The Womb of the Morning

A week ago, early in the morning as I was preparing to settle in with God for some quiet time, I had a thought. It was to do with me, internally, and the time of day, externally. It was the beginning of the day, both ways. 

 

Inside, I was anticipating my time with the Lord as well as the unfolding of my day. Outside, there was just a glow on the horizon, the promise of a new day coming, full of life and unknown possibilities. I had this thought, and I spoke it aloud: “The womb of the morning.” I don’t think I had ever heard such a thought expressed. I repeated it several times, thinking of the beauty and mystery it suggested. 

 

I picked up my bowl of porridge and goblet of kombucha and moved into the east-facing front room. The glow on the horizon was a small arch of gold, transitioning into a larger turquoise arch, which deepened in turn gradually into dark blue-black. Through that arch, the new day would be ushered in. 

 

It was with reverence that I quietly took my place on the couch. There was a holy hush I didn’t want to disturb. And my mind was pregnant with images and inspirations springing from that thought I’d had. I opened my Bible and spent some time with God.

 

Two days later, as I settled into that spot again, thinking once more of that powerful phrase, the Lord spoke to my heart: “Aren’t you going to kneel down for a few minutes first?” 

 

This is a suggestion that Dallas Willard makes in his writings, to spend a little time on one’s knees at the beginning of a visit with God. I often do this but hadn’t this morning. Now I was already very comfortable on the couch, but “prompt obedience” is something the Lord has been highlighting to me lately. 

 

I responded, “Yes sir!” and then knelt at the end of the couch, laying my Amplified Classic on the arm. Opening where I’d left off in 1 Corinthians, I began to read. But it didn’t seem the right thing to read at that moment. I should read, aloud, in Psalms, I thought. Lots of good words of prayer and devotion and praise in there. I cut the volume open approximately where I knew that particular book would be and found myself at Psalm 110. I began to read aloud at the first verse. The third verse stopped me short.

 

“Your people will offer themselves willingly in the day of Your power, in the beauty of holiness and in holy array out of the womb of the morning ....”

 

I was astonished. I hadn’t known that phrase was in the Bible. Taking in the wonder of this “coincidence” as another glorious day dawned around me, I was completely distracted from the usual context of my quiet time. Still on my knees, I waited, quietly thanking God, sometimes wordlessly, from an overflowing heart. 

 After a while, I continued on reading, still aloud, bits and pieces of the next few Psalms. All at once I found myself repeating words that were very familiar. It was Psalm 116. I had written a song 40 years earlier, taken directly from the first nine verses in the King James Version. Speaking the words aloud was a lovely way to bask in the gratitude of God’s goodness, especially thinking back to what these verses meant to me when I put them to music so many years ago.

 

I love the Lord because he hath heard my voice 

and my supplications. 

Because he hath inclined his ear unto me, 

therefore will I call upon him as long as I live. 

 

The sorrows of death compassed me, 

and the pains of hell got hold on me: 

I found trouble and sorrow. 

 

Then called I upon the name of the Lord; 

Lord , I beseech thee, deliver my soul. 

Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; 

yea, our God is merciful. 

The Lord preserveth the simple: 

I was brought low, and he helped me. 

Return unto thy rest, O my soul; 

for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee. 

 

For He hast delivered my soul from death, 

mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling. 

I will walk before the Lord 

in the land of the living.

 

 On a whim, I got out my guitar—something I rarely do anymore, and I sang that beautiful old song, several times. From there I sang another I had written, which begins with the first verse of Psalm 40 and then draws phrases from all over the Bible. 

 

And then suddenly I began to sing a new song called “In the Womb of the Morning,” the first song I’ve written in eleven years. 

