Post 30: Spiritual Mathematics

Longing to Entrust Ourselves to Our Father

When we say that we long for Father, we mean that we long to enjoy him and also that we long to entrust ourselves to him (Psalm 40:11; Psalm 62:11-12; Isaiah 6:1-3; Psalm 63:1-8). Entrust implies that we rely upon and place our confidence in Father’s faithful strength to keep us safe and secure. The cry, “Abba, Father,” represents our most basic relationship with God—a relationship of intimate trust. For believers, this means that every second that we trust God, we are fulfilling our purpose. Every time we cling to God, we glorify him while achieving our destiny.

Longing to Engage in Our Father’s Good Purposes

We revel in Father when we enjoy him, we take refuge in Father when we entrust ourselves to him, and we respect him when we engage in our Father’s good purposes. We long for the applause of heaven.

The Apostle Paul, awaiting his martyrdom, reminds his protégé, Timothy, that he has engaged in God’s purposes, and now longs for God’s high-five.

You take over. I’m about to die, my life an offering on God’s altar. This is the only race worth running. I’ve run hard right to the finish, believed all the way. All that’s left now is the shouting—God’s applause! Depend on it, he’s an honest judge. He’ll do right not only by me, but by everyone eager for his coming (Eugene Peterson, The Message, p. 2172, 2 Timothy 4:6-8).

Father fashioned our souls to long for His “Well done thou good and faithful servant!” His pleasure with us is our pleasure (Luke 3:22; 1 Corinthians 4:1-5; 2 Thessalonians 2:16-17).

Longing to Emulate and Reflect Our Father

We long to enjoy Father, entrust ourselves to Him, engage in His purposes, and we long to emulate or reflect Him. We want to hear God say, “That’s my boy! That’s my girl!” We want people to say of us, “Like Father, like son and daughter.” Our souls experience shalom when we fulfill our destiny of mirroring Father (Romans 8:28-29; 2 Corinthians 3:18; Ephesians 5:1-2).

Longing to Exalt Our Father

Some may be ready to mount a protest. “What about exalting God? Doesn’t the Westminster Confession of Faith teach that our chief duty is to glorify God and love Him forever? You’ve got the love Him part, what about the glorify Him part?”

Totally true. We long to exalt Father. However, how do children exalt and honor parents? Is it not by enjoying parents, trusting parents, engaging in parents’ purposes, and emulating or imitating parents? When we enjoy, entrust, engage, and emulate, then we exalt our Father. We glorify God by loving Him forever.

If people notice that my son wants to be with me, smiles as we talk, enjoys my presence, then they think, “Must be a pretty cool dad.” As Piper reminds us, “Never forget that God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him” (Piper, The Pleasures of God, p. 14).

If people observe my daughter trusting me, depending upon me, believing in me, then they say, “Great father.” If people see that my children join me in my values, living for Christ like I try to, then they comment, “Wow! Some parent.” If people find my children following my lifestyle examples, reflecting something good in me, then they respond, “He must be quite a man.”

People will honor our Father when we enjoy Him, entrust ourselves to Him, engage in His good purposes, and emulate His character. God will be honored and we will be at peace. Our longings satisfied. Our thirsts quenched.

How’s Your Spiritual Love Life?

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

*Who do I trust in to keep me safe and secure?

*Who do I cry to and cling to?

*In what ways do I long for the applause of heaven?

*What will it mean to me to hear God’s “Well done!” and to receive God’s high five?

*When people look at me, do they say, “Life Heavenly Father, like son or daughter”?

*How well am I exalting God by enjoying, entrusting, engaging in His purposes and emulating Him?

*How well am I glorifying God by loving Him forever?

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?

Hunger Was God’s Idea

Hunger was God’s idea. He created us with a soul that thirsts for what only relationships can quench. The Hebrew word for soul comes from a word that means “throat”—the organ through which we take in nourishment, fill our hunger, and quench our thirst. The Hebrews used physical body parts to represent immaterial aspects of our personality. Proverbs 25:25 is one example: “Like cold water to a weary soul is good news from a distant land.”

As the throat craves physical satisfaction, so the soul craves personal, relational satisfaction. We long for and are motivated by a thirst for intimate involvement and union. These longings for relationship are part of our essential being as created in God’s image.

Love is to the soul what breathing is to the lungs and food is to the stomach. Without connection, we shrivel; we starve to death. With mutual, risky, giving, grace relationships we thrive. The exact center of our being is our capacity to give and receive in relationships.

What motivates us to do what we do? What impels us? In training counselors, I like to tell them, “Go where the action is.” The action is relational because we are relationally motivated. We pursue what we perceive to be pleasing.

“We have an immense void inside that craves satisfaction from powers and persons and pleasures outside ourselves. Yearning and longing and desire are the very stuff of our nature” (John Piper, The Pleasures of God, p. 48).

As the Puritan writer, Henry Scougal, reminded us, “the soul of man has in it a raging and inextinguishable thirst” (Scougal, The Life of God in the Soul of Man, p. 108). We’re motivated to quench our relational thirsts.

Worship: The Holy of Holies of the Soul

We were born desiring worship. In our original design, God implanted in us a fundamental nature that must worship.

When I began working toward my doctorate at Kent State University, I decided to develop relationships as a precursor to sharing my faith. Or so I thought. Two weeks into my initial semester, our professor assigned a paper on humanistic psychology. As the class discussed our viewpoints, our professor encouraged me to share my position. “Bob, you wrote an interesting paper contrasting humanistic psychology with Christian thinking.” So much for my “go slow” approach. During the ensuing discussion, one student was particularly vocal against my views.

About a month later, in a course on counseling the culturally different, a Native American presented the guest lecture. Toward the end of her talk, she invited us to stand to worship the spirit of the four winds. Two students remained seated—myself and the woman who had vocally opposed my views in the other class. As soon as class ended, she marched up to me to thank me for not standing. “You gave me the courage of my convictions. But to be honest, I’m not sure what I believe in. You seem so strong and sincere in your faith. Could we talk about your relationship to God?”

This young woman exposed her fundamental spiritual nature. I could have said of her what Paul said of the people of Athens, “I see that in every way you are very religious” (Acts 17:22).