Post 30: Spiritual Mathematics

We Are Worshipping Beings Who Long

As worshipping beings we long for Father. We are faith-in-Father-beings. Our souls are a magnet polarized toward FATHER, longing for peace with our Father of holy love. The essence of our humanity centers on our loving trust in God the Father. This is the fundamental unifying factor in the human personality.

We are truly human only in fellowship with our Creator. Communion with God is precisely the natural state of true humanity. Man is truly man only when he participates in divine life and realizes in himself the image and likeness of God, and this participation in no way diminishes his authentically human existence, human energy and will (Maximos the Confessor, quoted in Neil Anderson, The Common Made Holy, p. 52).

The deepest longing in the human soul is to be in relationship with Someone who absolutely delights in us (“This is my beloved . . .”) and who fundamentally values us (“. . . in whom I am well pleased”). God created our souls with an ardent desire, a yearning, an appetite for relating. Our prevailing and prominent desire is for a relationship with our Father who art in heaven.

Longing to Enjoy Our Father

So when we say that we long for our Father, what do we mean? What do we long for when we long for our heavenly Father? First, we long to enjoy our Father. Enjoying God is foreign to us today, yet it is a continual biblical theme, it was common to our parents in the faith, and it is our holy calling and happy privilege.

The Psalmists sing, “Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you” (Psalm 63:3). “Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you” (Psalm 73:25). “I spread out my hands to you; my soul thirsts for you like a parched land” (Psalm 143:6). Our Father’s unfailing love is the umbilical cord of our life (Psalm 107:9; Psalm 136:1-26; Proverbs 19:22). Speaking of God’s husband-wife relationship to His people, Walther Eichrodt writes:

In choosing her to be his wife, he is not amusing himself, but fully committing himself to put his love into effect by founding a community, within which it is his will to enter into an intimate relationship with his people, and through them with all humanity. When he disciplines, it is not a light-hearted disregard for his unheard-of graciousness, nor a chilly withdrawal, nor yet a penalty enforcing the letter of the law. But a solemn act of calling to account, carried out in a fit of blazing indignation, to bring about a realization of what a grave thing it is to put his holy will to shame, and at the same time to show how seriously he takes his human partner (­Eichrodt, Ezekiel: A Commentary, p. 209).

Enjoying God is biblical and it is historical. Aelred, summed God and our relationship to Him when he wrote, “God is friendship.” Satisfying friendship, at that. “The enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied” (Edwards, “The Christian Pilgrim,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, p. 2).

Enjoying God is biblical, historical, and wonderful. “The pleasure God has in his Son will become my pleasure, and I will not be consumed, but enthralled forever” (Piper, The Pleasures of God, p 28). He quenches our thirst and captivates our souls.

The suffering church militant of this present evil age is to cultivate one great impulse throbbing in her soul, viz. an aching longing for the Bridegroom to come to her, to take her in his arms, with nothing within herself to wrest her away, and to be held there for ever. Until such time as he is pleased to come, she is to center her life around the love of Jesus Christ, the King, Bridegroom and Husband of his church, to her his Queen, Bride, and Spouse, and of hers to him (Ray Ortlund, Whoredom, pp. 168-169).

How’s Your Spiritual Love Life?

In tomorrow’s blog, Lord willing, we will explore four more aspects of our longing for God our Father. Until then, let’s examine our spiritual love life. Prayerfully ponder:

*In what ways is my life evidencing that my soul is a magnet polarized toward my heavenly Father?

*In what ways is my life evidencing loving trust in God the Father?

*In what ways is my life evidencing the deepest longing of the human soul to be in relationship with God the Father who absolutely delights in me and who deeply values me?

*In what ways is my life evidencing the longing to enjoy my heavenly Father?

*In what ways is my life evidencing that my heavenly Father’s unfailing love is the umbilical cord of my life?

*In what ways is my life evidencing the truth that the enjoyment of God is the only happiness that satisfies my soul?

We Are Motivated by Religious Affections

The Puritans called our spiritual longings “religious affections.” By “affections” they did not mean emotions, but something deeper. Emotions are reactive; affections are directive. As Jonathan Edwards explains: “Affections are the mainspring of human actions. The Author of human nature not only gave affections to man, but he made them the basis of human actions” (Edwards, Religious Affections, p. 9). Earlier he wrote:

The affections are the spring of men’s actions. All activity ceases unless he is moved by some affection—take away desire and the world would be motionless and dead—there would be no such thing as activity or any earnest pursuit whatsoever. Everywhere the Scriptures place much emphasis on the affections (Edwards, Religious Affections, p. xxviii).

The energy behind life is relational/spiritual. Relationships are fundamentally what move us. As John Owen describes:

Relational affections motivate the soul to cleave to and to seek relationships. The affections are in the soul as the helm is in the ship; if it be laid hold on by a skillful hand, he turneth the whole vessel which way he pleaseth (Owen, Temptation and Sin, p. ix).

We hunger for God while attempting to keep him far from our spiritual diet. When I worked on a psychiatric inpatient unit, I counseled a young man diagnosed as manic-depressive (what is now called bi-polar affective disorder). He experienced intense mood swings. At times he struggled with bouts of crippling depression, at other times he suffered from incapacitating elation. During one of his elevated periods, I asked him what would happen if he slowed down. “When I slow down, when my mind takes a break, then I languish alone in a bottomless, loveless pit.”

As we worked together, I encouraged him to invite God into the pit and onto the mountaintop. “Whatever you are experiencing,” I shared, “God is there and wants to experience it with you.”

In the ensuing days, weeks, months, and even years, he was able to face his spiritual dread. Though I believe that part of his struggle was physical, I believe that another part was spiritual. In his highs and lows, he escaped God, or at least tried to. All non-biological issues are relational issues, and ultimately spiritual ones. Blaise Pascal describes what occurs when we attempt to quench our spiritual thirst in non-God ways.

What is it, then, that this desire and this inability proclaim to us, but that there once was in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present? But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself (Pascal, Pensées, VII, Paragraph 425).

So how’s your spiritual love life? Prayerfully ponder:

*What moves and motivates you to action?
*What desires impel and compel you?
*What are you earnestly pursuing and why?
*What is the energy behind your life?
*What fundamentally moves you?
*What is your soul cleaving to and seeking?
*Who or what is at the helm of your soul?
*What is in the Holy of Holies of your soul?
*What do you fill the God-shaped vacuum of your soul with?
*What do you fill your hungry soul with?
*What is your source of true happiness?
*What are you filling your infinite abyss with?