 

In the womb of the morning

Lord, You are here

And I’m sitting, desiring

For Your voice to hear

The words of Your mouth

Oh, they sustain and nourish me

So I’m waiting in anticipation 

For You speak to me

 

In the womb of the morning

The sun’s getting ready to rise

And its rays will go out like the word of God

Resonating through the skies

It’s a picture of You, Lord

Presiding over all

Bringing warmth and comfort

Restoring us when we fall

 

The day may stretch ahead

With challenges I dread

But everything I fear

You defeat when You are near, yes!

In the womb of the morning

Lord, You are here

 

In the womb of the morning 

You are bringing forth the day

And I get on my knees and bow my heart

And submit to you my way

All my troubles and worries

At Your feet I lay

Lord, You are the ruler of my life

And I like it that way

 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Part 2

 

Just a couple of weeks after having this experience, something else happened that enlarged my understanding of it. Again I had come downstairs to have my quiet time. I had barely got settled on the couch in the front room when I heard my husband getting up. I had slept a little later than usual, so this was not surprising. But I felt myself bracing internally for the inevitable noises and interruptions. I feared that soon there wouldn’t be much room to think and listen. 

 

Rachel was staying with us for a few days, and now I heard her getting up as well. Before long, both she and her dad were in the kitchen, making coffee, talking and laughing. It’s not that they were being unusually loud; it was just that in this special, holy time of the day when I had thought to be strengthening my soul in God’s presence, it was complete abrasive.  

 

The “womb of the morning” was shredded. It could not support and nurture life. It could not gestate the life of the Son of God in me. And that was when I realized something: the walls of that Womb are comprised of silence and solitude.

 

I am sorry for the violent image, but when a womb is slashed open, it cannot sustain life. All that was taking shape there spills out and is lost. It is not irretrievable; if one acts quickly and decisively, that space can be be restored. Fragments of thoughts can be recovered and rooted back in.

 

But in addition to nurturing the Life of God in me, I have the God-given responsibility and privilege of nurturing my husband and daughter and my relationship with them. I would go out into the kitchen and join them, and I would pick up, a little later, where I left off with God. 

 

It is no coincidence that silence and solitude are two of the foundational spiritual disciplines. They establish a physical and mental place where we can transact with God. And yet silence and solitude have become increasingly alien in this world. Unless we contend for it, we will never have a moment of either. Even when we are silent, our thoughts are not quiet. Even when we are alone, we are not alone. 

 

Our phones are always with us, and we turn to them and fritter our time away with pithy, temporal distractions that will not ultimately enrich our lives in any way. Many of us, if we found ourselves in a womb of silence and solitude, would be so disoriented and uncomfortable that we would leap back out at the first opportunity. We ourselves would be the ones to slash open that nurturing, life-giving sanctuary. 

 

But if we will, little by little, learn to say no to our flesh and its constant demand for stimulation; if we will taste a little of the Lord and see that He is indeed good (Psalm 34:8)—and so cultivate a taste for more; if we will practice a little bit and then a little bit more of being alone and being truly quiet; if we will come to Him early in the day and accustom ourselves to sitting peacefully with Him, we will find that, like the song says, “In the womb of the morning, Lord, You are here.”

 

 

Letting God Fight for Me

Way back before I was married, living in Victoria, I came to know about a man who went by the name of Lion Serpent Son. It was in a Sunday evening church service that I noticed, several rows in front of me, something happening to a young girl who had recently been delivered from evil spirits. In the middle of the sermon, she began to twitch uncontrollably. I whispered a comment to the friend sitting beside me, and he said, “Yeah, that’s because that guy”—he jerked his head back over his shoulder—“is sitting at the back of the room—Lion Serpent Son. The devil knows his own.”

What he meant was that because this teenage girl had until recently been under demonic influence, this man who had slipped into the back of our service (and was staring at the back of her head) was able to oppress and control her. My friend went on to say that this man ran an occult bookstore in town where, in the back room, he led Satanic rituals.

I had a dream a few nights ago in which this man showed up. Later, curious, I went to Google to see if I could find mention of him. Reading here and there, I figured out that his name, Lion Serpent Sun, would have been taken from images in the tarot card deck, a tool of occultic divination. But back in the day, I misunderstood the name my friend spoke to me: what I thought I heard was “Lying Serpent’s Son.”

