What a tremendous season I’ve been in. Full of disillusion, despair and hurt but at the same time life-changing, heart-transforming, destiny-calling. I have never felt so free and so good in my entire life, loosing what I thought I possessed to find Him in the nothingness. I wish you will be inspired to remain single-hearted as you read my sharing of His work in me.

 

Love only reveals himself to Love (Maurice Zundel)

I would like to dive once more in the subject of love cause it is the only goal my heart is set on for and I’ve discovered new depths of its meaning. Indeed, in Corinthians, Paul chose to end the passage where he summons us to earnestly seek the gifts that the Holy Spirit gives as He wishes, by saying this: «And now I will show you a superior way to live that is beyond comparison» (1 Corinthians 12:31). Which is the way of love. What can then be said about it?

In the famous chapter of 1 Corinthians 13, right after describing the nature of love, Paul goes on by saying something I never really paid attention to before: «When I was a child, I spoke about childish matters, for I saw things like a child and reasoned like a child. But the day came when I matured, and I set aside my childish ways» (1 Corinthiens 13:11). 

And some more verses ahead: «Beloved ones, don’t remain as immature children in your reasoning. As it relates to evil, be like newborns, but in your thinking be mature adults» (1 Corinthians 14:20). 

Those verses confirmed to me that there is something about love that requires us to mature, to take a step further away. So yes, we are to be like little children full of fearless trust to receive the Kingdom of God, but when it comes to love, something more has to be grasped. 

When I think about it, as a child, we are very selfish beings: the whole world revolved often around us, we wanted immediate gratification and to be loved without thinking about being freely loving,… because we had not realized yet that the universe was bigger than our peripheral vision.

So here is where we can choose to mature, to «set aside our childish ways»: No selfishness in love, no love in selfishness.

Maybe an other way to apprehend it would be helpful: When God said «Let’s make men at our image», do you know that He was not talking about a head and two legs?! He was talking  about who He is. And who is He? He is love by definition. So our created value and our destiny is love and love only. But the fall of men twisted our original value. We became the very perversion of what we were created to be. We have embraced a selfish perspective of why we are saved and made it all about us. Dan Mohler express it this way: «I have received a gift not from God called «Myself», hand-wrapped and handed to me by the enemy, his nature entwined in it: self-centered and self-serving».

I think we do sometimes let ourselves give into this mindset, being self-absorbed by our very own individual life («the peripheral vision»). Let’s just look a moment at our prayer lives, our daily choices, the vision of the future we are dreaming about… Is it looking like you achieving something really big? Or you having a big platform to express yourself? Or you succeeding in what you are gifted at? By this, I am not saying at all that we should never do great things in our lives or never dream big. Quite the contrary! I’m saying this precisely because our greatness has never been found in our works. Indeed, it has always been about becoming like God by beholding Him. 

We can, through the succession of days, forget that following the Lord is a very narrow path that requires renouncement, repentance and humiliation… (Matthew 7:13-14) Doesn’t look that appealing, nor is our first definition of success, right!? God once spoke to me and said: «Are you sure that this is what you want? Because there is a price to pay». And oh believe me, there is! I think it means that we can’t expect to be the glorious redeemed vision of ourselves only by making choices that sounds appealing to our feelings, that we can’t desire to reach a position that will require so much of us that it would crush us at this point of our life, that we can’t forever wait to receive and «position ourselves to accept» His love without giving it away first,… 

Simply said: we somehow forgot that it was a love thing, a thing that will never ever have to do with our circumstances or what we actually make out of our days. As I said, it’s about becoming like Him on the inside.

 

You can’t turn out a light shining from the inside (Steffany Gretzinger)

Joshua Lukes Smith experienced in his life this kind of pattern that I underlined right before. And this is what the Lord then revealed to Him: 

«Alright, I have learnt this the hard way. If you are driven by the relentless need to achieve or attain something to be recognized or seen, valued or secure, it will be the same drive that holds it once you have it. You’ll be swamped with comparison, competition and ultimately… the need of control. I’ve learnt if I’m not led by peace, there’s no guarantee of it being where I’m going. !What you’re looking for is in you! The world within, the revolution is within».

