Your Love Is Amazing

Taken from Desperate for You, A 30-Day Worship Adventure by Integrity’s iWorsh!p
And Roberta Croteau

DAY TWO / SEEK / Hallelujah (Your Love Is Amazing)

“Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of Genius.” -Mozart

Hallelujah (Your Love Is Amazing)

Brenton Brown and Brian Doerksen

Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah

Your love makes me sing

Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah

Your love makes me sing

Your love is surprising, I can feel it rising

All the joy that’s growing deep inside of me

Every time I see You, all Your goodness shines through

I can feel this Godsong rising up in me

Your love is amazing, steady and unchanging

Your love is a mountain firm beneath my feet

Your love is a mystery how You gently lift me

When I am discouraged Your love carries me

The cosmonaut landed his capsule bravely back on earth and declared there was no God. He had sailed through the heavens and saw no sign of Him. Too bad they didn’t send up a poet – he would have seen God everywhere.

Through the centuries scientists and artists have searched for God, each in his own way. One sits in a lab and waits for the smoke to clear to find the proof; the other sits with pen in hand and finds Him in the fog.

And even though He is the one who set the atoms abuzz and swung the cosmos into orbit and designed all the ebb and flow of life within and without us, I still think God is more poet than scientist.

I have yet to understand the science of god. I can’t prove Him there; I can’t understand His logic – sometimes it takes everything within just to believe He might really be.

The poetry of God I do see. I can fathom the epic truth of love degrading a Creator enough to step in for the death scene. I can see the rhyme, even when I can’t see the reason. Love is an amazing catalyst. It can send mere mortals to reach for unimaginable heights. It brought the Maker of the Universe down to an unimaginable depth.

“For God so loved the world” is the beginning of poetry – when the old world started dying, and the new world began. He is the poet who sees the promise of life in the ashes and the artist who can find the starlight in an empty sky. His science is too expansive for me to embrace, but I can see His art in every atom, hear it in every sound, feel it in every heartbeat.

I guess it’s not so strange that the wanderers who watched the sky and followed the road under it are forever remembered as “wise men.” Their wealth of wisdom didn’t stop them from taking on the quite illogical task of following one bright star through the dark, cold nights of foreign lands. And their reward was to find what the whole world seeks – God in a box – proof you can touch, a flesh-and-bone stranger who knows them more than they know themselves.

And that same singer, dancer, poet, painter of earth and heaven still flings Himself across a million miles of sky. Send up any contraption you want to search for the place He lives and you’ll still come back empty-handed like the cosmonaut. But I’ll bet you God was there all right, dancing in His heavens. And if you had looked with more than your eyes, you just might have seen Him there.

His Handiwork

I will never forget the day my wife told me that the same God who carved out the Grand Canyon, who spills onto the canvas of the sky the beauty of the sunset, unique and gorgeous every evening, who springs up daisies and daffodils with his endlessly creative flare, knit me together in my mother's womb and is the Perfecter of my faith.

We are his handiwork (Isaiah 19:25), crafted and spun and birthed and breathed into being with more delight even than He takes in creating the heavens (Psalm 8:3).

Early Will I Seek You

If you wake me each morning with the sound of your loving voice,
I'll go to sleep each night trusting in you.

-Psalm 143:8, The Message

How we need this. How desperately we must awaken each day into the Gospel Narrative, to be reminded deeply of our place in it and God’s heart toward us in announcing the Kingdom come for us. How quickly we forget.

In his book One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marques tells the story of the Buendía family, and through them the rise and fall of the township of Macondo. At one point there was a plague of insomnia that swept through the town. No one could sleep, and so the people began to slowly lose their mental facilities. Because they began forgetting things, they wrote down the names of objects around them and stuck them all over town. “Cow,” “Door,” “House,” etc. Then, they realized they could read the names of objects but not know what to do with them, so they described them further, “Cow: Milk in the mornings,” “Door: Push to open,” “House: Enter for shelter,” etc. On the outskirts of town, they even posted a sign to help them remember, “God Exists.”

John Eldredge tells about reading this story and finding it so ridiculous… until he realized how much like his own story it is. He wrote that he wished he had a sign posted above his bed in the morning so that when he woke up the first thing he would read was simply, “God Exists.”