In my dream, this man, Lying Serpent’s Son, was seated on my left, talking to me. He was trying to have input into my life. I spoke to a person on my right and explained who this guy was. “Back in the 80s,“ I said, “he sued 100 Huntley St. for libel.” (This actually happened in real life.) 

My mentioning this threw the man on my left into a rage. He began to attack me, both verbally and physically. I tried to protect myself; I tried to fight back, but my strength was pitiful next to his. 

The Lord spoke to my heart: “I will protect you. I will be your defense. But you must completely give up your own efforts and trust in Me alone. Otherwise I cannot fight on your behalf.” At His direction, I laid my forearms down on my thighs, hands flat, palms down: a picture of trust and rest. I didn’t feel that way on the inside. It was terrifying, doing nothing to help myself. I found, though, that if I kept my eyes shut, it was easier to focus on God and rest in Him.

But in spite of myself, I opened my eyes once more. Seeing the fury on this man’s face, his arms flailing and his hands clawing at me, was too much for my faith. I threw my arms up again, trying to defend myself.

Once again I realized the futility. Determined to trust, I laid my forearms down again, took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and focused on God. In that place, I found that the blows of this enemy could not actually touch me. He could not hurt me as long as I kept the eyes of my heart fixed on God. I could have peace in the middle of the storm.

As the dream faded away, Jesus spoke to me in a ringing voice: “Whatever I say to you, do it!” As I awoke, I clearly understood that unquestioning obedience—even in the smallest matter—would be both the means into that place of trust—as well as the evidence of that trust. Trusting obedience was the way into sanctuary. And as I obeyed, He would continually demonstrate His trustworthiness; and so my faith would grow.

I recognized that the words the Lord had spoken to me were an echo of something His mother said to the household servants at the marriage of Cana, narrated in John 3. The wine had run out and Mary had just prodded Jesus to do something about it. Although His initial response indicates that He has no intention of stepping in (“It’s not yet my time.”), Mary almost seems not to hear Jesus, calmly and confidently telling the servants, “Whatever He tells you to do, do it!” Is this what moved Jesus to action, her confidence in who she knew Him to be? Was it her trust and her derring-do? “The kingdom of God makes way for aggression, and the motivated lay hold of it by their determination” (Matthew 11:12, my paraphrase). 

Sure enough, He gives the servants some instructions. They obey to the letter, and we have Jesus’ first miracle: He turns water into wine. 

If we strip that story down to its bare principles, one of the things we draw from it is that as servants (and friends and family!) of Jesus, if we want to experience supernatural provision, protection, peace—you name it, we must without delay respond to His promptings. Conscious obedience is one of the conditions that bring the kingdom of heaven down to earth.

I would soon have opportunity to practice this principle.

We were staying in Canmore as our daughter Melissa had to have knee surgery in Banff, 20 minutes away. We’d driven to Calgary on Sunday, picked up Melissa, and the three of us drove to Canmore where we got settled, finally, in a hotel suite. It had been a long day for me as I was running on just four and a half hours of sleep. 

The next couple of days was a marathon of exhaustion, with Melissa suffering a lot of pain and vomitting from the effects of the whole ordeal. I would set my alarm and get up at midnight to make sure she got her pain meds and to take care of other needs, then lie awake for the next several hours. By the time I got sleepy, it would be almost time for the alarm to go off for Greg’s shift at 4:00 a.m., so I would cancel the alarm so as not to disturb him, then get up and tend to Melissa again. 

By the time I got to bed on Tuesday night, later than I would have liked, self-preservation was kicking in. With my own health challenges, I was becoming fearful and self-centered and even resentful about the demands of the situation, although I’d been keeping my mouth firmly shut.