This leads me to my main point: We can be so obsessed with the world in our hands that we have forgotten the world that beats within us. We need to be able to hug our own soul before talking about changing nations. Indeed, what will you do when everything that you hold on to will be taken away from you? What will you do when your life will be shaken and stretched and tested? Are you going to blame God? Are you going to believe that there is something wrong with you? Are you going to let the fear of failure take hold of your heart?

The truth is that we will never be satisfied if we continue to seek after outwards things. You still don’t get it? Then read Saint Augustin (please read it carefully, again and again, to really embrace the weight of those words): «Too late, too late, I have loved You Beauty of old and always new! Too late I have loved You and yet You were inside, but it was me who was outside. And without beauty, I was rushing to these beauties that, without You, wouldn’t be. And You were always with me. It’s me that wasn’t with You.»

Is it striking you? Everything is inside. It is right now, right here, where you are. Not then, not there, not with. 

The thing is that it is so easy to put ourselves at the center, being deceived by our own thinking and feelings, desperately chasing after God, when it just required to turn inside. Indeed, this at out center that the Lord dwells but it is so natural for us to live on the surface of our being. To make it worst, we even sometimes seize some part of the world or some part of the self with such a tight grip that we make only snail’s progress toward our Center. Thank God, sometimes, out of His love, He strikes the burden violently from our hands (you know, those moments where everything seems to fall apart?). It is then that you realize just how very much you had been hindered and held back. So as Madame Jeanne Guyon writes it, you just have to allow everything to drop (notice that she didn’t say: you need an other power encounter…). Simply withdraw your hands from self, withdraw your hands from every other person and all things, because the soul needs no other force to be drawn to the Lord than the weight of love. Of course, that is something of a sacrifice. It can even be called a crucifixion. But you will be amazed to find that there is only a very short space between your sacrifice and your resurrection.

So what it means is that the power is in our hands if the world that we seek to change is in our hearts.

 

There is so little you can do for God in your lifetime, but you can love him a great deal 

(Roland Baker)
To love the Lord purely is to love in a way that is not seeking anything for itself. A love that only comes from the desire to please Him and to do His will, seeking nothing from Him, nor experience, nor spiritual enjoyment. There, Madame Guyon says again: «You will learn to love God just because you love Him, not because of His gifts, nor even for His precious presence». It means that we must put our human will to rest and abandon ourselves to a point where we stand in complete indifference to ourselves. 

It seems great for sure, but how can we become that selfless? Let me answer. We become abandoned by simply resigning ourselves to what the Lord wants, in all things, no matter what they are, where they come from, or how they affect our life. It is forgetting our past; it is leaving our future in His hands; it is devoting the present fully and completely to Him. It is being satisfied with the present moment, no matter what that moment contains. And you are then satisfied because you know that whatever that moment has, it contains -in that instant- God’s eternal plan for you. Pay attention here! Those are not simple words. They contain a revelation that will be unfolded to you if only you are willing. Imagine just a moment, this abandonment of the self will open up before you a life where you will feel good deep inside at your best and at your worst: You will have peace when you work at «Carrefour» to earn money as much as when you get accepted to a missionary trip. You will experience joy when an expected door closes in front of you as much as when favor comes your way. You will carry love when you get betrayed by someone dear to your heart as much as when you get married… A life lived from above.

If I talk to you about surrender, it doesn’t mean self-denial here. Indeed, self-denial only make us more focused on the outward things that we think we need to change, removing us farther away from our center and resting place. Therefore, the only way for us to conquer our «flesh» is by turning our soul completely inward to our spirit. When our soul is turned within, we withdraw from outward objects and constantly draw nearer to God. If you haven’t yet grasped the meaning of this «turning», read this: «Your main concern lies in dwelling continually upon God, who is within you. Then, without particularly thinking of self-denial or putting away the deeds of the flesh, God will cause you to experience a natural subduing of the flesh. Your Lord will put to death all that remains to be put to death in your life» (Jeanne Guyon). 

Turning inward is not trying to be the one that does the examining, the introspection of our self, because there is a good chance that we deceive ourselves, never seeing our true state. Instead, God does all the revealing and is the constant examiner of our soul, if only we abide in Him.

