My friends, I need you to know how wildly grateful I am for you. You have blessed me so immensely and taught me worlds about the Father’s faithfulness within the last six weeks. All I did was hand-write a few letters and push a quick blog last month, and you all have fortified me and my ministry with so much hope and courage. I am so grateful for you. A month and a half ago, I asked you to be on my team and, collectively, you’ve supported me with over $4,000 (which is over 20% of my goal). Praise God!
(ps, if you’ve read this far, but don’t know what in the world I’m talking about, check out my last blog!)
I’ve been thinking about writing you for weeks, but aside from a quick and sincere “thank you”, I didn’t know what to say. But here we are, embarking on a yearlong journey into sharing whatever God is teaching me. I want you to know the ways that He is ministering to me and preparing me, so that’s what this blog will be centered on. A couple years ago, before I really knew the Lord like a best friend, I quite literally could not comprehend vulnerability. Being honest about my emotions and failures and even my successes and victories was an utterly paralyzing concept to me. But upon meeting the King with a new disposition – that is, actually meeting with my Dad rather than some ambiguous religious entity that I constantly failed to relate with – I couldn’t not be vulnerable. I couldn’t not be honest with people. I couldn’t not share what He’s done for me. So I suppose that this is a preface, simply to inform you that I have all intentions of being raw as I share my reality, in hopes that you would receive it with grace as a reader. I want you to know who the King is to me.
So here’s what I have to say — or what God has had to say to me recently…
I spent most of last December begging the Lord for a level of intimacy that I had not experienced in months, a pretty serious petition that He answered like the rain. A couple of weeks later, I found myself laying on my bed, eyes filled with tears of lovesickness as I rested in the secret place. In that moment, God gave me a picture: I saw myself laying on my bed from His point of view as I stood next to Him high above. He whispered to me, “I’m so in love with my daughter. She’s so pure.” He told me that He would have died for me even if I were the only life on the line. Listen to this: then he told me,
“I could never love you more than I do right now.”
Read that back to yourself: He could never love you more than He does right now. There’s nothing that you could do to win any greater amount of His affections, nor anything you could do to curtail his obsession with you. But when we honor God with our time, He honors our diligence with intimacy. He equally yearns for intimacy with you — His bride, His lover, His best friend. Yet it is only when we drop everything and run with abandon to the throne of grace that He gives more of Himself to us. It is in this posture that the secret place is transformed from a chore to our truest and surest delight. When we run with desperate abandon into the throne room to commune the King, we desert our tendencies to tiptoe into His side room. Here, we begin encounter His whole self — the fullness of His ravishing beauty — rather than simply experiencing mere portions of His character that we like most.
That one morning could pretty fairly sum up the atmosphere of the surrounding month — I spent every moment of my time in the secret place in a stupid amount of awe, typically with eyes filled with tears of love and inexpressible affection. What an answered prayer.
And here’s what he revealed to me: glory.
He brought me to Isaiah 6:
“I saw in a vision the Lord sitting on a throne, high and exalted, with the train of His royal robe filling the temple. Above Him seraphim stood; each one had six wings: with two wings he covered his face, with two wings he covered his feet, and with two wings he flew. And one called out to another, saying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts; The whole earth is filled with His glory.’”
As if I wasn’t already enraptured by this verse, He brought me to Revelation 11 the next week:
“And the twenty-four elders who sit on their thrones before God fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying, ‘We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, who is and who was, for you have taken your great power and begun to reign.’”
These two verses alone give such a perfect window into the tiny bit of God’s glory that we can comprehend. I close my eyes and imagine these heavenly beings covering their faces and feet as they sing over and over, “Holy, holy, holy, holy, holy, holy are you Lord.” Never do they tire of His glory. And I imagine 24 elders, faces flat on the floor, absolutely enthralled by His beauty. My sister Sarah shared this picture of heaven with me that she envisioned: we will be worshiping before the King and He will move one-half inch so that we see a whole new dimension of His glory. And we will fall flat on our faces and worship Him for another thousand years, until He moves another half-inch. Never will we tire.
But what blows my mind is the same thing that the Psalmist struggled to wrap his mind around in Psalm 8. In all of His glory and might and power and radiance,
“What is man that you are mindful of him?”
God, in all of His glory, wants to use you and me:
“How majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy. When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?”
God, in all of magnitude, chooses to ordain His strength through us. That causes me to ask, “What is man that His is mindful of us?” But He delights in using us when we are willing to drop everything and run with abandon to the throne of grace. I am so eager for the King to manifest His strength through my weakness, and to become more like Him as I feast in His throne room. Hallelujah!
You are the spring of water that is nourishing my ministry. Again, I am so grateful for you. Praise God for your faithfulness. I pray that you would run to the throne of grace, experience His glory, and stand in awe of His generosity toward us. It is through our weakness that the King manifests His strength. Let’s live into our calling. I praise God for you.
All of my love,
A