I had less than an hour until my alarm would ring again. I was in a knot. Peace and joy, my birthright in Christ, were gone. The dream, which I had just had early that morning, was very much on my mind. A vile spirit, the devil’s spawn, son of the lying serpent, was talking to me. He was trying to have input into my life. As God says in His Word, “We are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12, NLT). Discouragement had a violent grip on me. I didn’t have the power to fight it, at least certainly not in my own strength.

Greg was still awake too. I spoke aloud to him: “I think I need to repent.”

He paused for a moment. “Yes, I think you need to change your mind about some things,” he said. 

(For many years now, he and I have understood repentance to mean changing one’s mind. As even Wikipedia says, “The repentance [metanoia] called for throughout the Bible is a summons to a personal, absolute and ultimate unconditional surrender to God as Sovereign. Though it includes sorrow and regret, it is more than that. ... In repenting, one makes a complete change of direction [180° turn] toward God.”)

I felt God wanted me to kneel to pray. Whatever I say to you, do it! I rolled out of bed and knelt on the hardwood floor. I had serious business to do, and it would not be helped by lying cozy and comfy in a soft bed. Because our body and soul are so closely tied together, taking a serious physical position helps our soul—our mind, our will, and our emotions—to get serious as well.

Mostly what I did that night was to re-establish some things in my mind and heart before God: He is my provision. He is my rest. He gives sleep to His beloved (Psalm 127:2). If He doesn’t give me sleep, He will sustain me supernaturally—if I trust Him to do so.

I stood against fear, fear for my health, in the name of Jesus. I renounced self-protection. I submitted myself to God once again,  committing myself to His care and keeping. In every way that I knew how, I gave up fighting for myself—so that God could fight for me. When I climbed back into bed, I lay on my back with my palms resting on my thighs, the way I had done in my dream—a physical picture of the relinquishment, rest, and trust that I had chosen in my soul.

The peace was tangible. I lay quietly until my alarm went off, then I tended to my daughter’s every need, taking all the time in the world. 

In the morning, I told her about the battle I’d had the night before and the victory I had won through Jesus. 

“It felt different when you came into my room last night,” she said. “There was a softness.”

When the Israelites stood at the formidable obstacle of the Red Sea with the entire Egyptian army breathing down their necks, Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord.… The Lord will fight for you, and you shall hold your peace” (Exodus 14:14, NKJV). 

To hold one’s peace means to remain silent. That was certainly what I’d needed to do as I struggled with all my negative feelings and attitudes. But there is another meaning I see there: If I let God fight for me, I will be able to hold onto my peace, my most valuable asset. And so I summarize my experience with a note to self: When you’re in a struggle, first re-establish your submission to God. Don’t lift so much as a finger to fight on your own behalf. Don’t even open your mouth, for as 2 Chronicles 20:16 says, “The battle is not yours, but God’s.”

*   *   *   *   *

Today as I posted this article, I saw that Facebook had brought up a post I wrote three years ago. We had been asked to pray for a certain family who were going through difficulty. What I wrote that day seems such a fitting addendum to this article that I felt I should tack it on. 

 

When Greg and I began to pray for [this particular family] this morning, this was the first thing that came to mind: “When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him” (Isaiah 59:19, KJV). A standard is a banner that an army carries, displaying a symbol or insignia of the kingdom it represents. Jesus is the Captain of the host of the Lord's armies, and He says that His banner over us is love (Solomon 2:4). He is our Champion, and He will fight for us.

 

“The Lord will march out like a champion, like a warrior he will stir up his zeal; with a shout he will raise the battle cry and will triumph over his enemies” (Isaiah 42:13, NIV).

 

A little later, I was praying through Psalm 118. Here are excerpts, all from The Message except for the paragraph annotated NIV:

 

Thank God because he’s good,

    because his love never quits….

 

Pushed to the wall, I called to God;

    from the wide open spaces, he answered.

God’s now at my side and I’m not afraid;

    who would dare lay a hand on me?

God’s my strong champion;

    I flick off my enemies like flies….