 

Moreover, we have to guard ourselves from being anxious because of our faults. You know when you «miss the mark» and you don’t know how you will get over it, when you don’t know how God can forget what happened, when you act in a way that you know doesn’t match with the glorious redeemed being (that became your true identity when you received Christ) and you feel overwhelmed by the weight of the circumstances and the lies that are running like crazy in your mind…

Well, firstly, such distress only stirs up the soul and distracts us to outward things. Secondly, our distress springs from a secret-root of pride. What we are experiencing is in fact a love of our own worth. To put it in other words, we are hurt and upset at seeing what we are. But we shouldn’t be surprised at our faults, our failures, or even at our own basic nature, because the more clearly we can see our true self, the clearer we also see how miserable our self nature really is; and therefore the more we will abandon our whole being to God, who is making us white as snow from the inside-out. Think about it guys… We do are miserable without the Lord, but there is something worth redeeming here. Our lives are worthy of the blood of Jesus. God didn’t save us just because we were still sinners but because He knows who we are. We didn’t need Him to die because we were so sinful but because we were so lost and confused and deceived. The price was so high for our Lord Jesus… there has to be something of great value there. We need to be back in His image. We need to forget anything that concerns us so that we can remember only God. This is how we were always made to be.

So remember, only if He is Center can He be Source. And if He is not Source, then there is an other one…

​

We can deal with the heart of a matter by healing matters of the heart (Joshua Lukes Smith) 

We have to realize that we have all things in Christ, but not all that He has given us has filled our hearts yet. And I think that sometimes, what prevent us from filling our lives with His love, is entitlement, this feeling of deserving something (whatever it looks like for you) coming from a root of pride and insecurities. 

We are so busy trying to be blessed and to have «more» and build faith, but really, faith works through love and love comes comes only from knowing Him, it’s a spontaneous response. So what I have been writing about has very little to do with giftings. I have been writing to you of an enjoyment of God, not of the gifts of God. Gifts do not constitute the ultimate beatitude. Gifts cannot satisfy our soul or our spirit. Our spirit is so noble and so great that the most exalted gifts God has to give cannot bring happiness to the spirit... not unless the Giver also gives Himself. It can actually be so easy to cheat on God with stuffs that He gave us. Eric Gilmour says this: «We must redefine success. It is not miracles, nor preaching or people falling when you are praying, nor packing up stadiums, it is not riches and it is not fame. Success is a heart that is captivated by the love of Jesus. So you have to let him hold you. When he holds you, it’s like He drains out all your inwards poisons: bitterness, selfish ambitions, pride, lust,... This to me is the secret of everything».
Eric Gilmour continues by talking about the heart of Mary of Bethany: «She is not in awe of His power, she has found that He himself is the fulfillment her person, the joy in her life, the satisfaction to her soul, the peace to her heart. Being with him is to have everything she has ever wanted to be and arrive everywhere she only dreamed of going. His presence has freed her from her need to have anything else. She found that most of all of her prayers have vanished simply by his presence».

This happens when your heart is broken and tender, when your heart is open and naked before His sweet sweet embrace. It makes me think of a revelation Kathryn Kuhlman got when she was in the darkest season of her life. Being drawn to the relationship this great woman of God had with the Holy Spirit, I red her biography. I discovered that she had made a terrible mistake that cost her many years, cut off from her trusted friends and her ministry. When she realized she had been deceived, this is what her biographer wrote: «Kathryn realized that she had become like those great stone lions she had seen pictures of in Europe, with the water pouring out of their mouths. They were able to give water to all those who were thirsty, but unable to drink of it themselves, for they were made of stone. Her heart had become like that».

I believe it is of great wisdom for us today. He wants your heart! And Basilea Schlink tells us about it very well: «So do not let yourself be tempted to follow paths which run according to earthly desires and which feed your ambitions, for this would hinder love for Jesus, and you would lose the first love» (Basilea Schlink).

 

To finish up, I would like to remind us of what we are all called to do with the words of our Lord Jesus: «If you truly want to follow me, you should at once completely reject and disown your own life. And you must be willing to share my cross and experience it as your own, as you continually surrender to my ways. For if you choose self-sacrifice and lose your lives for my glory, you will continually discover true life. But if you choose to keep your lives for yourselves, you will forfeit what you try to keep» (Matthew 16:24-25).

 

So tell me the truth
Even if it hurts me, even if it’s ugly 

My heart is open
Tell me the truth
Without the self-protection 

Love can mend what’s broken In me and you 

                                        Steffany Gretzinger 

 

PS. «Love, then do what you please». For when you have learned to love, you will not even desire to do those things that might offend the One you love.