"Dear
God help me to let you love me to-day."
By Bob Pitcher
For two years Janet and I were members of a Christian Community devoted to the creative arts. Each morning we would gather for prayer. I remember so clearly that one of the leaders would pray almost daily.
"Please Lord help me to let you love me to-day "
It seems that for many of us this is at the centre of our problem. We know God loves us. We know that a knowledge of His love will transform us into His image; but so often there seems to be a barrier between that love and the depth of our hearts. A bit like the weather, we know that the sun is shining but so often, as the song says, 'clouds got in my way'. Somehow there can be a protective shell around our soft hearts which make intimacy with God difficult.
It has long been my belief that the interface between God and us is woundedness. The point of entry into relationship with Him is the cross. The point at which God in Jesus was most vulnerable, helpless and wounded. It is at this point we come with our brokenness, our sin, our pain, our failure etc. When we embrace the cross it turns from being an instrument of death and becomes for us the tree of life and healing. From here we are of course led onto the resurrected life ….. but even in His resurrection Jesus carried wounds, not scars. Therefore our moments of deepest intimacy with Jesus inevitably come at our moments of deepest openness….. when we choose to open up all that is within our hearts to the one who has literally opened up His heart to us. Interestingly this is something we verbally assent to every time we are guests at the Lord's table. How do we respond to the president's invitation to 'lift up our hearts?' Well we 'lift them up unto the Lord'. All I can bring to the Lord is my heart as it actually is….. not as I would like it to be but as it really is, with all its imperfections. Too often in renewal these days I sense a temptation for us to bring our strength to His strength. No, this amounts to climbing over the wall of the sheepfold. Our place of entry and continued fellowship is the place of our brokenness to his brokenness. This is the authentic route to resurrection and enthronement. This process of opening up all that we are to all of who he is, however, for most of us, takes time. Life has taught us that we can get hurt if we give too much of ourselves. Many of us have tried that and been walked all over. It's much safer to hide behind a mask than to present all that we are to anyone. For signposts on this road I have been recently drawn to Mary of Bethany.
We first meet Mary at home in Bethany. Superficially, she has taken the soft option. Whilst Martha is peeling the potatoes, Mary is having a cosy chat with Jesus. But is that what is really happening? Actually Mary is taking a big risk as she is opening herself up to what Jesus has to say to her. Playing at church can be so much less challenging than opening ourselves up to what God has to say to us. As well as the wonderful words which he whispers to us at those moments of intimacy, He also speaks words of challenge and even reproof, Martha is safe from this. She has the self-satisfaction of doing things for Jesus. After all that's what it's all about isn't it? Getting on with the job. Mary, however, is exposing herself to the love and challenge of the Living Word. Those of us who claim to be renewed think of ourselves as 'Marys'. After all we've got the gift of prophecy and we get 'words'. Sometimes I wonder how open we really are. Often I busy myself with endless meetings and parish work, worship leading etc. etc but actually I am hiding away from the Word the Holy Spirit may want to bring me.
So Mary shows us this first step.
A desire to be close to Jesus and to receive whatever he has to
say.
Second step. Have you ever felt let down by God?
"God where were you when my child was dying, when my
business was going down the tubes, when my husband was having an
affair ?"
"God I prayed and prayed ( as one of your Spirit filled
people ) but you didn't come."
This was how Mary must have felt when Jesus didn't come to heal Lazarus. She was the one who had opened her heart to Jesus. She had made herself available to His word and yet He couldn't be bothered to stir His stumps and do a simple healing for the one He loved.
When Jesus finally turns up and Lazarus is safely in the Tomb, Martha is at the gate to welcome Him but not Mary. She's inside. Her World has collapsed. The one she totally trusted has let her down. She doesn't know how to react to Him so she hides in the safe place. Have you ever done that? The life of faith and risk, living at the forefront of what we see God is doing can feel pretty precarious at times and when hurts come it's easy to retreat back into the place of safety. Let's go back to the well- known. Clergy know this too well when experiments in renewal have gone apparently wrong. It's so easy to retreat back into the old and safe ways. It may be boring but at least it's safe. But God hasn't called us to be safe in that respect. He's called us to live on the edge because that's where faith has to be and where miracles will happen.
