God's Pulse - October 28, 2018

Song of Solomon 4:9 - You have made my heart beat faster, my sister, my bride; You have made my heart beat faster with a single glance of your eyes, with a single strand of your necklace.

Romance can be a wonderful thing. I am not talking about dating and much of the romantic involvement so prevalent in our modern culture. I am speaking about a romantic interlude between knowing someone and marrying that individual---namely courting. This term, while archaic to many, is God's manner and method to bring a man and a woman together in holy matrimony. We have lost much of the innocence around engagements because too little of the courting element is part of our societal expectations. However, I do know of a few couples today that when they say their wedding vows to one another on that glorious day will kiss for the first time. (This was never my experience. However, in hindsight, I wish it was part of my wife's and mine experience.) God wants romance to be a holy thing, unsullied by the world and their norms. The purer we can keep love between a man and a woman before they share their vows, the more their intimacy will mean after the ceremony.

God does not require something of us that He does not expect of Himself. God's perfect plan demands chastity and purity before our earthly nuptials. In the same way, the Bridegroom, Jesus Christ, longs for His wedding day and the consummation of His love for the bride He purchased through His blood. The Song of Solomon is a wonderful metaphor of Christ's love for His beloved bride, the church. The first three chapters of this love poem declare the bride and bridegroom's love for one another on their wedding day. Their confessions of love have made many believers uneasy throughout the centuries, as many of the passages are noticeably erotic and sensual. However, let us take these in context. This holy matrimony is nothing more than God's perfect plan of fidelity before marriage. We are presented with statements such as the desire of the bride to be kissed by the king on their wedding day (Song of Solomon 1:2). The chastity of the bride is further remonstrated by the her declaration that her "perfume gave forth its fragrance" while she was at the wedding supper (Song of Solomon 1:12). What a glorious picture of Christ and His spotless bride that emits the fragrance of Christ to all! This is merely the setting that draws us as a private audience to understand the bride and especially the bridegroom's love for one another.

In chapter four, we see Solomon's love truly expressed in words for his bride. Our lead verse tells us how his heart rate is elevated by just a "single glance" of the bride's eyes. Can we then relate this to God's feeling about His bride the church? Some might question if Christ's pulse rate would change whatsoever looking upon the current state of His bride. However, we would be remiss if we did not understand how He looks well beyond our present state to the eternal perfection of His lovely bride. We have lost a true understanding of the heart of God if we believe He only views us in our present state. While the church of Jesus Christ, His future bride, is far from perfect, she is readying herself for that wedding day which inevitably will come. Even now, Christ's church is beginning to exude the aroma or the fragrance of Christ to a lost and dying world. However, we are far from what He desires in our present state. God through His Holy Spirit will continue to purge and cleanse His bride through the act of "holy courting." This wonderful process which the Lord is taking His church through is no where close to the intimacy He will one day bestow upon His beloved. Through every act of obedience and surrender to Him, we are making the church, His bride, ready for that day when He will reveal all of His love to us.

Does Jesus' heart beat faster for us as Solomon's pulse raced excitedly for his bride? I believe it does. Jesus Christ sees us as we are, yet He also sees us how we shall be through His omniscient foreknowledge. As His bride, we cannot rest on our proverbial laurels and not make ourselves ready for His appearing. Remember, five virgins were ready, yet five were not and their entry was denied by the Bridegroom (Matthew 25:1-13). We must continue to set our affections on things above, waiting for the Bridegroom's glorious appearing (Colossians 3:1-3). Is His heart beating faster when we gaze upward and inward toward Him? Not as profoundly as when He will one day return for a spotless bride, purified by our obedience and love. The "courting" continues until that day when He will intimately take us in His arms and never let us go! May we all long for that day, perfecting ourselves in holiness by humility and surrender to the Lover of our Souls!

Lord Jesus, we long for that glorious day when our hearts will beat faster and emphatically for You and You alone. Allow us to surrender more to You today, that our hearts would even now be Yours. Prepare us for that wonderful day when we shall be overwhelmed in joy and love by our Savior. In Your Name, the Lord Jesus Christ, Amen!

Your Barefoot Servant,

Rick

Love Lost - October 21, 2018

Revelation 2:4 - But I have this against you, that you have left your first love.

