There is roughly 12 inches between the brain and the heart. In the life of faith this distance is covered by actual experience. We can have a head knowledge of many subjects but until we experience the subject or the situation it is merely theory. I could be an apple expert, know everything about the apple and never have actually ate an apple. A faith untested is like a car never driven. The point of a car is to take us from one place to another, the point of our faith is to take us deeper into the heart of God. In addition to having a car we need the fuel to propel the car. A car without fuel would be like a bird without wings. Faith without works is dead.
The Holy Spirit is the wind that propels us forward. He is the fuel that runs the engine. He is vital to forward motion. A sail boat without wind in the middle of the ocean is carried wherever the current takes it. If we live in this life without the direction of the Holy Spirit then we will be carried by the influence of the world and by our personal natures. This is why trials and storms in our lives actually promote growth. If we allow ourselves to run with the wind in the midst of these storms we can cover great distances in a shorter amount of time. The journey from the head to the heart is a difficult one, but vital.
Trials and tribulations will ultimately bring out the best in genuine Christians and the worse in the religious man. The harder the circumstances get for the genuine Christian, the more he is forced to his knees and driven deeper into the heart of the Father. He is humbled and contrite as he understands how weak he is and how much flesh he still has.
Ultimately the results of this is more love, more peace, more forgiveness and more understanding. The harder the circumstances become for the religious man, the more bitter he becomes. He has no joy or peace. He will not forgive his enemies and his hatred for those he perceives to have caused his sufferings increases dramatically. So, the trial, the deep valley, is death to one and life to another. The flesh dies and the spirit arises.
As I was walking recently, the Holy Spirit spoke some words to me. ” There is nothing more important than the condition of your heart.” It lingered with me for weeks as I pondered those few words. All of my Christian life I have periods where I retreat into myself and kinda shut down, withdraw from the maddening crowd and simply go along on auto pilot.
In Kansas we can go months without rain. The ground gets baked hard in the sweltering heat of summer. If a rain comes it typically does not penetrate the hard ground, instead there is a flash flood. The ground is wet for a very short period of time and then it is as hard as it ever was.
There are periods when it rains every day in the spring. The ground soaks up the rain and then it rains again and again until it is saturated. When the ground is saturated it takes only a slight rain to cause flooding. The creeks and the rivers are swollen and the landscape is in danger of being changed by raging waters.
If my heart is good, if the waters that flow from heaven flow through me, if my heart remains supple and soaked with the dew that falls from heaven, then it takes very little for the glories of heaven to flood forth from me, living waters that refreshes my soul and others. If my heart is hard, it takes a lot of water just to soften me up. Oh that I would learn to remain close to the source of life itself that I might be useful in season and out of season, that I would be a source of life to others.
Can you see the furrows on my brow
Each tells a hundred stories of the whys and of the how
I have walked through howling winds I have walked through pouring rain
I have journeyed through the joys and I have journeyed through the pain
Every single furrow marks the valleys I have trod
And the narrow winding road that leads me back to God
And every single line that is marked upon my face
Highlights the very fact that I have lived by grace
Each and every soldier bears the scars of many fights
For every cloudless day there are just as many nights
But even through the furrows and all my many lines
You will see my joy, you’ll see my love and many other signs
For though I bear the scars that are etched upon my back
In the depths of my very soul there has never been a lack
There’s a deep wellspring of peace that continually flows
Despite the many rains and the mighty wind that blows
There is a greater wind from God that carries me along
There is a latter rain from heaven that makes me very strong
The hand of God Himself is the hand that holds the plow
You will know I’ve been to war by the furrows on my brow.
Jesus was a man acquainted with sorrows. It is not something that we like to dwell on too often but there it is. When we are physically attacked, at the very least, we throw up our hands to protect ourselves. Yet when our heart is open, as it must be to walk with and serve the Lord, then it is utterly vulnerable to attack. It is like a city without a wall. It is so tempting to allow our hearts to begin to close down, to construct a moat around our hearts and make it difficult for people to ” come in.” I have cried out to the Lord many times to fill my heart with love even when I had not the slightest desire to. This is the Word of God doing it’s work, when our own love fails, when we come to the end of our emotions, when anger and bitterness and melancholy seek to drown us or perhaps apathy sweeps down like an avalanche and smothers everything, then we cry out to God for what we know is right and we wait.
