As Everything

"He loves to be loved by those who love Him."

GOD NEEDS TO BE NEEDED. Just as soon as we decide we’ve got this and put Him in the backseat, He goes silent. We have this idea that He’s the Big Voice In The Sky, incessantly talking. Though He does speak when we don’t expect it and sometimes interrupt what we are doing, His heart is for us to desire to hear Him. For us to need Him.

God wants to be wanted. He didn’t come to earth to live among men simply to fulfill the Law and the Prophets. It wasn’t just something on His checklist. He came to restore connection between man and God, so that He could express His love, and we could share it. As Adam walked with God in the garden, God wants to walk in the garden of life with us. He wants us to want Him to be there, for us to look for Him, to seek Him.

God desires for His desires to be our greatest wish. He wants us to want what He does. His heart is for Israel. They are His people whom He adores, so we should hold them in adoration. He is for life and against death, so we should desire life for all people, the young and the old, the unborn. He sent salvation through His Son so that all men could be free of the destruction of the enemy, could know the truth about His love for them, and walk in health and His all sufficiency for their entire lives. We should desire those things then, both for ourselves and for our neighbors, and also our enemies. He is against sin and for repentance, so that should be our prayer for all men. A man who gives His life to Christ is a man who will not be and do what He was anymore. Where we react to a person’s behavior with anger and complaint, God sees who they could be if they would turn to Him.

“For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour; Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.” (1 Timothy 2:3-4)

God loved in order to be loved. We read the Old Testament, and our natural minds grasp hold of His judgment. We focus on the people’s sins and the destruction of their cities and nations and miss the love of God that couldn’t stand in the same place as idols and demons. We see the mercy of God as what He does when everything has been destroyed. But mercy is always God’s first choice. Love is who He is. And He will always love and be merciful to the humble, repentant heart. He loves to be loved by those who love Him.

A strong man who knows His strength will not do certain things because He is aware of the damage He can cause. An intelligent man will not speak to second graders what he would say to those in college classes. God meets us at our level of strength and in our place of knowledge of Him. But we are not meant to stay there and forever be in second grade nor only able to handle the weight of small objects. We are told to lay down our burden, to give it to God, and to pick up His cross. We exchange what the devil has laid on our backs and lift up what pushed the gospel forward, out of us and into them. We go and do for God with the energy we used to use for ourselves and in so doing, show ourselves as God’s.

Our need for Him becomes His need to save others. We want Him so that we can speak the Word with signs and wonders following. What we desire is to make Him known. Then when we come home at night and things are quiet, and it’s just us and time to spare, our love is for His voice, for His presence, and what He will do through us tomorrow.

I sat with tears in my eyes, knowing they weren’t just mine but God’s. The worship I’d just heard was sung in English and Hebrew and Italian. There, on the screen, were Gentiles and Jews, Romans, their voices all raised to the God who had joined them together, to God who had taken what, centuries ago, was a huge gulf and through who He is, because they all needed, wanted, desired, loved Him, made of them a family. Here is His heart.

God made not a people, but all people. Not only one nation, but all nations. And He redeemed them for an ideal that He has fulfilled to resemble a man that He became, so that these He created would come find Him as the center of their universe. As everything. He is not only the Author of the story but the Reason for it, the Focus of our actions with Christ as our Savior. No longer do we live just for us, but for Him. No longer do we speak just on our own, but through Him. No longer are we just “me” anymore but have been changed into His image and filled with His glory so that He might know it.

“For the new heart and mind that you received is not riddled and consumed with fear and doubt—No! Trust has been restored and you received the mind, heart and attitude of Christ himself—the mind of God’s very own child. And now we are not afraid to cry out to him, ‘Daddy, Papa, Father.’” (Romans 8:15 Remedy)

“We can therefore be confident in approaching God, because we know he is eager to hear whatever we ask in harmony with his will. And since we know he gladly hears us, we know that we have what we have asked of him.” (1 John 5:14-15 Remedy)


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Suzanne D. Williams, Author
www.suzannedwilliams.com
www.feelgoodromance.com