Detachment and Desire

Detachment and Desire

psalm 42:1-2

As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God.

psalm 63:1

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

God's grace has always been previous to and acting upon our desire to know our creator and redeemer.  His love for us, his children, is the catalyst for the willingness to enter into a relational covenant with Him. As the apostle John wrote in his epistle , we love because He first loved us .  (1 John 4:19)  When we choose to love God fully this is our response to His interior invitation of the heart to personal intimacy with the eternal as the theologians call it the transcendent.   God the Father has lavished upon us His grace by calling us into the eternal life that Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ defined as knowing the only true God and Jesus Christ whom He sent into the world (John 17.3)  The passion and depth of our response to this call from God shapes the quality of our earthly sojourn and all the while our position is of  heavenly existence while seated in the heavenly places here on earth in Christ. (Ephesians 1).  Positive reciprocation of this desire will help to develop over time a spritual maturity that is attentive and receptive to the subtle activity of the Holy Spirit within us.  This answering love inspires and inflames and motivates a Holy quest of God daily that is maintained and sustained by humility, trust, and obedience.  When you my Lord said, "Seek my face, my heart said to You, "Your face Lord, I shall seek." (Psalm 27.8)  In this quest of seeking  once we leave the dead man in Adam through Baptism in our Lord's death, (Romans 6.4)  we never return as the same creature who was once alienated in desolation, but we are beginning a new in Christ in sotltude and power by His ressurection.  In solitude there is the trust of hope and victory but in desolation there is only despair and destruction.  To rest in God who loves us, draws us near to Him continually and allows us to be in obedient submission to His grace and mercy.

This fire of divine love purges as well as ignites. It will create in us a growing realization of our spiritual poverty, our desprate ness, and of our cold indifference. The human being is the mystery of infinite emptiness and God is the mystery of infinite fullness. As Jesus stated on the Sermon on the Mount , "blessed are the poor in spirit, for thiers is the kingdom of heaven.  It is this desire for God that will set us up on this narrow path that is difficult because it will require of us self emptying and self denial of losing our lives that we may lay hold of and abide in Christ's life.  (Matt 10:(38-39).  This transformational shifting of the heart involves a painful and gradual purgation of the desire of perishing things that desensitize us to heavenly treasures and realities.  Desire for God requires of us our soul, mind, and body in a fundamental orientation away from narcissistic enslavement to earthly cravings, acquisitions, and ambitions towards the new bent of the relentless pusruit of the Love of God and love toward others.

This detachment from the the temporal and desire for eternal work of the Holy Spirit in us and through us work in tandem.  This relentless chasing of God  heightens our awareness of being exiles and pilgrims who increasingly are longing to be home with Him. (Phil 1:23, 3:20) .  Because we are conformed to what we desire the most we should all pray for the grace of holy desire.  This is why to author of Hebrews exhorts us to lay aside every weight, every sin, and every snare that entangles us and let us run our race with endurance that has been set before us , fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of faith.  Even though we may stumble in practice at times, holy intention, and sincerity of the heart are pleasing to the Lord.  As we respond to the promptings of grace, we will move in the direction of purity of heart.  As Jesus followed up his statement of spiritual poverty with,  "Blessed are the pure in Heart, for they shall she God."  Purity of the heart is to will one thing and that one thing is the to see forth the will of God in your life.  An undivided heart is an integrated heart united to God with the bond of peace through the unity of the Holy Spirit.  (Eph 4:1-6).  A life lived in accordance with the Gospel of Christ  becomes centered on the one thing that can never be taken away.  (Luke 10:42).  This purity of communion with God is never attained quickly or fully; it is the organic growth of the fruit of God planted by the eternal seed of the Word of God,  that is to be worked out in the grace of God that will  abound in decades of stumbling pursuit.  In the mystery of divine love, the more we find God, the harder we pursue Him.  Thus devotional and contemplative relational experiences with our maker will involve aternating  seasons of sorrow and joy of delight and emptiness, of warm experience and feelings of abandonment.  These patterns are evident in the writings of the Psalter.  David was a man after God's own heart while deseperately seeking to understand the ins and outs of his own. Sometimes this deep reflection would lead him to places that we ourselves continually  find.

Entanglement, double mindedness, compromise, and complacency are enemies of our spiritual progress.  God in His wisdom will sometimes dis lodge us to experience trials and brokenness in our outer world or by leading us through desert places and darkness in our inner world. But know this believer, the known without God is a more dangerous place to be than the unknown with God.  A relational exerience with the Lord will become feeble, shallow, and unstable when it is based on feeling alone.  We can not measure the quality of our times of communion with Jesus Christ by the scale of how we feel because honestly, sometimes difficulty and apparent fruitless times of prayer may contribute more to our development than times of consolation and enthusiam.  The fidelity of showing up before God on a daily basis is critical.  These times will reveal our desperate condition and our need to renounce our deluded images of intimacy, and our attachment to reputation and accomplishment.  These out ward trials and inner battles of dryness become means of grace when the bring us to see a profound realization of helplessness and emptiness before a Holy God.  This joy of growing attachment to Christ leads inevitably to the pain of growing detachment from false self.  

Song of songs 8.6

Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the LORD.