I was the last one to go to bed last night and the first to wake up this morning. The Lord had some things He wanted to discuss and He needed my undivided attention. (Once the baby wakes up my focused attention turns into multi-tasking and "division" is a necessity). So I grabbed my coffee, kept all the lights off, and cozied up in the corner of the couch to pray.Prayer began like a nice morning stroll discussing different areas of life with the Lord until I began to think about the price that He had to pay for my sin. It had been a while since I truly stopped and meditated on that truth outside of a sermon. When I taught through the Gospel of John with the women's study a couple of years ago, the scene with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane had touched me in a fresh way. One of the blessings was the realization that even the Son of God had a time when He did not like the will of His Father for His life. He had asked the Father to not only take the cup from Him, but if there was any other way to accomplish His will, could He have "Plan B" so to speak. That uncovered a fresh reminder of the Lord's grace and understanding when I sometimes wrestle with "the cup" of the Father's will that He wants me to drink from. I tried to think about and visualize the intensity of Jesus' prayer, hear the cries of His heart and see such depth of wrestling in the spirit that sweat came out as blood. Yet...for love's sake...there was an ultimate surrender to the will of His Father in the word "nevertheless".
Then in prayer I revisited the cross and thought about Jesus' scourging, His beaten face, torn garments, the mocking, spitting, nails, weighted pressure of every sin of every human being placed upon Him, the torment from hell and torture of separation as His Father's face turned away in rejection. I prayed "Lord, I can't grasp it! It's too deep, high and wide in scope. I can't even imagine...but I want to be slain by the reality of it. Why don't I immediately repent when I think about the price You had to pay for my sin?"
The scripture immediately came to my mind, 1Cor. 13:12 "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know..." Sunglasses...we have to wear them now because our eyes are too weak to handle the full radiance of the sun into our eyes. But there will be a day when there will be no need for the sun, nor glasses to protect our vision...the Lord and His radiance will provide all the light we need and we will NOT want to take our eyes off of Him. Yes...our vision of spiritual things is like trying to look through dark glasses or dust covered mirrors. Very limited.
But...love is not blind unless it's driven by the flesh and then should be called "lust." Love "sees" very clearly when it's from God. It doesn't see through dark glasses nor dirt covered reflections. Love is what motivated Christ to live a sinless life, resist temptation, persevere through affliction, obey His Father's will, and endure the cross while despising the shame. The Word says that Jesus could see past the cross to the reward of joy in Heb.12:2. Love. 1Cor 13:13 And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
"Repentance"...the Lord had me come back full circle and sit there for a while. My sight of things may be dimmed in life. My understanding of circumstances may be skewed and unclear. The revelation of the cross cannot be accurately depicted by a movie nor described well enough by a book..or "blah-g." But God's love...that heart of pure love which looks on the object of its love with a vulnerable, abandoned, passionate sense of surrender. God wants my love for Him to be like that...rather than calloused, tainted, clouded, cold and dark. If this is my heart towards God, it's only because there is sin somewhere...which has brought death...which has not been repented of.
He pointed out something in my heart that was sin in His eyes...I repented immediately.
1Cor. 13:8 Love never fails...