We are told to wait upon the Lord, to believe that He is a rewarder of those diligently seek Him. If you are tired and weary, cry out to God and wait. Cry out for what you know to be right no matter what your heart or your emotions tell you. Then suddenly the presence of God will lift you and carry you beyond and above, high above the cares and pain of this world. He will make you lie down for a while in green pastures, He will lead and guide you and comfort you.He will do it. He feeds our hearts and waters our thirsty souls.
He prepares a table before us right there in the midst of our circumstances and we are strengthened to carry on. Every time we walk through the fire or the flood and walk out the other side there is a growing realization that surely goodness and mercy has followed us and will follow us all the days of our lives. This is the joy of knowing Him on this all to often painful journey. We persevere and overcome because our hand is outstretched to His and that outstretched hand reaches high into the heavens and touches His outstretched hand and we find ourselves before the throne of mercy and grace.
If every tear could tell a story
About your love and all its glory
Could you read the words that I cry
Could you even begin to try
With every single tear that fell
There is a story it will tell
A single tear that falls with emotion
Is deeper than the deepest ocean
Tears of joy and tears of pain
A single tear or falling rain
Some tears are caused by a poison dart
That finds it mark and breaks the heart
Some tears come from a cleansing flood
Part of the river and part of the blood
Other tears fall from bitter regret
Of all the things done we’d rather forget
So when all of your tears are gathered together
And are carried away by that heavenly river
They will flow to a sea and by its name it will bless
For the name of that sea is forgetfulness
I wrote this song for those who suffer from chronic pain of one kind or another, emotional or physical.
STILL GOD IN THE MIDST OF PAIN
Can I suffer through the pain
Can I love Him in the flames
Will you come and hold me up
When life has come and filled my cup
When my weary soul begins to tire
I find my Lord in the midst of fire
Oh Lord take me a little higher
And my Lord lifts me up
Will I make it till the end
Not without my Lord and friend
Oh Lord of wounds and stripes and pain
Shield me from the pouring rain
When my weary soul begins to tire
I find my Lord in the midst of fire
Oh Lord take me a little higher
And my Lord lifts me up
When all of life becomes too much
I desperately need to feel your touch
Oh Lord consume me with your power
And raise me up to your high tower
When my weary soul begins to tire
I find my Lord in the midst of fire
Oh Lord take me a little higher
And my Lord lifts me up
And when the race is finally won
And this world gives way to the eternal Son
You dear Lord were faithful and true
It was by your hand that I got through
When my weary soul begins to tire
I find my Lord in the midst of fire
Oh Lord take me a little higher
And my Lord lifts me up
Despite walking through the various valleys of life, including the shadow of death, He leads us besides still waters and He compels us to lie down in rich pastures, being fed and living life where others starve and die. While many cry out to God to take their cup from them, gethsemane shows us the way of righteousness and embracing God’s will and directions in our lives by drinking fully the cup. It is our light that overcomes the darkness . So many people cry out to God to remove the darkness, yet the answer, the solution already exists within us, Christ in us, the hope of glory, the light of the world. Let your light shine today, be that city on the hill for oftentimes we never know that the man or woman standing next to us is being consumed by the darkness.
A neighbor shot himself in the field behind my house on Tuesday. It is profoundly sad and tragic. I spent the the first few days of this week writing a poem about the many struggles that I had prior to becoming a Christian with this particular demon. This man was a good man. He was a Christian. I had spoken to him many times. The last time we spoke he gave me some tiny little crosses that he would hand out to people, he said that he knew I spoke to people and maybe I could give them one. I want you to know today that if you are struggling with this issue, please speak to someone, find someone. I also want to ask folks today to engage people more, even just ask how someone is doing. In a supposedly connected world we have become so disconnected. I pray the Lord’s grace upon his wife and adult children.
