"First Love"- Beth Moore quote

Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write…
I have somewhat against thee,
because thou hast left thy first love.
Revelation 2

Beth Moore in “Beloved Disciple” (pg 165) says:~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Notice that the church in Ephesus received tremendously noble commendations from Christ and yet somehow let go of the most important thing of all: her sacred romance with Jesus Christ…. Beloved One, you and I can work hard, persevere through extreme difficulty, refuse to tolerate wicked people, and accurately discern false teachers- yet still forsake our first love.

Ironically, many believers don’t view an absence of fiery, first love for Jesus Christ as sin. They view it simply as something they lack. This misunderstanding may be part of the holdup. If God’s absolute priority for all followers of Christ is love- for Him first and others second- then the absence of such love is sin. I don’t pound this point to condemn. Remember, it’s not an irreversible condition! I pound the point so that we can do what we must do to get on to the business of loving! God says “Repent!” Repent means turn. I believe God told them and is telling us to turn from whatever we have given a higher priority than our sacred romance with Christ. He tells us to pour our lives back into the first things.

Keep in mind that with the first things rightly established, all other things of value come to us as well. The church in Ephesus very likely allowed spiritual busyness and stalwart religiosity to displace love. Because everything else hinges on the laws of love (see Matt 22:40) over time all things of eternal value would have crumbled in Ephesus. Christ exhorted them to go back to the first priority of love so that all their works would flow form a boundless wellspring of agape. Surely this exhortation speaks to each of us.”
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Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen,
and repent, and do the first works;
or else I will come unto thee quickly,
and will remove thy candlestick out of his place,
except thou repent.
Rev. 2:5

Beth explains:
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“That doesn’t mean they would lose their place in heaven. We lose our lampstand when we lose our godly influence on earth. In other words, we lose our light in the world.”
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God hasn’t put a period at the end of our sentences yet…"

Thought provoking meditation from Beth Moore’s “Beloved Disciple” (pg 153 )

“Read John 3. List each person identified and write a brief description __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Imagine being named in a letter that turned out to be inspired Scripture for all the world to see! Whether in commendation or criticism, having your name immortalized in scripture is a heavy thought! When I see a portion of Scripture with brief testimonials similar to the segment we’re studying today, I almost shiver… At times I would have been anywhere from devastated to humiliated over what might be written in my life’s theoretical one-sentence statement. I love knowing that as long as we’re kicking and breathing, we can change the course of our testimonies. God hasn’t put a period at the end of our sentences yet…”

ME- May we all think twice about doing things we would be ashamed of were they “exposed”. They are visible to GOD, even if we succeed in hiding them from everyone else… The greek word “hypocrisy” means “mask”.

“the particular loneliness”–> the gateway to something new

I’ve been reflecting upon the particular loneliness that comes from a loveless marriage……
Henri Nouwen talks about loneliness, pain, brokenness, suffering and I agree with him that precisely in the depth of the aching IS—> the gateway right into the very embrace of the ONE who loves me.

Quoted from Henri Nouwen tape Who are we? Exploring our Christian Identity

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“Befriend your loneliness, pick up your cross … Precisely where we are painful, precisely where we are suffering there is the gateway that leads us to something new…if we are willing to embrace our brokenness we will discover that in the midst of all this pain there is joy… “

Naked and Unashamed: "how terrible it must have felt… breaking their relationship with God"

from Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller (relates to some reflection on “intimacy” in my marriage posted here):

I started asking myself why Moses would say five times that people were naked before the Fall, but after the Fall they went around with clothes on… Here is what I think Moses was saying: Man is wired so he gets his glory (his security, his understanding of value, his feeling of purpose, his feeling of rightness with his Maker, his security for eternity) from God, and this relationship is so strong, and God’s love is so pure, that Adam and Eve felt no insecurity at all, so much so that they walked around naked and didn’t even realize they were naked. But when that relationship was broken, they knew it instantly. All of their glory, the glory that came from God, was gone…

I used to think that when the Fall happened, man started lusting, getting angry, getting jealous, coveting, stealing, lying, and cheating because, in the absence of God, he became a bad person…
And then it hit me how awful it must have been for Adam and Eve… to have been tricked by Satan into breaking their relationship with God.