In his poem, In Memoriam, Alfred Lord Tennyson stated, "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all." Queen Victoria took great solace in this work of Tennyson's, so much so that she stated next to the Bible this poem was her great comfort after the loss of her beloved husband, Prince Albert. Unquestionably, this poem has been a source of consolation to many who have lost a loved one before their time. I especially think about children and their untimely deaths, how it must grieve the hearts of their parents and their loved ones. How tragic lost love of this sort must be for those who are left behind to bear this sorrow! I have often considered how our Lord feels when we grieve. Since sorrow is a God-given emotion, we must understand that He does grief in a perfect manner. We can only imagine the amount of colossal mourning God the Father allows Himself to be subjected to on a daily basis. However, His hope as well as ours is a coming day when He will wipe every tear from our eyes and we will experience eternal joy in His presence (Revelation 21:4).

Until that glorious day, we are still subjected to the results of sin and mankind's fall from grace. We are products of Adam's great calamity which usurped God's ultimate plan for the human race. Ah, but then that glorious event of the cross and the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ occurred which allowed us once again to be restored to the Father through His shed blood! I hope many of us reading this have accepted this wonderful restoration through Christ's sacrifice. If we have, we know and understand how Jesus' love fills our hearts like nothing the world has ever known. However, the tragedy, not unlike losing a loved one to sudden death, is when we leave our first love as our lead verse depicts in Jesus' words to the Laodicean church. How it must grieve the heart of God when we allow other things to captivate our hearts rather than His love! We may still do things in the same way as before, such as go to church and sing in the choir or even help out the poor. Yet, something is different. Our lives pull us in one direction toward these outward acts of religious business. However, we see a different dynamic happening throughout our day that does not coincide with our religious activities. Instead, we find ourselves fascinated by that new TV program and we cannot take our eyes off of it all evening. We justify it and say, "I deserve a little relaxation. After all, I work hard all day and I just need to unwind in the evenings." This may be true, to some extent. But have we considered how we used to "unwind" in the presence of God in prayer? Or, how we enjoyed worshipping God in the car on the way home from work and now we listen to secular radio stations instead? Beloved, time is the only thing we can give back to God. It is part of our worship, offering up a sacrifice of praise. There is no other way to please the heart of God then to give Him ourselves through the 24 hours He has given us every day.

Jesus Christ is a patient, wise God and will not demand time from us. He will only point out when we have lost our intimacy with Him. It is our responsibility to return to Him, humbling ourselves and admitting that we do not desire Him like we used to. He already knows it anyway. Once we admit that we have lost our passion for Him, He can then once again grant us the grace to want Him by changing our will to do so. There will always be a struggle in the will (or our "wanter") to humbly submit itself to Christ and His grace and power, or to rely foolishly upon our own power to "do" religious things for Him. Our sin nature will always seek the easier, softer way of resisting humility because it is foreign and distasteful to surrender to anyone or anything. The joy comes when we die to self and once again live to Christ as He then takes our intentions and empowers them with His life. As previously stated, this takes ... time! We must commit ourselves to keep coming, keep seeking, and keep knocking until He once again restores that lost love that He is so desirous to restore (Matthew 7:7). Remember, many of us who have left our first love did not do it in an immediate fashion. God may restore our love with Him immediately and then He may require us to seek Him out through a period of time. Either way, His promise is He will restore us to that place of intimacy if we will but give him our time to do so.

So, what are some of the red flags we have lost our first love? We might ask ourselves, "Do I feel a sense of loss that my Savior is not as dear to me as in previous months or years?" No matter how much we are "doing" for God, it doesn't matter if we are not "being" with God. As Tennyson implied through his poem, it is better to have loved because then we understand the significance of the loss involved. Otherwise, we would not have anything to gauge what we might gain by reacquiring this tragic misplacement of affection. God desires each of us to be passionately in love with His Son. Until we give Him our hearts to reaffirm what was once lost, He will never be content nor will we. May we all find and cherish the love of Christ within, once again, and hold passionately to it until He calls us home.

Heavenly Father, thank you for the love of Your Son for His beloved church. May we reaffirm our love for Him this day, promising never to stray. But if we do, may He bring us back to Him through His word to our hearts, understanding that we are simple sheep who need the loving wooing of the Great Shepherd. In Jesus' Name, Amen.

Your Barefoot Servant,

Rick

Rapture Ready? - October 14, 2018

Revelation 19:7 - Let us rejoice and be glad and give the glory to Him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and His bride has made herself ready.