Martha runs in breathless, flushed cheeks , full of expectancy, "Mary the Master is calling for you."
Listen out for that call if you've retreated into the safe place. At the right time it will come and it demands a response to draw near to the one who wants to take us on, despite our hurts and disillusionment and negativity. Mary responds but not without some anger. God never minds angry prayers. What He doesn't like is dishonest prayers. Opening up our anger to Him is by definition part of the opening up process and also part of the healing process.
"Where have you laid Him. " asks Jesus.
In other words, 'take me to your place of pain'. Don't hide it under the carpet, don't try and battle through, take me to the worst place show me your place of agony and despair. We are tempted to say, "But what's the use?"!
I don't think the fellowship of Christ's suffering is just persecution. I believe that any pain we experience in life can be joined to his pain in a way that will bring us a new revelation of who He is. In this example Mary felt profoundly let down by Jesus. We may have at times felt badly let down in a way that smarted; where we felt unloved undervalued perhaps even de-humanised.
What can we do? We pray, " Jesus, I feel hurt and let down, I trusted people and they deserted me. When did you feel like that , Lord? Was it like that when your disciples slept in Gethsemane, and your Father didn't answer your prayer to remove the cup of suffering? Jesus, will you spiritually link my small pain of being let down to your huge pain of being deserted by both your friends and your Father?"
What happens now? The Holy Spirit reveals to me in "the fellowship of His sufferings" the Christ, who was let down and deserted. And what's more everything that God reveals to me about Christ He wants to reveal in me. We too may see Jesus weep firstly for us and then through us for others. So not only is that a healing experience for me it is also an event which will make me more like Jesus. This is why it is so important that we take Him to the point of our pain. He has been through the same pain and will reveal Himself to us and through us as a result. Jesus himself was made perfect through the things he suffered. Why should it be any different for us. So many of us 'waste our sufferings'
Jesus is brought to the tomb and, instead of ordering the stone-rolling angel who would be quite busy in about a weeks time in Jerusalem, he told them to roll away the stone.
"But Lord you won't like it!. It's a rotting mess in there. There are some things that even you shouldn't look at Lord. No Lord, we've hidden all that away quite successfully behind a four ton rock!"
But Jesus is saying that He wants them to roll away the blockage. He tells us that too. There can be corpses in our tombs or to put it in our terms, skeletons in our cupboards. Things which will never change, rotting away causing us inner spiritual disease and darkness. We're back to the opening up process. Jesus says open all the rot up to me. Let my light shine in and my word do its stuff. If we're to live the resurrected life we must allow the Resurrection and the Life come into every bit of our life including the bits that we think are hopelessly corrupt and rotten.
So Mary has been through this whole process. She has allowed herself to be vulnerable to the Word, she has responded to His call when she was hurting, brought him to the point of her pain and even opened up that place of corruption rottenness and death. The end of the story for her was that she got Lazarus back. We may not. Our business may not recover, our marriage may not be saved, but our lives will be drenched in the presence of the Lord of Life, He will be manifested in our mortal bodies as He was in Mary's.
How did she demonstrate this? She got the most precious thing she owned; an alabaster jar of ointment and broke it, yes broke it over the Lord's feet in an act of intimate and costly worship. The jar was a symbol of what had already happened with her heart, a heart which she allowed to open totally to the Lord as she had submitted to the process which was her life, and the perfume was that glorious fragrance the Church in our land so desperately needs which exudes from such broken and given lives.
[ Bob is best known to us as our worship leader at Flames of Fire and for his part in Praise Events in the Swansea area. But he is also vicar of St Teilo's Church in Portmead Swansea.]