” He says, “Listen, O daughter, consider and incline your ear; forget your own people also, and your father’s house; so the King will greatly desire your beauty” (Ps. 45:10–11).

Jesus greatly desires the man or the woman who lives abandoned to Him. This is what catches His eye and what moves His heart: people who hold nothing back in obedience, emotion, allegiance, and in every arena. He wants wholehearted abandonment because that is how He is. This is what Jesus calls beautiful. To be beautiful means to be attractive. It is what attracts Jesus. I am not talking about earning our salvation or favor. I am talking about the kind of people He wants to surround Himself with and the kind of people He calls friend. Like the twelve apostles who left everything to follow Him, these are the kind of people He wants to be around, because it is the kind of person He is.