I was born with a trembling soul
Intuitively knowing that I’d have to pay the toll
Darkened troubled waters and the wind was in my face
Staying alive was just one perpetual race
Swimming up the river, never ever down
Really,would it be such a big deal just to drown
Just to stop the thrashing and simply to let go
And the darkened troubled waters would take me in its flow
You would see me laugh but you would never see me cry
The trouble with troubled waters is that they dare you to die
Hopes and expectations were for ordinary people
In my darkened troubled waters, hope was truly lethal
Pretending to be normal was the greatest pain of all
It looked like I was walking but it really was a crawl
The darkened troubled waters they were seeping into me
This was the kind of darkness that no one must ever see
It was the bottom of a bottle, sex and then a roach
In no particular order, this was my approach
And all the while the waters rise trying to pull you down
Any light was left receding as the darkness gathered round
Darkened troubled waters and a trembling soul
The man in dark was coming, he was coming for his toll
I looked around and found myself at the bottom of the pit
I looked up and saw no light and knew that this was it
I looked down in horror, no heart no flesh no bone
I looked around in horror, my God I’m all alone
And in that moment I cried “my God please come to me”
And suddenly there was light “I have come to set you free.”
And so it was and so it is my Father took me by the hand
Upward ever upward out of the pit into the promised land
He set me on the Rock and I looked down, no longer a heart of steel
Within my chest a new heart beat and it could love and it could feel
If you swim in troubled waters and there’s no where left to go
There’s no more fight, you’ve given up and are carried by its flow
There is a hand that reaches down and He will make you whole
For the hand belongs to the Son of God, He’s already paid the toll.
The freedom to do what is right, towers above the prison and the chains of commandments.One is initiated by love, the other is enforced by the whip. Holiness comes from freedom and freedom comes from love . And this love inspires and draws us and compels us to honor and respect and obey our Father in heaven because His love is the very air that we breathe and the air before the throne is rarified air and if we cannot breathe this air then we die.
The remnant Church will soon face such a flood of evil as has never been seen before. It is time to prepare. We must gird up our hearts and our spirits in such a way as to be completely dependent upon the Lord. Indeed, that is why the Lord is conveying His people into the valley of Acacias, into the desert place, into that final place of gathering before the great and notable day of the Lord. Once before, the Lord carried His people on Eagles wings. Exo 19:4 You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Myself.
The tenderness and beauty of the Lord can be seen in this Scripture. He delivered His people from bondage out of Egypt. Now Egypt is synonymous with the world. The Lord has begun to convey His people on eagles wings from the world, from the established church, into the desert where they will be prepared for the final battle. His people are being prepared for Martyrdom. They are being isolated so that He alone will be their sustenance. Jesus Himself was also taken into the desert as a place of testing and preparation.Mar 1:12 And immediately the Spirit drove Him into the wilderness. Notice the word “drove.” Interesting ,is it not, that the Spirit “drove,” Jesus into the wilderness. The Greek word for drove is “ekballo,” meaning to drive out, to send away or to cast out.
You see brothers and sister, once again God’s people are being carried on the wings of an eagle and being “brought to myself.” God is drawing His people close to Him in order to prepare them. What was the Lord being prepared for when He was driven into the wilderness? He was being prepared for humiliation, rejection, false accusation, imprisonment, torture and ultimately death on the cross. We too brothers and sister are being prepared for such things on a scale not seen before. Yet even in the wilderness, this shall be like “Eden.” You see in the beginning God drove His children out of Eden into the wilderness. Now, at the end of times He will make that very wilderness like Eden. For we know that it is God’s presence that creates the “garden of Jehovah,’ even although it is in the desert. Heaven is where the Lord is and joy and gladness shall be found in the desert by His people. This spirit of Martyrdom, this Spirit of Rev 12 where they “overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb, and because of the word of their testimony and they did not love their soul until death,” can be found down through the ages and it will be found in us as we glorify Him whether we live or whether we die.
A Call To The Remnant 