A wedding day is a marvelous event. We have all been dazzled by the beauty of a bride on her special day. There is a glow and a warmth as the soon to be married is flush with beauty and adorned in her best to receive her bridegroom. The expectancy of her entrance is often announced by the familiar tune of Mendelssohn's Wedding March. When we all stand at a traditional wedding when this song begins, we are expecting the appearance of a bride in all her glorious beauty. Often, the father of the bride is proudly escorting his daughter down the aisle in a lavish setting. How tragic would it be if all the guests turned to see the bride without an escort, appearing in a t-shirt with dirty blue jean shorts and flip-flops! The stark contrast between her and the rich setting of the event is not lost on the observers. While those drawn together to witness these nuptials are in their very best, the bride has chosen to appear otherwise. Furthermore, the absence of her fatherly escort is painfully clear to the guests. Her attitude comes through clear and strong as she saunters up the aisle to join her groom: It's not what I look like on the outside. If he really loves me, then he won't care how I'm dressed!

While this may seem like an exaggeration regarding how a bride would show up to her own wedding, it is a suitable analogy for the attitude of much of the present day bride of Christ toward her future Husband. Our lead verse tells us about a bride who has made herself ready for the Lamb of God---or more clearly--Christ the Bridegroom. We are reminded over and over in Scripture that Jesus Christ redeemed us by His blood to purchase for Himself a people who would be holy (Revelation 5:9). However, to look at much of the church today, one would wonder if they have received this message---or if the church even cares! We continue to see concerning trends of compromise toward sin in the 21st century Western church. The post-modernist viewpoint has changed the Christian landscape remarkably in the past 50 years. Many of today's youth in denominational as well as non-denominational bible churches see no problem with homosexuality as a "life choice." Even more frightening, is how this is being reflected in our state legislatures regarding the attitude of homosexual marriage. At the time of this writing, seven states plus the District of Columbia have legalized same-sex marriage. Beloved, the devil mocks the church because we have allowed the spirit of this Babylonian age to take our society into captivity. How Satan must laugh when God's holy plan of marriage between a man and a woman is mocked continuously by evil! What was once a holy institution has become a defiled, base form of idolatrous hedonism as our society embraces homosexual unions. However, this is only an outward manifestation of a much deeper problem.

The perversity of these unholy unions are only one expression of the infidelity within the hearts of all men. Not only does the world join themselves in unrighteous relationships, but the church is increasingly turning a blind eye to sin and embracing similar associations. The reason is simple---sin within the church has reduced God's absolute standard to one of relativity. No longer does the bride of Christ call out sin within its congregations as it once did. How is it we suppose we will not be influenced to believe like the world when we are acting like the world? So-called Christians carousing with friends, drinking and drugging is not righteous living, beloved. Neither is spending a Saturday night at the casinos living like Christ. Or, how about sitting in front of a television set every night watching the filth coming out of Hollywood? Is this not loving the world rather than the Savior? It is no wonder the Millennium Kids and GenX'ers believe in relativity and an "anything goes" attitude. They have seen it modeled for years!

In many ways, the church is like that careless bride who expects Jesus to accept us "just as I am." However, many will say to Him on that day "Lord" and He will say I never knew you (Matthew 7:21-23). He is returning for a bride that is spotless, beloved. Not just through His work in justifying us through His blood, but through our obedience. Only then can he sanctify us for His purposes. If we recall the words of Peter, he likewise tells us to prepare ourselves for Christ's great appearing. He states: "Therefore, beloved, since you look for these things, be diligent to be found by Him in peace, spotless and blameless" (II Peter 3:14). A cavalier attitude like the careless bride in the previous analogy may very well mean that the Holy Spirit has forsaken us as our escort to Jesus. Furthermore, we may find Christ is not waiting for us at the altar as we might have hoped.

Is the church, Jesus' bride, ready for the marriage of the Lamb? Our opening verse states it has nothing to do with our righteous standing by justification before the Lord. However, it does state we have the responsibility to have "made herself ready." This means holy living, beloved. This means obedience and consecration so we might be sanctified by His power. Is the bride ready for her wedding day? Are we "rapture ready" to meet the bridegroom? Thank God He has not come in our present state! Jesus desires a bride who has made herself ready for Him by perfecting holiness and sanctification. For without these things, no one will see the Lord (Hebrews 12:14). May we, the church, get busy removing the idols from our hearts and tearing down everything that would set itself up against the King of Kings. Then, beloved, He will come for a spotless, consecrated, sanctified bride.

