I’ve been hearing a lot of messages lately about God’s love. God’s love. God’s affection. As one speaker put it, the word love is used so much that it fails to impact us the way it should when used in regard to the way God feels about us. God is affectionate toward us. Affectionate. Yet even this word seems dead to me, or I to it. Should that move me to cry to God for a heart that can respond to Him? In some small way, it does. Maybe if I start asking, that desire will grow.
I want, as Mike Bickle said in a message at IHOP, a heart that is fascinated by God. The most important thing in life has got to be the knowledge of God. The knowledge of God is the experience of Him in all of the ways that He expresses His identity. He is Jehovah-Rapha, Jehovah-Nissi, Jehovah-Jireh, Adonai, Elohim, El-Shaddai, El-Elyon. He is Healer, Provider, Father, Redeemer, Lover, Friend, and King. He is wonderful, majestic, awesome, active, compassionate, holy, and beautiful. I want the knowledge of this God and knowledge to the full.
Right now, I am learning to experience God as “the God who is for me.” Somehow in all my time walking with God, I have failed to truly consider Him as “for me,” but somehow saw Him as “indifferent to me.” But the Bible says that God is for us, and very passionately so! As Ben Woodward says in a prayer from His Proclamation and Confession workbook, “But today I stare into the truth of Your word and declare that You loved me with such a great love that You ransacked heaven on my behalf and sent Your Son to save me!” (Proclamation and Confession workbook, page 55) I am aware that there is great power in this truth, but my heart can’t seem to connect with it. But I want to. I have no choice but to keep pressing in and proclaiming the truth until God releases to me the understanding of it. Father, reveal to me the knowledge of God!