 

All the [hosts of hell] surrounded me,

    but in the name of the LORD I cut them down.

They surrounded me on every side,

    but in the name of the LORD I cut them down.

 They swarmed around me like bees,

    but they were consumed as quickly as burning thorns;

    in the name of the LORD I cut them down (NIV)

 

I was right on the cliff-edge, ready to fall,

    when God grabbed and held me.

God’s my strength, he’s also my song,

    and now he’s my salvation.

Hear the shouts, hear the triumph songs

    in the camp of the saved?

        “The hand of God has turned the tide!

        The hand of God is raised in victory!

        The hand of God has turned the tide!”

 

I didn’t die. I lived!

    And now I’m telling the world what God did.

God tested me, he pushed me hard,

    but he didn’t hand me over to Death….

 

Thank God—he’s so good.

    His love never quits! 

Unworthy or Worthy? Nope!

 I love the Amplified Classic Bible, but there is something that, frankly, has come to irritate me. Virtually every time the word grace appears in the context of God’s relationship with us, the editors insert an explanatory phrase along the lines of “undeserved and unmerited favor.” I know that they cannot presume upon their readers to retain these explanations from page to page or even from verse to verse and so they repeat it every time. But the image it conjures up now, each time I read that phrase, is of these scholars, the translators, sitting around smacking their foreheads with a great big Bible while monotonously repeating, “I am unworthy. I am unworthy.” It makes me want to respond in a manner akin to “God” in the stage play of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where He shouts from off stage, “Oh, quit your grovelling!” Not that God actually thinks or responds this way, but I sometimes do.

Speaking of The Holy Grail, I suddenly realize that that is where I got the mental picture of Bible scholars whacking their foreheads: there is a scene where a procession of monks in single file are chanting in Latin while intermittently thumping their heads with a short plank. It’s a picture of the same kind of self-flagellation and -abasement: “Unworthy.” Whack! “Unworthy.”

In the same way that I am bothered by the Amplified Classic’s continual reference to unmerited favour, I am grieved (and I think maybe God is grieved as well) every time someone says, regarding His goodness to them, “I know I don’t deserve it.” Oswald Chambers once said, “If we have ever had a glimpse of what we are like in the sight of God, we shall never say—“Oh, I am so unworthy,” because we shall know we are, beyond the possibility of stating it” (My Utmost for His Highest, January 12 reading). 

But when it comes to our relationship with God, worthiness is not the currency we are dealing in. The currency is love. Then again, “currency” is too mercenary a term to be used in connection with love. “Currency is a medium of exchange for goods and services” (investopedia.com). It suggests a system of earning and payment: duty accomplished and reward disbursed. Love, on the other hand, is a relationship where unconditional value is place on the beloved. And we, amazingly, are the beloved. 

As a parent, can you imagine if your child (of any age) were always saying, “I don’t deserve the things you give me. I don’t deserve your love.” It would break your heart! Furthermore, you would be concerned about the mental health of your child.

But before we go further, let us recognize that it is nevertheless both helpful and healthful to grasp the true, negative potential of our depravity, our fallen nature. This most often can only come by revelation. It typically comes by way of a very deep failure, moral or otherwise, which shows us, to the depths of our being, our need of a saviour. It is in that place that we can really receive Jesus, because then we truly know, “beyond the possibility of stating it,” how much we need Him. But then we must determinedly receive what He has promised: “to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). When we have failed, we must choose—against all the weight of our shame—to accept His forgiveness and move forward in confidence that He means what He says: He forgives us, and He is continually cleansing us. 

It seems to me that the constant expression of being undeserving of God’s goodness exhibits a lack of understanding concerning the difference between the old and new covenants, more specifically, the difference between law and grace. And even then (although the Israelites of old could not understand this at the time), the law was only ever given to show us our need of Christ (Galatians 3:24) and to bring us to repentance: “For no person will be justified [freed of guilt and declared righteous] in His sight by [trying to do] the works of the Law. For through the Law we become conscious of sin [and the recognition of sin directs us toward repentance, but provides no remedy for sin]” (Romans 3:20, AMP). 