Heavenly Father, May we not shun the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. May we surrender ourselves in humility, understanding Christ desires a faithful bride that is not marked by this world. Even as unholy marriages mock Your perfect order, so also the church mocks Your command to make ourselves ready by loving the world. May we allow the Holy Spirit to escort us through this life through our obedience to present us to our Bridegroom who longs for us with purity of intention. May we come to the altar and die to ourselves that we might be made alive to Christ. May we give ourselves in thought and action toward that blessed day. In Jesus' Name, Amen.

Your Barefoot Servant,

Rick

Joy to Overflowing - October 7, 2018

John 15:11-12 - These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full. This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you.

We all desire to live happy lives. Some will succeed, even outside of a relationship with Jesus Christ. However, to live a life filled with joy is only possible by knowing the Savior. David tells us in the Psalms that to be in God's presence is to experience fullness of joy (Psalm 16:11). To experience God's presence and conversely His joy to overflowing, is a paradigm jointly supported by both parts as joy and presence are dependent upon each other. Simply, if we are experiencing God's presence then we will know His joy. Likewise, if we are overwhelmed with His joy it's because we are in the presence of the Almighty. There seems to be no divorcing the two. Having established that the two are inseparable the question remains: How do we get there and stay there? I believe the word of God tells us plainly how we can experience the joy of the Lord. However, I believe it also shows us how to experience joy to overflowing.

It is simply not enough to cloister ourselves away in study of God's word to experience the fullness of His presence. We cannot expect God's overflowing joy to overtake us through continual prayer and fasting. While these are necessary tools to the deeper things of God, they are not enough in and of themselves. There is a final ingredient to fullness of joy and living in the presence of God and that is revealed in verse 12 of our opening scripture. Jesus first tells His disciples that the commandments He has given them, if obeyed, will make their joy full. He implies they must love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength as the great commandment states (Mark 12:29-31). However, He then reinforces the second greatest command stating they should love each other perfectly, even as He loved them. This must have been one of those moments for the disciples similar to the Sermon on the Mount where they understood Jesus was once again expecting perfection (Matthew 5:48). They had been the recipients that very evening of their Lord humbling Himself and washing their feet. They must have thought it impossible to behave as their Lord served them, because it would have never entered their minds to do such a thing! Probably not until after they received the infilling of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost did they understand how God could fulfill all His expectations through them. Once empowered by the Holy Spirit, they found serving one another an effortless undertaking as they held each other in higher regard than themselves (Acts 2:44; Acts 4:32).
How do we practically go from the place of impossibly loving as Jesus loved, to the the place of being the servant of all? I believe there are four criteria to entering into a life of joy overflowing.

Confession -- It is much like when we come to the Lord initially in repentance, telling Him we are a sinner in need of salvation. We must come to Him with an honest appraisal of ourselves and tell Him we need His help in drawing closer to Him. As James stated, if we draw near to Him, He will draw near to us (James 4:8). Unfortunately, many believers don't make it past this elementary stage, leading to a frustrated, unfilled walk with God.

Profession -- We must profess who we are in God. Paul reminds us throughout his letters how we are children of the King and we possess all things in Christ (Ephesians 1:3; II Corinthians 5:21). To allow the devil or the flesh to tell us differently is contrary to Jesus' love message to His beloved church.

Obsession -- If we say we love God, we will want to be with God. That means time in prayer, reading His word, and meditating on His love for us. It means obsessing on our Lover, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Many Christians believe if they have given their lives to Jesus through the aforementioned acts of consecration, then God's joy should overtake them. After all, are we not continually in His presence if humble and walking with our Lord? There is one more criterion.

Expression -- Without expressing the love of Christ to others, we have failed the Great Commission to make disciples of all men. Who will enjoy the fruit of the Spirit in our lives if we don't allow those who are hungry for God to taste of His goodness through us?

If we are expressing the love of Christ through a confessed, professed, and obsessed life, we will know the fullness of God's joy. In the same way as there is joy in the presence of the angels when someone repents on earth (Luke 15:10), there will be fullness of joy when we are pouring out our lives for others as Christ commanded. Are we content to just enjoy Jesus without ever dying to self and living for others? We will not experience His fullness if we are. Once we begin to pour out our lives for mankind through His great expression of Christ within, then we will know His overflowing joy like we have not imagined!

Heavenly Father, allow us the privilege to be poured out wine and broken bread for all who would hunger for You. As we draw near to You, draw near to us and even nearer as we fulfill Your Great Commission to make disciples in the image of Your Son. Consecrate us and then empower us for this wonderful endeavor, Lord. In Jesus' Name, Amen.

Your Barefoot Servant,

Rick