Feel the Heat

Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking... They want to taste, to touch with their hearts, to see with their inner eyes the wonder that is God... and in Him we shall find that for which we have all our lives been secretly longing. -A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

Ice lays thick on the streets and in the yards and on houses and cars and everything else in sight right outside my window. The Midwest has been hammered with an ice storm this week, and we are among the lucky few that still have electricity.

As beautiful as it is, there’s something smothering about the ice. It’s... weighty. It’s heavy. That is, literally, what’s caused the power outages – power lines buckle under the weight of the ice, or are snapped by fallen tree limbs. Travel becomes treacherous. Moving becomes difficult. Everything slows to a frozen standstill.

Such often is the case with our own hearts. What is this reluctance, this gravity, this freezing up, that keeps us from rising up and shining and seeking after the heart of God? Why is it we can often go days or even weeks on some kind of spiritual momentum after contact with God, but then we soon slow up, our joints freeze, we grow cold, and frigid wind finds its way in through the cracks in our souls and snuffs out the fire within? Our desire is stolen. We quit our hope and courage. We lose heart.

I don’t want to use a very real and very prevalent and very painful phenomena as fodder for poetry. I don’t want someone to read this post and leave and think, "That was a nice bit of wording to express that little problem." There is something as sinister and intentional in our spiritual inertia as there was behind the 100-year winter in Narnia before the Pevensies showed up on the scene, if you remember the story from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. There are in this world real enemies bent on snuffing out our desire for God in any way that they can. As Thomas a Kempis said, "The devil sleepeth not; neither is the flesh as yet dead; therefore cease not to prepare thyself for battle; for on thy right hand and on thy left are enemies who never rest."

If the promise is true, and I believe it is, that we will find God when we seek Him (Jeremiah 29:13) and that in finding and knowing God we will have life (John 17:3), then it is equally true that we will not have life if we do not know God by seeking Him. It all begins with desire. Right? That’s what Jesus said, after all, that "blessed are those who hunger and thirst." Speaking to this character of the Father’s heart, George MacDonald said that "surely he may keep his plans in a measure unfixed, waiting the free desire of the individual soul!" Desire does, indeed, play a crucial role. This desire, says Gerald May, is our truest identity, "our reason for being."

I’ll never forget the night I ran across that verse in Jeremiah 29:13. I had worked for a ministry at the time, and we had traveled to Africa to film a video documenting the plight of Christians in Sudan. It had been an exciting journey, but a challenging one. Among other things, the disconnection from technology and the whirring and buzzing of television, telephone, mp3 players and the like brought with it both a welcomed relief and a unsettling silence, a space in which God could speak and I could hear.

Our compound had set on a clearing on the edge of a small sub-Saharan village, surrounded by the deep greens of teak forests to the west and open bush to the east. The days had been full of hiking and filming and interviews, and the nights had been hot and sticky.

It was late on the last night of our stay, and I had been unable to sleep. Weary of staring at the mosquito netting tented over my bed, I flipped through some pages of Scripture until I landed in Jeremiah. My eyes fell on the portion of the sentence that I’d always passed by before, "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart."

I left my tukel and took a walk underneath a brilliantly massive starlit sky. There was no artificial light whatsoever, but the sky had enough to illuminate my way. I lingered over the verse and found that it had a strange effect on me. I had felt... despair. I felt as if I would never find God, or at least not find him in a deeper and more authentic way than I had known Him before. I had wanted God, or at least wanted to want Him. What that verse had to say must have been it, I thought. It had to be the reason why it had felt so difficult to engage with God, to pray, to read his Word, to offer life to others as he had said that I would, at least over the course of the previous few months. Because I had been trying to do so without all my heart in it. Even finding God was impossible without my full heart.

But instead of hearing it as hopeful, as in "Ah! Now I know what the problem is," I found it frustrating, defeating. I thought it was a set up for an automatic loss of heart. How could I ever have hope of finding Him if I didn't even do anything with all my heart? Enraged, I balled my fist and told Him what I thought about it. I cried to the heavens, "How can I seek you with all my heart when I don’t have all my heart?!" But there alone in the middle of a foreign continent, Jesus came to speak that night, and with a single word answered my dilemma, "Exactly." I came to see that all my efforts to get to him were futile, that only his work first on my behalf would enable me to find him. He would, as he promised, give me an "undivided heart" (Ezekiel 11:19), so that I could then find God, and live. He had been waiting for me to simply see that I could not know Him without first His restoration of some large pieces of my heart.

These years of walking with God since have been just that, a journey of restoration and reconciliation, and alternating cycles of deeper healing and more intimate communion with God, and usually an odd and beautiful mixture of both. Coming to Christ first gives you a beachhead, a place from which the kingdom will continue to advance. But there is more. There are new avenues of freedom and joy and even ecstasy to have. Even after the children came into Narnia, it took some time for blossoms to appear on trees and the rivers to unfreeze and run wild once more after so long dormant and cold.

So much of our life now is a process of both healing and of learning to walk in the new way of the kingdom of God. It’s what being a disciple of Jesus is all about, since he’s the One to usher in this new way of living. It’s him and his disciples and friends that Tozer was speaking of when he said to draw near to them and feel the heat of their desire after God. As we walk in this New Way, God sets our hearts free more and more vibrantly so that we may enjoy in constantly fuller measure what it is to really know God, to really love, and to really live.

I’m taking Tozer’s counsel to heart. I’m opening up the Scriptures to find the men and women who were delirious in the desire after God. I’m discovering that passion in David’s psalms and in Paul’s letter to the Philippians. In John’s gospel and in Peter’s epistles. And I’m not stopping there. I’ve discovered George MacDonald, St. Athanasius, Dallas Willard, and Tozer himself. And so many other saints that have gone before and a precious few that are still around. But that’s not enough, either. Because God has given us community, where together with other glorious hearts we encounter the Living One and rediscover with forgotten joy His true intentions for us and through us. Don’t forsake that fellowship; it is vital for your heart and memory, to keep before your eyes the real gospel, that "in Him we shall find that for which we have all our lives been secretly longing."