The law speaks of duty; grace speaks of a love relationship. 

The mention of duty versus love makes me think of something Greg shared with me from a book by C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, a collection of thoughts from the writings of the Scottish poet and preacher. In #59, a short meditation called “Law and Spirit,” MacDonald explains that we cannot keep God’s Commandments by striving to do so in our own strength. We inevitably fail, and then, he says, “the man is overwhelmed in the weight of their broken pieces.” It requires a truly regenerate heart to produce pure actions: “a power of life, not of struggle; the strength of love, not the effort of duty.”

Perhaps the striving of duty stems from the old myth of earning God’s favour by good deeds and hoping that at the end of our lives when we are weighed in the scales of judgement, the good will outweigh the bad. But this a myth, a gross misunderstanding. God never had such a system in mind. 

It’s not that behaviour isn’t important, but first the heart must be settled on the matter of being completely accepted by God. Truly righteous behaviour grows out of the confidence of being rightly related to God.

Are we trying to earn our right-standing with God by proper behavior, or are we simply, by faith, receiving the gift of His love and imputed righteousness? In Romans Chapter 4, Paul clearly lays out two very different systems of receiving benefit: 1) being an employee who works to earn his wages and therefore deserves to receive them and 2) being the beneficiary of a gift. The first scenario is laid out here: “Now to a laborer, his wages are not counted as a favour or a gift, but as an obligation—something owed to him” (Romans 4:4, AMPC). The second is illustrated here: “But to the one who does not work [that is, the one who does not try to earn his salvation by doing good], but believes and completely trusts in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited to him as righteousness (right standing with God)” (Romans 4:5, AMP).

 If you consider yourself to be an “employee” of God, then you will work to try to earn what He gives you. You either work very hard to please God and then subconsciously feel you deserve to be rewarded, or you don’t work hard enough (in your estimation) and therefore don’t deserve anything. (You feel you have failed because you have done things you shouldn’t or not done things you should.) 

If, on the other hand, you are plainly (and generously) being given a gift, it has nothing to do with your performance. This is the Good News, or at least one way of expressing it.

Let us not think of God as an employer who will pay us what we have earned, withhold what we have not earned, or perhaps pay us anyway and leave us feeling vaguely and perpetually guilty for receiving a reward that shouldn’t be ours. Let us think of God clearly as the loving Father He is and of ourselves as His beloved children whom He delights to restore and bless.

Do you know what the monks were chanting in Monty Python’s story? “Pie Iesu Domine, dona eis requim”: “Holy Jesus, Lord, grant them rest.” So that is my prayer today for those still struggling with the idea of worthiness. You are not unworthy, and you are not worthy. You are simply loved. 

In the Presence of My Enemies

I hear a knock at the door. I pull back the curtain a little and look out the front window. There is a white van parked out front, with gold lettering on the side: “God’s Catering Service.“ I open the door. There stands the Lord Jesus Himself.

“Behold,“ He says, “I stand at the door and knock.“

“Please come in,“ I say, opening the door wide.

“You’re having a bit of a hard time today?“ He asks. He says it like a question, but it’s really more of a statement. I know that He knows.

He has in His arms a large box. He walks past me into the kitchen and sets it down on the counter. The first thing He takes out is a beautiful white linen tablecloth. He shakes it out as He moves into the dining room, and He spreads it out on my dining room table. He lays out two dinner plates of fine china, crystal goblets, polished cutlery, and neatly folded napkins that match the tablecloth. He sets a vase full of flowers – fresh, colorful, fragrant – at the centre of the table.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I said I would prepare a table for you in the presence of your enemies,” He says.

“Well, I sure do feel like I’m surrounded by enemies right now,” I answer wearily.