You and I have it easier. We were born this way. But I remember loving a girl back in Colorado and having her explain to me she didn’t feel the same and how for a year I lived in the attic of an old house in Portland, feeling an ache and emptiness in my heart I thought would never mend…
And this feeling, this feeling must have been so much more painful for Adam and Eve, this feeling of having an infinite amount of love pouring through their lives and then its’s suddenly gone… I wondered at how terrible it must have felt, at the fear of no longer feeling God, at the ache of emptiness and the sudden and horrifying awareness of self. God have mercy.

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Rest

whose adorning let it be
the hidden person of the heart
(I Peter 3)

quoted from When the Lights Go Out by
Graham Cooke

quote:

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I am choosing to live my life in hiddenness, so that when God’s manifestation comes, it’s a bonus. I want to live in that place of constantly yielding inwardly to find the presence of God- the place that, even in the eye of the storm is one of tranquility, of peace and of rest. In such a place, “rest” becomes a weapon against the enemy. You can exasperate the devil, because when he comes against you, you don’t fight against him, but submit to God (see James 4:7).

In fact, it is not our job to fight the devil. Our job is to “step back” into God and experience His majesty and power. Christ has overcome the devil, so we need to focus on being “in Christ”… Real warfare is about discovering the majesty, the supremacy and the sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ. Warfare is about seeking the face of God and enjoying Him as your fortress and your refuge.

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Lectio Divina

“the Bible tended to leave her cold,
as it had been used

more as a weapon

than an instrument of grace…” Benner

I consider myself a recovering Pharisee which- perhaps- leaves my children with a similar burden of painful misconceptions about God as Angie carried (see the above quote). I pray that this excerpt from David Benner’s book “Sacred Companions” will help someone to take some steps closer to the real Jesus (who is too often poorly reflected by those of us who claim His name)

QUOTE: (clips from pages 110-117)
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Every idea and assumption we have about God must be measured against the person of Jesus. For most of us this will give us an opportunity to redraw our image of God. This is one of the most important ways in which Christian spirituality matures- by allowing immature and incorrect ideas of God to be reformed. The filter for that reformation … is Jesus of Nazareth.

Meditation on the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life has been the core of many Roman Catholic approaches to spiritual formation. We Protestants do well to learn from them in this regard. Bible reading can take many forms. Nonmeditative reading may involve some reflection, but it is usually more oriented toward analysis and comprehension of content. For years I read the Bible this way, attempting to discover or be reminded of things that would help me live the Christian life.

Meditative reading is less focused on the words and more focused on the Word behind the words. In the case of meditation on Gospel accounts of Jesus, the intent is to come to know Jesus better. This involves lingering over the story long enough to allow yourself to meet Jesus in that account. …

No one has anything to fear about imagination that is guided by meditation on Scripture and the Spirit of God…. Any moment in the life of Christ or any of his teachings or parables offers rich opportunities for meeting Jesus. Consider this fragment of a conversation with a woman named Angie with whom I worked in spiritual direction.

Angie struggled in her Christ following. Her personal history made her deeply uncomfortable in the church- any church- and her relationship to Christians was filled with ambivalence. However her spiritual yearning was fervent, and she entered spiritual direction out of a longing to encounter God more deeply.

After we explored the contours of her spiritual journey, I asked her about her experience of God. She told me how much trouble she had relating to Christ. Her perceptions of him were all tainted by dysfunctional childhood family and church experiences. I then asked her about her ability to meet Christ in church or in Scripture. She said that she was sometimes deeply aware of meeting him in the liturgy but that the Bible tended to leave her cold, as it had been used more as a weapon than an instrument of grace in her childhood.

…
Angie had been on the journey of Christian spirituality for a long time. However her progress was seriously limited by her unfamiliarity with the Jesus of the Gospels. Her ideas of God needed reformation in the light of the decisive revelation of God in Christ. She needed to get to know Jesus better…

The only way to come to know Jesus is through the Gospels. There is no substitute for meditation on Scripture as a route to a deep, personal engagement with God. Attunement to the Christian God must always involve attending to Jesus…

For some time after the session I recounted earlier, Angie continued to focus on Jesus, seeking to encounter him through the Gospels. Increasingly , however, she came to speak of the great difference between Jesus and the God of the Old Testament. It seemed important therefore for her to meet God the Father of Jesus as he revealed himself in the rest of Scripture. Again the goal was not simply to teach some point of theology. It was to facilitate her attunement to God.

I did this by encouraging her to meditate on the Genesis account of the creation and fall of humans. My instruction was for her to watch for the hidden presence of Jesus- the God of grace she had come to meet in the Gospels. Praying for eyes to discern grace, she went off to read and meditate on the first three chapters of Genesis.

