Rising to the Heights… pt 4

I’ll be honest with you… there have been a few times in the daily care of my wife that I have fought both exhaustion and discouragement.  But in those times something on the inside of me has given me a spark of life that regenerates my strength, determination and faith to press on.  I believe that this something else is the tangible anointing of all the Word of God that I have been faithfully pumping into my wife and I over the past nine years.  In the darkest of times that I have experienced throughout this ordeal, His Word has always been there to remind me of His love and compassion toward my wife and I.

As I meditated upon this thought over the weekend, I came to the conclusion that God’s Word is His love and therefore should always be the first and foremost choice to lead me in every action in my life.  Follow my thought pattern here… Since I John 4:8 and 16 tell us that “God is love.” (KJV)  and John 1:1 states that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (MKJV) then it only serves to understand that every time I speak the Word of God into Piper and my lives, I am actually pouring God’s love into us.

So, on the basis of all that love that is inside of me, I am able to rise up to the heights of His love and take the high road when I am faced with things such as discouragement, a questioning faith and/or persecution.   I am learning more and more that our true identities, our life’s foundation, our confidence, our success in our daily responsibilities and our ability to “humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time” (English Majority Text Version) are all based on our individual love walks that are dependent upon our personal, intimate experiential knowledge of how much God loves us… individually!  

Let’s face it… It is Piper’s and my ever increasing, intimate experiential knowledge of God’s love for us that has given us the strength to carry on as we have walked this path over the last nine years.  Without that personal knowing of how much He loves us, I believe that we would have nothing to base our steps of faith on!  His Word wouldn’t mean much if I didn’t really understand that it is a carrier of His love for His children.

Without that intimate understanding of His love for Piper and I personally, I would NEVER be able to face the physical realities of what is happening with the most important person in my life with the daily sense of Godly expectation that rises up in me just when I need it the most… like during those ugly experiences of discouragement that try to lurk in the shadows of my mind.

So yeah… with that intimate experiential knowledge of His love, I am “able to take in the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love.  To reach out and experience its breadth!  Test its length! Plumb its depths! And rise to its heights!  How about you?

Have a great new week!  I encourage you to meditate on His love for YOU personally and then look at your life from that perspective… and as you do… keep asking yourself… “Are my daily expectations really based on my ever-increasing, personal and intimate experiential knowledge of God’s love for me?”