He returns to the kitchen and starts to carry in the food as I stand there full of wonder. There is a rack of lamb, still sizzling, trailing its aroma of rosemary, garlic, and thyme. There are roast potatoes, nicely browned, and a medley of vegetables, some of which I don’t even recognize. There is a crisp salad and a basket of steaming brown buns. Then He places beside the food a jug of water that sparkles like it’s alive.

I have been too anxious and distracted all day to even have an appetite, but now my mouth is watering and my stomach is making its hunger known.

He pulls out a chair and gestures to me to sit, seating me in the most gentlemanly and fond manner, then begins to fill my plate.

“Lord, it doesn’t feel right, You serving me like this.”

He doesn’t answer right away; He carefully fills my cup to the brim, pouring until it cannot hold another drop. Then he faces me full on, still holding the jug, his eyes warm. “Do you remember when I said, ‘He that is greatest among you must be the servant of all?’ Think about that for a while.”

I’m not sure what He means; I will have to think about that later. Instead I ask, “Who is the other plate for? Are you going to eat with me?“

“I stood at your door and knocked,“ He says. “You heard my voice and opened the door. So I came in, and as I have said, I will dine with you, and you with me.”

I suddenly realize how dry I am. I take a sip of water and swallow. I can feel it tingling all the way down. It seems like if I just drink this, I will never be thirsty again.

Together we eat. The food nourishes my body; I can feel strength flowing into me. The flavours delight my taste buds and satisfy my soul. The conversation, easy but deep, draws out my thoughts, enriches my understanding, and fills my deepest yearnings.

My troubles seem far away. They cannot touch me. The presence of the Lord is a shield to me. My soul is restored.

 

The Pelican Prophecy

I saw something amazing as I drove in to church Sunday morning. It moved me to tears. It was very much on my mind during worship, and I finally got up and walked to the back of the sanctuary to speak to Pastor Greg. I told him briefly what I had seen, and then said, “I don’t know if it's appropriate to share.” He was intrigued, and he seemed to feel in his spirit that it fit in with God’s direction for the service, so he said he would call on me before he got up to preach.

This is what I said to the congregation:

I just wanted to share something that I saw on the way in this morning. I left at 9:30, and before I pulled away, I dialed in to the zoom room so I could intercede for the service with Rita and Lorne on the prayer team as I drove. I got to the Coal Lake hill and, totally predictably, I lost the signal as I came down the hill.

As I came through the valley, I looked out on the water and saw something. I didn’t know what it was at first. It was a white circle with gold in the center. I thought, What is that? and I looked again. It was a flock of eight or ten pelicans in a perfect circle with their bodies outward and their beaks inward. Their beaks were all touching in the center. It looked like spokes of a wheel with white around the outside and this brilliant gold of their beaks inward. 

And it just walloped me—with the glory of it. I believe it’s prophetic, although I have no idea what it would mean. But I do know they were declaring the glory of God. Just in the middle of an ordinary morning, ordinary birds, doing something extraordinary.

Pastor Greg‘s sermon was on unity. Further on into it, he began to speak from John 17, Jesus’ high priestly prayer. As he spoke of the harmony and beauty that come when people serve God in unity, I begin to think of the pelicans again. And then he said it himself: “Makes me think of something I heard about some birds.”

I have written before about how all living creatures submit to the Spirit of God with the notable exception of mankind. (Only man has been given the choice of whether he will listen to God or not.) I believe that those pelicans were moving in response to an impulse from the Spirit of God to gather in an organized and beautiful formation. And that made me think, as the sermon continued, But what glory will be displayed when mankind aligns themselves with what God is doing in the earth and they do it together!

It wasn’t until much later that I suddenly remembered I had prayed along the lines of John 17 with Lorne and Rita on my way in to church, after my Bluetooth got reception again. Another scripture had been on my mind the previous few days: “But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). In other words, sometimes when we share the good news of the kingdom of God, people cannot grasp what we are saying because their spirits have not yet been activated; and yet their spirits are where these spiritual truths must be processed. It’s like trying to open a program on a computer when you don’t have the software to handle it. So on the zoom room, I began to pray along the lines of the scripture in Corinthians, and then I found myself praying from John 17.