That’s all of our stories. We wake up… and forget. God knows this. How He must know this. The Old Testament is full of stories of God in fellowship with his children that forgot him constantly.

And so here’s one of the greatest provisions of the New Covenant: He’s provided for this by giving us the Spirit of life to remind us and teach us as the disciples and apprentices we are called to be (John 14:26). How cool is that!

“You are all [children] of the light and… of the day… So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep… “ 1 Thess 5:5-6

I love how St. Francis of Assisi reminds us to “remember at all times – it is God himself, breathing within, who woos us and calls us to live as His sons and daughters.”

And so, we pray with Brennan Manning: “Jesus, Son of the living God, anoint us with fire this day. Let your Word not shine in our hearts, but let it burn. Let there be no division, compromise, or holding back. Separate the mystics from the romantics, and goad us to that daredevil leap into the abyss of your love.”

Being awakened is, of course, just the beginning. We come into the Life that Jesus promised us.

The psalm finishes:

Point out the road I must travel;
I'm all ears, all eyes before you.

-Psalm 143:8, The Message

Taking the Leap

Speaking about some great Invitation and about the Life that is found in God – with all the intimacy and beauty and mystery of Him – is great, and so vital for our time. Dallas Willard explains that in order “to trust in God, we need a rich and accurate way of thinking and speaking about him to guide and support our life vision and our will.” He says that biblical language provides such way of thinking of God, of course, but so too has this language “continued to be carefully crafted in the works of Christian writers well into the twentieth century.” And, I would add, on through to our time.

But, until we take those leaps following after the Risen One, we run the risk of just talking. Words must be accompanied by experience, or better, preceded by it, and then followed through with real action. As Rich Mullins once pointed out, “faith without works, baby, it just ain’t happenin’.”

I usually balk at such talk, because I feel like it normally comes from folks scared of words and naive about their power (because they do hold such power as images and metaphors and expressions of our desire). It’s accurate to say that Jesus holds a high regard for words and the stories they tell and the responses they can elicit for those that are open to them. The Word of God is called the Sword of the Spirit for good reason. And his miracles were always illustrations of his sermons. That is to say, in the gospels we find that he was not just full of talk. He was full of the life and power and presence of God. (And still is.) With all of that, He is also intimate and conversational, personal and direct, defined by love and truth.

So, this is where the rubber meets the road. I came across a journal entry this morning from an author of a book, and, well, I gotta say that I feel that God led me right to his entry to read what living a life of risk might look like for me:

Jeff Taylor: Author?

It would appear so, I guess. I never really thought about it until now. I was looking in my archives from last July and here is what I said on July 7th (a year ago yesterday):

"I took a big step yesterday. That is all I am going to say for now."

What was the big step? Sending in a book proposal for the xx-xy affair, which soon became Friendlationships: From Like, to Like Like, to Love in Your Twenties! A year ago I took a risk. I risked rejection and everything and now, one year later, I am days away from the book hitting shelves nationwide. Friend, if there is something you want to do, just go and do it.

Back in high school, I was on my school's Academic Decathlon team. We were ranked first in the state going in to the state competition. In my mind, we were going to win. I did not allow any thoughts of losing enter my mind. One of my coaches told me that he admired my ability to stare failure in the eye and spit right in its face.

What are the things in life you want to strive for? Are you wanting that new job that you might not be qualified for? Are you wanting to ask that hot girl out that will probably turn you down? Just go for it. Jump right in and try it.

You need to realize that God wants you to experience joy in your life. He wants to be glorified through your risks. He wants to do great things through you. So, look shame and the fear of failure in the eye and spit right in its face. You could lose (like I did at that state competition) but you will at least know that you tried.

I may not sell a single copy of the book. It may get horrible reviews. But I tried.

Can you say the same thing about yourself?

(found at http://www.jefftaylorministries.org/)

What I can say about myself is that I find in me desires that are hard and fast and real. Those are meant to be stoked and fanned into flames (2 Timothy 1:6). I am beginning to see that I must live a life of risk to pursue those desires heartily. That pursuit will lead me into the calling and purpose of my life… and ultimately to Him.

I want to write. I want to find and redeem that language to help guide and support our vision and will as we pursue Christ. There, I admitted it. Now to taking the leap…