HOLY HEARTBURN

There is one huge barrier that keeps most of us from hearing the voice of God, it is what Henry King called, “the seeming unreality of the spiritual life” or we could say “the overwhelming presence of the visible world.”

The visible world daily bombards us with its things, and its events. These circumstances of life push and pull (and sometimes hammer and beat) away at our lives. Very few people wake up as thirsty for God as they are for Starbucks.

The spiritual voice of God does not shout, but rather He whispers at us. He appears on the edges of the events of our lives. God is hovering always, longing for our attention. God’s little intrusions into our human lives are so gentle that they are far too easily dismissed or explained away. We are obsessed and ruled by the visible decay and death around us that we cannot seem to grasp the life of the spirit (Roman 8:6).

Hence, we are hindered from hearing because we too quickly and easily explain away the very movements of God towards us. God wants to be wanted! He wants to be wanted enough that we are ready, predisposed, to find him present with us.

Unfortunately we live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. Only a very hardy individualist or social rebel – or one desperate for another life – therefore stands the chance of discovering the substantive reality of the spiritual life of God, and hear His voice. Hence, very few people develop competent prayer lives. This is chiefly because they are prepared to explain away as coincidences the answers that come to the prayers that they do make.

If we are to “hear God” we must chose to be a spiritual person and to live a spiritual life. We will be required to “bet our life” that the visible world, while real, is not reality itself. Today we live in a culture that overwhelmingly gives primary, if not exclusive, importance to the visible. We cannot make spirituality “work” without having a significant degree of confidence in and commitment to the truth that the visible world is always under the hand of the unseen God.
This is the challenge that I face every day when I wake up. It walks with me through the events of each day. Will I, like Moses, “endure as seeing him who is invisible?” Will I listen for God then obey? Right now where I am, moment to moment, I sweat it out with my brother Paul: “My visible self may be perishing, but inwardly I am renewed day by day… it is working for me, to produce in me His glory, thus I refuse to look at the visible, but rather focus on the unseen.” (2 Cor. 4:16-18 paraphrase)

God has always used and invaded the visible. He has always provided visible points of contact for His people. Consider all the visible elements that He instructed Moses to build. Those elaborate provisions provided a visible means through which Moses might be able to hear God’s voice. The tabernacle, the sacrificial equipment, the rituals and so forth provided a point for constant interaction in the visible world with the invisible God. They were called to worship morning and evening, at the very door of the tent of meeting, “I will meet with you, to speak with you there” (Ex. 29:42). Here they, “heard the sounds of the words, but saw no form…”(Deut. 4:10-14). Here they stood, only one step away from the visible to unseen reality of God’s Kingdom.

The Voice of heaven becomes visible in and through the life of Jesus Christ. After His resurrection He appears to his disciples in visible form a few times in order to allow them to grow accustom to hearing him without seeing him. Thus it was “through the Holy Spirit” that he gave instructions to his apostles (Acts 1:2). He made Himself visible to them just enough to give them confidence that it was he who was speaking in their hearts. This prepared them to continue listening and conversing with him after he no longer appeared to them visibly.

Remember for a moment those two heartbroken students who were on the road to Emmaus. He caught up with them in a visible form that they did not recognize. He spoke with them from the Scriptures and explained what had happened to their Jesus. Then when they sat at supper with him, suddenly “their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight” (Luke 24:31). They asked one another, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32).

They realized that his words had always affected their hearts, their inward life, in a very peculiar way. No one else spoke the words or the way that He did. They realized that they should have recognized Him by the affect that His words had on their hearts. This was not the first time that they had discussed “holy heartburn” that was produced by Jesus’ words.

We are called to live on the road, on a journey, with intermittent moments of “HOLY HEARTBURN.”

Our healing, our health is directly related if not proportionate to our hearing of God’s word. If we are to walk in health, it begins with our hearts being warmed by the very VOICE of the One who came to “heal the broken-hearted.”

Today, be listening, be expecting to hear the voice that will warm your heart, and make you whole!!!

HEALING

"If there is one thing I hear with growing clarity, it's that God is calling each and every Christian to personally participate in the healing ministry of Jesus Christ." Brennan Manning

I love that statement! God is not some impersonal force trying to get us to conform to His will. No He is "Our Father"; a loving parent who is working within our lives for our highest and best.

A "healed" person is one who finds his/her identity only in God, and no longer in a role (wife, mother, father, etc.), in a career or profession (doctor, lawyer, pastor), or in class (woman, white-collar worker), a "healed" "whole" person is no longer shaped or determined by fears of failure or by what others think. JUSTIFIED BY GOD AND GOD ALONE! This redeemed personality is free! Free from sins, mistakes, opinions; it is free from the rejections it has experienced. This person is free: free to love -- even its own enemies; free to create -- in spite of the fears and hate surrounding it. This personality (healed person) no longer attempts to relate to others (much less the Body of Christ) on the basis of expertise of any kind, for it no longer finds its identity in that expertise. A HEALED PERSON (PERSONALITY) FINDS HIS/HER IDENTITY AS A CHILD OF THE FATHER!

A "healed" person is free from fears, outward pressures, undue domination by others. Free from the very circumstances of life and secure in his or her inner person, a healed person is able to confront and to deal with these issues rather than being shaped by them. A HEALED PERSON HAS WILLED TO BE ONE WITH GOD.

A healed person has begun a journey of collaborating with its Creator. This person has realized that he or she can create nothing of himself, but rather being "one" with God is now free to discover what the Creator is doing in and through his or her life. Healing then is surrendering to the "One" who can "RE-CREATE" our lives according to His Divine will.

Thus, a "healed" man is indwelled by God the Holy Spirit who now empowers man to be an "artist" or a "co-creator" with HIM. THIS IS OUR DESTINY!

Christ in man, resurrecting the whole of man; his intellectual, his senses, his emotions, every area of his being to be responsive to the very life of God. Healing then is the result of our union and communion with the very Source of life and all of creativity. In this union we become whole persons. Love flows from the uncreated to the created and out to other created beings.

God's love in us is the Divine Energy that overcomes the Fall every person and lifts us back up into the very life that we were created to live. To enter into this Union, Communion or "The Great Dance", then, is to enter into the Presence of the Holy Spirit, the dynamic activity of the Love that is shared between the Father and the Son, this is Healing to all of creation.