Articles

Wholeheartedness - God's invitation to us

jhawkins — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 07:00:24 -0600

I’m sure we’re all familiar with what Jesus called the “first commandment”, found in Matthew 22:37-38:

“Jesus said to him, " 'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the first and great commandment.”
(Matthew 22:37-38 NKJV)

These 27 words of Jesus are perhaps the most weighty and most demanding yet the most inviting and invigorating words ever spoken. In them He gives us the only plausible outlook and only foreseeable future if we desire to live in the highest expression He has for our lives. He calls us to give Him everything. But many believers tend to look at these words as only a commandment and neglect the invitation into the commandment. This call to love God with all of our being is more than Jesus saying “you’d better do this, or else…” With every one of God’s commandments always comes the invitation and enabling power to walk it out.

Stepping into wholeheartedness - the invitation of loving God with all of our being - begins by looking at the way that God loves us wholly and with all of His being. God does not place boundaries around His love nor does He love up to a certain point. The verse we all take for granted – John 3:16 – gives us an amazing glimpse into the Father’s love. He gave His only Son for us! Imagine the tearing His heart experienced when He gave up His only. This act was not a small thing for God. He loves fully, and with that very same love He invites us to love Him and to love others (John 17:26). God has never loved or done anything in fractions, but only in fullness. His all-consuming desire has always been for our everything because He has given us His everything.

When we see that He is not stingy or reserved with His love, we can open our heart wide to begin to love Him with all that we have. We were made to abandon ourselves to Him completely. To only love Him with portions of our heart, soul, mind, and strength is to express ourselves to Him in ways contrary to the nature of love. And it is only in the place of wholeheartedness that we will be kept secure in the face of trials and in the seasons of blessing.

But the invitation to love God in this way is not just something far off at some distant point in the future. When He asks us to love Him fully, He is not demanding immediate maturity but rather a complete response to Him in the here and now. It is not something done or offered once and for all, nor is it just a promise we make to Him at an altar call or during our favorite worship song. Wholeheartedness is to be lived out moment by moment and choice by choice. It is with each step of our journey that we give Him our love through obedience (John 14:15,21), however ordinary, common, or weak it may seem.

Wholeheartedness does not occur somewhere far ahead in the future when we are finally godly and have our lives in order. The enemy uses this lie to keep us from radical love and obedience in the here and now. Loving God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength can and must be done in the context of the difficult, dry, common and mundane moments that we have been given right now.

In each moment of monotony, He has invited us through the doorway to fellowship. There is nothing too small or too trivial to not bring our hearts to Him in love and to consecrate as something done unto Him. When we are cleaning our house, mowing our lawn, going to school, playing with our children, driving in our car, serving at our job, etc., He is deeply and intimately near and familiar.

Lord, help us to live in this place - it is truly the place you've invited us to live in!

The great line of division: Is Jesus God?

jhawkins — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 07:23:53 -0600

I believe the greatest point of contention that men will wrestle with at the end of the age is the identity of Jesus. Is he just a good man that lived a few thousand years ago or is He fully God?

I’ve been studying Christology lately, and even just yesterday my roommate Tim spoke to some Jehovah’s Witnesses at our door. As we were talking last night, we both quickly made the point that the root of the problem in their faith is their misunderstanding of the person of Jesus. They believe He was just a mediator for a super-spiritual class of believers throughout history, the 144,000 “spiritual Jews”. They don’t believe He is God, and they believe He is still dead and was never resurrected, contrary to the belief of all of the New Testament writers.

I’ve been studying a bit on how Christology and the identity of the human being named Jesus as fully God fits in with the global prayer and worship movement being raised up all over the earth today. I’ll post more on that later…

One of my favorite passages on understanding the divinity of Jesus comes from Philippians 2:

“Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
(Philippians 2:5-11 NKJV)

Many of us know this passage well, but there is so much more in here than is just seen on a casual surface reading. Contrary to our popular belief, the “name above every name” that Paul speaks of is not “Jesus”. There were perhaps thousands of others who had the name “Yeshua” – “Joshua” or “Jesus” during the first century. The passage also makes it clear that Jesus was given this name above every name at His exaltation at the resurrection. He had been given the name “Jesus” from birth (Matthew 1:21), so Paul must be speaking of a different name here.

Every Jew at the time would have understood that Paul was speaking of “Yahweh”, the unspeakable name of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – often represented as small-caps “LORD” in Old Testament translations today. The Hebrew culture revered the name of the Lord so much that they would never fully write out His name either – it was always written as what is commonly called the tetragrammaton, or “YHWH”. When Paul says that everyone will confess that Jesus is “Lord”, he is using the reverential substitute in the Greek for the Divine Name of Yahweh, “Kurios”.

Paul is actually quoting Isaiah 45, where “YHWH”, the “LORD”, is speaking:

“I have sworn by Myself; The word has gone out of My mouth in righteousness, And shall not return, That to Me [Yahweh] every knee shall bow, Every tongue shall take an oath.”
(Isaiah 45:23 NKJV)

This is the key point in Philippians 2 – Paul is saying that a day is coming where Yahweh alone will be exalted, and every man, woman, and child that has ever lived will bow and confess that Jesus is Yahweh, God in the flesh, and in Him alone is found righteousness and strength.