She returned to our next meeting with considerable excitement. Something totally new had struck her. She was deeply impressed by the care God took to prepare garments of skin for Adam and Eve after they discovered their nakedness and were overwhelmed with their shame. She added, “Had God been like I have often pictured him, he would have wanted to rub their noses in their shame to make sure they learned their lesson. I was so impressed that what he seemed to want was to eliminate their shame, not exploit it.” This was a profound insight for her. It led to a cascading series of subsequent insights about the nature of God as she subsequently meditated on other Old Testament passages.

Scripture is given for our instruction and edification. In its totality Scripture presents the God revealed in Jesus and whom we seek to follow. The story of his pursuit of humankind despite our unfaithfulness is a story of grace. Biblical revelation aids our attunement to God by helping us encounter the Lord God of heaven and earth, not simply the god of our imagination, childhood experience or previous religious instruction.

~~~~~~~~~Lectio Divina (pg. 170)~~~~~~~~

… a modification of the classic lectio. It emphasizes four ways of reading (or listening to) Scripture, each named for the corresponding monastic form of meditation. It also involves reading the passage four times.

1. Lectio. Listen with your senses, without thinking too much about the meaning. Attend to your imagination, noting the smells, sounds and images that arise as you hear the passage. Allow yourself to enter into the setting using your imagiantion.

2. Meditatio. This time I want you to follow along in your Bible as I read the passage out loud. Use your thinking to reflect on the meaning and significance of the passage. Consider why the passage is included in Scripture. What does it mean? How does it affect your understanding of God?

3. Oratio. This time as you listen, I want you to attend to your feelings. Note your feelings and silently offer them back to God as a prayer of the heart. Comment in your prayer on anything in the passage to which you particularly respond.

4. Contemplatio. Before I read the passage a final time, quieten yourself, close your eyes, breathe deeply and regularly, and prepare to receive God’s Word. This time I want you to listen with your intuition- your heart. If something impresses you, simply notice it and then refocus your attention on what you are hearing. Don’t worry if you do not seem to have any thoughts or impressions. Simply remain open to the passage and to the Spirit. After expressing gratitude to God for your experience, open your eyes.
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The only way to heaven…. by Jeanne Guyon

Jeanne Guyon 1648-1717
Quoted from “Jeanne Guyon An Autobiography”

The only way to heaven is prayer, a prayer of the heart, of which everyone is capable, and not by reasoning, which is the fruit of study, or by exercise of the imagination, which, in filling the mind with wandering objects, rarely settles it; instead of warming the heart with love to God, they leave it cold and languishing. Let the poor come; let the ignorant and carnal come; let the children without reason or knowledge come; let the dull or hard hearts that can retain nothing come to the practice of prayer, and they shall become wise.

Oh you who are great, wise, and rich. Do you not have a heart capable of loving what is proper for you and of hating what is destructive? Love the sovereign good, hate all evil, and you will be truly wise. When you love anyone, is it because you know the reasons of love and its definitions? No, certainly….
None can exempt himself from loving, for none can live without a heart, nor the heart without love.

Why should any amuse themselves in seeking reasons for loving love itself? Let us love without reasoning about it, and we will find ourselves filled with love before the others have learned the reasons that let to it. Make a trial of this love and you will be wiser in it than the most skilled philosophers. In love, as in everything else, experience instructs better than reasoning. Come, then, drink at this Fountain of living waters instead of the broken cisterns of created beings, which, far from allaying your thirst, only tend to continually augment it. IF you could drink once at this Fountain, you would not seek elsewhere for anything to quench your thirst. While you still continue to draw from this Source, you will thrist no longer after the world. But if you quit it, alas! The Enemy has the dominance. He will give you a portion of his poisoned drink, which may have an apparent sweetness, but will assuredly rob you of life.

I forsook the Fountain of living water when I left off prayer. I became like a vineyard exposed to pillage, hedges torn down with liberty for all the passengers to ravage it. I began to seek the creature what I had found in God. He left me to myself, because I first left Him. It was His will, by permitting me to sink into the horrible pit, to make me feel the necessity of approaching Him in prayer.

Nouwen "Out of Solitude"

Quoted from Out of Solitude by Nouwen:

quote:

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As a community of faith, we remind one another that we form a fellowship of the weak, transparent to Him who speaks to us in the lonely places of our existence and says: Do not be afraid, you are accepted..

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quote:

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It is in solitude that we discover that being is more important than having, and that we are worth more than the result of our efforts. In solitude we discover that our life is not a possession to be defended, but a gift to be shared…

