A Holy Space

“Suffering opens the holy space in your soul that will be filled only when you’re dancing with Me at My party.” –Larry Crabb in 66 LoveLetters

We want so much to be delivered from our suffering. We have believed that the ultimate goal is to be healed from every pain. We don’t understand why loved ones must die, often at a young age or in the prime of life.  We can’t see purpose in brokenness and seek above all else to get our brokenness fixed, sooner rather than later.

But what I hear God saying is that we need to learn to live in brokenness. That holy space that suffering opens up in us will only be filled when we reach heaven. That means we must walk this earth with a gaping hole in our spirits… an ache that never goes away… perhaps a sickness that doesn’t get healed… a relationship that doesn’t get restored… a problem the doesn’t get fixed.

This is not what we want to hear. We can’t see beyond life on planet earth. We desire the good life now. And we should pray for sicknesses to be healed, relationships to be restored and problems to be fixed, but that is not our main goal.

What is our main goal? To know God… to feel the ache… to desire Him above all else, even healing, restoration and fixed problems. Those things will be taken care of when we reach eternity. For now, they may or may not be. God wants, above all else, for us to know Him… to love Him… to desire Him more than we desire the good life on earth.

I Want to Know God's Heart

I want to know Your heart, God. I have to know Your heart. I want to pray prayers that thrill Your heart. I want to pray prayers that please You… not prayers to bless me… I am already so blessed I can hardly see straight. I’m weary of my superficial prayers, and I sense that You are too. I’m bored with my prayers that must make You yawn as well.

I know there is a different way to pray and I want to find it! I want to find power in prayer. I want my prayers to take me into Your very throne room. You sacrificed Your son just so I could have that privilege, and yet I sit here and pray lazy, shallow prayers that require no faith. They involve no risk. Who would know if they ever got answered or not because they are so vague. Lord, I want to know Your heart!

Lord, the needs are so great. Help me today as I press in close to You… close to Your heart. Help me to pray the prayer that thrills You today.

A Confession

I blew it again today. I did not represent God well. I was judgmental. I was a gossip. And I was all this as I spoke to a person who has a shakey faith already. Lord, I’m so sorry. I failed have you... again. Father, please forgive me, but more than that, please make up for my failure to the person I was speaking with today.

Shortly after I failed God so miserably, I went to my class, The Truth Project. Part of the lesson was about “knowing” God. God is so big, so deep, so wide, that it takes us a lifetime to even scratch the surface in knowing Him.

But if I really know Him, I will reflect Him. As I listened, I was reminded of my fresh failure, and I felt sick. I grieved that I not only let God down, I really let my friend down. And I revealed a lack of my knowledge of God. My failure revealed how far I am from Him. I call myself a Christian. I am even involved in ministry, and yet I completely misrepresented Him today—all because I have not invested the time and energy necessary to know God on a level that would cause me to reflect Him rather than my judgmental, gossipy self.

I feel like I broke God’s heart today and that breaks my heart. I need to be broken.

I'm hitting my knees before God.

To Know Him

I have a friend who is desperate to know who her “real” father is. She has a step-father who has raised her from a young age and into her adulthood. But there’s this intense inner desire “to know him,” her biological father.

I can’t imagine not knowing my father, and there’s a part of me that’s tempted to trivialize this desire and say, “It doesn't matter! You know the father who love you and raised you, who loves your kids as his own grandkids. Who cares about the guy whose DNA you carry?” I don’t ever want to say something like that about something I don’t understand. Especially when I realize that my little girl may very well have a similar issue some day.

So, the purpose of this post is certainly not to minimize my friend’s desire to know her biological father, but I do believe that beneath her longing to know him is a deeper longing to know her Heavenly Father. She does know Him. She’s a woman of strong faith. But does she really know Him? Do I really know Him?

Our pastor is preaching a series on God’s love. This weekend, he talked about God’s desire for us to know Him. Pastor briefly mentioned a scripture in Ezekiel that says, “that they may know that I am the Lord.” He unpacked to word, “know” from this scripture. It doesn’t just mean that we know about God. It’s the deepest knowing, the same as the way a husband knows his wife – intimately. It’s a covenant love.

Well, I decided to look that scripture in Ezekiel up for myself. I went to biblegateway.com and typed in “they will know” in the New Living Translation. I found, not one, but 22 verses! But I also remembered hearing “that you will know that I am the Lord.” Maybe that’s the one Pastor was talking about. So I typed in “you will know.” I found, not 22, but 32 verses! So at least 54 times in the book of Ezekiel, God expresses His desire for us to know Him deeply and intimately.

I believe God has placed within every human being, a deep, intense desire to know Him intimately. We try so hard to quench that desire with everything from relationships, to drugs and alcohol, to ministry, to food! It’s time we all learn that the only thing that will truly quench it is to know God and open up our deepest, most inner selves to Him. That’s why I’m off to read more in the strange book of Ezekiel about God’s desire for me to know Him, my Unswerving Hope!

We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly as He knows us! 1 Corinthians 13:12 MSG