God is going to confront the earth with His unique identity and vindicate His name by causing the whole earth to see that Jesus is the LORD. Jesus Christ, which is largely used as profanity across the nations today will be revealed in all His glory and be worshipped and acknowledged by all as God Himself! Every high thing will be brought low, everything that exalts itself now will be brought to the dust before the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords!

This article is a repost from my blog. If you'd like to comment on it, leave the comment on the blog entry.

Growing in Intimacy with God - Part 2

jhawkins — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 13:18:27 -0600

In part 1 of this series, I wrote briefly about the subject of intimacy with God – what it is, what it isn’t, and how we grab a hold of the means to growing in it. We all want to grow in intimacy with God, but in order to grow in something, we must have clarity on exactly what it is and how we grow in it because we can never expect to lay hold of something unless we know exactly what we’re looking for. Scripture tells us that we grow in intimacy with God by beholding Jesus Christ, the highest revelation of God’s nature, character, and name.

But what does that practically look like? In part 1, I made the case that intimacy can be defined as relational knowledge, and that the way to the knowledge of God is by revelation. If the pinnacle of the revelation of God is in a human being named Jesus Christ, then intimacy is simply the prayerful, adoring study of the person and work of Christ in the context of a life of obedience.

Author A.W. Pink says the following in his “Exposition of the Gospel of John”:

“If the believer would enter into a better, deeper, fuller knowledge of God he must prayerfully study the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ as revealed in the scriptures! Let this be made our chief business, our great delight, to reverently scrutinize and meditate upon the excellencies of our Divine Savior as they are displayed upon the pages of Holy writ. Then, and only then, shall we ‘increase in the knowledge of God’. The ‘light of the knowledge of the glory of God’ is seen only ‘in the face of Jesus Christ.’”

Studying the life and works of Jesus becomes more than a dry, dull exercise. It can be likened to the way one would spend long hours peering at a breathtaking landscape in order to drink it in as much as possible. David longed to “behold the beauty of the Lord” (Psalm 27:4) and Mary longed to “hear His word” (Luke 10:38-42). Biblically, this is the posture that the Lord is looking for from us – so much so, in fact, that He called it the one thing that is necessary or needful. It is to actually take real time and give it to Jesus by “beholding the beauty of the Lord” and “hearing His word”. This practice, however, is not a nebulous thing where you close your eyes and somehow see a swirling cloud of light and energy, or you sit in silence wishfully hoping to hear a loud booming voice from heaven. What David, Mary, and Jesus are talking about is so simple in practice that anyone can do it. The Scriptures have so much to say about Jesus if we would simply turn our attention to it. He is “the Word” not just in the things that He speaks, but He is a person, an identity. So in that, we are hearers of the Word every time we see Jesus. When we think about God, do we first think about Revelation 4 or John 4? Do we see God in the flesh talking to a sinful woman on a hot day about her past and future? This is indeed “hearing” and “beholding”, for in it we discover what God is really like. We must see the Scripture as more than words on the page, but as a launching pad into this realm of “beholding”, or studying and savoring the life, works, deeds, and words of Christ. This is true “beholding” and “hearing”.

Many believers, as they pursue intimacy with God, relate to Him as though the Incarnation (God becoming a human in the person of Jesus) had never happened. We enter into the place of devotion and think we’re trying to build a bridge between our little heart and a far away distant God who is stingy and doesn’t want to reveal Himself in the way that we want Him to. But the truth is that the 89 chapters of the four gospels scream loudly about who God is and what He is like. He is so gracious about His self-revelation if we indeed look for Him where He is to be found. Confidence in His love towards us and the whole plethora of the knowledge of God opens up when we look at the person of Jesus. We aren’t stuck as a weakling trying to somehow bridge the gap anymore.

So the practice of growing in intimacy with God is essentially knit to the acquiring of experiential knowledge about the person of Jesus. Unless Jesus is the focal point of our pursuit, all movements towards God will at the least end in frustration if not confusion. Reading books, attending conferences, or listening to teaching about intimacy may be potentially useful and edifying but can result in very little heart growth if our vision is not set upon Christ with waning distraction. We can’t expect to walk out the lifestyle Jesus prescribed in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) apart from a preoccupation with the One writing the prescription.

John of the Cross, a 16th century Catholic saint, said:

“God could reason as follows: If I have already told you all things in My Word, My Son, and if I have no other word, what answer or revelation can I now make that would surpass this? Fasten your eyes on Him alone because in Him I have spoken and revealed all and in Him you will discover even more than you ask for and desire. You are making an appeal for locutions and revelations that are incomplete, but if you turn your eyes to Him you find them complete. For He is My entire locution and response, vision and revelation, which I have already spoken, answered, manifested, and revealed to you by giving Him to you as a brother, companion, master, ransom, and reward.”

Opening the scriptures and reading, studying, and meditating on Jesus is so simple that anyone can do it, but it’s so simple that few actually do it with consistency. Set a schedule to read, pray through, and journal on the scriptures daily. It’s more than mildly important to give ourselves to the Lord daily, it’s critical - our little weak hearts wander so easily and quickly. It’s only in this place that we can expect to grow in true intimacy and grow in the knowledge of God.