In solitude we discover that our worth is not the same as our usefulness…

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The love of Solitude

The Following of Christ
The love of Solitude
an early-15th-century devotional tract by Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471)

A soul, which is separated from all the amusements of the senses,
seeks and finds in God
that pure satisfaction
which it can never meet with in creatures.
A respectful and frequent remembrance of the presence of God
occupies the mind,
and,
an ardent desire of pleasing Him
and of becoming worthy of His love
engages the heart.
It is absorbed in Him alone:
all things else dwindle into nothing.
It buries itself and all things in God:
it breathes only His love,
it forgets all to remember only Him

"Searching for God Knows What" on Adam and Eve

Here are some clips of an insightful and thought provoking look at Adam and Eve from Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller:

quote:

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But here is Adam, the only perfect guy in the world, and he is going around wanting to be with somebody else, needing another person to fulfill a certain emptiness in his life. And as I said, when God saw this, He did not create Eve right away. He did not give Adam what he needed immediately. He waited. He told Adam to name the animals….

I looked up how many animals there are in the world… and Adam, apparently, had to name all of them. And the entire time he was lonely.

I never thought of Adam the same again… this was a man who, despite feeling a certain need for a companion, performed what must have been nearly one hundred years of work, naming and perhaps even categorizing the animals… Moses said that Eve didn’t give birth to their third child till Adam was well into his hundreds, which means they would have had Cain and Abel some thirty or so years before, which also means either it took Adam more than a hundred years to name the animals, or he and Eve didn’t have sex for a good, long, boring century. And so in my mind, I began to see Adam as a lonely naturalist…

The thing is, when Adam finished naming the animals, after all his work and effort, God put him to sleep, took a rib out of his side, and fashioned a woman. I had read that part a thousand times, too, but I don’t think I quite realized how beautiful that moment was… So here was this guy who was intensely relational, needing other people, and in order to cause him to appreciate the gift of companionship, God had him hang out with chimps for a couple hundred years. Its quite beautiful, really. God directed Adam’s steps so that when He created Eve, Adam would have the utmost appreciation, respect, and gratitude.

I think it was smart of God because today, now that there are women all around and a guy can go on the Internet and see them naked anytime he wants, the whole species has been devalued. I read recently where one out of every four women, by the time they reach thirty , are sexually harassed, molested, or raped. And then I thought how very beautiful it was that God made Adam work for so long because there is no way, after a hundred years of being alone, looking for somebody whom you could connect with in your soul, that you would take advantage of a woman once you met one. She would be the most precious creation in all the world…

I’ll bet Adam felt loved by God, like he was somebody God was always trying to bless and surprise with amazing experiences, and I’ll bet they talked together about how beautiful Eve was and how wonderful it was that the two of them could know her, and I would imagine that Eve felt safe, loved, not used or gawked at, but appreciated and admired….

I started asking myself why Moses would say five times that people were naked before the Fall, but after the Fall they went around with clothes on… The very first thing that happened after Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was that they noticed they were naked. And man, I couldn’t stop thinking about how whatever happened at the Fall made them aware they were naked…

Here is what I think Moses was saying: Man is wired so he gets his glory (his security, his understanding of value, his feeling of purpose, his feeling of rightness with his Maker, his security for eternity) from God, and this relationship is so strong, and God’s love is so pure, that Adam and Eve felt no insecurity at all, so much so that they walked around naked and didn’t even realize they were naked. But when that relationship was broken, they knew it instantly. All of their glory, the glory that came from God, was gone…

I used to think that when the Fall happened, man started lusting, getting angry, getting jealous, coveting, stealing, lying, and cheating because, in the absence of God, he became a bad person…
And then it hit me how awful it must have been for Adam and Eve… to have been tricked by Satan into breaking their relationship with God.

You and I have it easier. We were born this way. But I remember loving a girl back in Colorado and having her explain to me she didn’t feel the same and how for a year I lived in the attic of an old house in Portland, feeling an ache and emptiness in my heart I thought would never mend…
And this feeling, this feeling must have been so much more painful for Adam and Eve, this feeling of having an infinite amount of love pouring through their lives and then its’s suddenly gone… I wondered at how terrible it must have felt, at the fear of no longer feeling God, at the ache of emptiness and the sudden and horrifying awareness of self. God have mercy.

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