Help us, Lord, to speak Your words with Your power, that people would truly hear and receive the good news, that that supernatural conception would take place, where the spermata [1 Peter 1:23] of Your word fertilizers the seed of faith in their hearts and brings forth new life, new life in their spirits, so that they have the ability to understand the things of the Spirit of God.

Help us, Jesus, to remember what You said and really understand what it means: that You are in us and we are in You, and together in You we are in the Father [John 17:20-23]. Let this vital understanding be a daily part of our lives as we live and breathe and walk with You, so that this spiritual life can be passed on to others.

Although I did not clue in when Pastor Greg used this same passage from John 17 in his message an hour or so later, it afterward struck me as quite amazing. And yet we should not be surprised. As Graham Cooke said, “We cannot help but be prophetic; it is in our very bones. It is who God made us to be” (Approaching the Heart of Prophecy, p. 6). For those not familiar with prophecy in this sense, it is not so much a foretelling of future events, although it can include that; it is a telling forth of the mind and heart of God on a matter. With Pastor Greg preaching from the same passage that I had been praying from, it seems these verses  of John 17 were part of God’s own message to the body of Christ that morning. We come to expect such synchronicity as we understand another part of the 1 Corinthians 2 passage quoted above.

 For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.  Now we have received ... the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God” (v.11-12, NKJV). “ God has revealed them to us through His Spirit” (v.10).

I will put this another way: There is no way I can really understand what you think and feel. Only your spirit knows that. And so, obviously, no one can really know what God thinks and feels. Only His Spirit knows. Oh, but wait a minute! God has given us His Holy Spirit, and He lives right inside us. So guess what? We can perceive God’s thoughts. Like I just quoted above, “[He] has revealed them to us through His Spirit.”

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Very early Tuesday morning during my quiet time, I brought some things to God that I was struggling with. I am trying to learn to bring daily matters to Him to find rest and guidance. One of these things was the cover for the republishing of my Made in Heaven book.

I had begun to work on it in earnest a couple of weeks earlier, sitting at the dining room table with my laptop, perusing all the excellent photos on the various royalty-free sites. But none of these photos was doing anything for me. Frankly, the images set forward in the many couples photos I looked at seemed sadly lacking as I compared them with the magnificent stature and countenance of my husband, especially the way he looked on our wedding day. As I looked at picture after picture, always moving on again, an image from our wedding album planted itself firmly in my mind, with this thought: “You could crop it right above the lips to give it some anonymity.” I dug out the old seldom-seen album and found the picture. So beautiful! And the amazing thing was, our lips were in almost perfect horizontal alignment, so the cropping idea really would work. I submitted the photo and my thoughts to the woman who has been designing my book covers of late, and so began the back-and-forth process. But a couple of weeks had gone by now and it just wasn’t coming together.

Here, as in the rest of my life, I was trying to trust God that I really do have the mind of Christ, as He tells us in the last verse of 1 Corinthians 2. I am trying to learn not to lean on my own understanding but to acknowledge Him in the process and let Him direct my paths, as He counsels us in Proverbs 3:5-6.

I think it was Graham Cooke who said that sometimes we have trouble hearing God because we expect Him to speak to us through our natural ears and our natural thoughts, when actually He can and will speak to us in many different ways. In fact, I find that He most often bypasses the natural channels, possibly so that our flesh is not so easily able to interfere with the message.

So I told God I would not try to think harder about the cover but would give it over to Him and forget about it until He brought it up again.

(“You delegated it,” said my daughter Rachel when I told her about it. She understands these things because she works in a managerial position. “Yes!” I replied, “and now that I’ve done that, I mustn’t micromanage what I’ve turned over to Him!”)

So now I deliberately turned my thoughts away from my conundrum and toward a scripture I had been intending to check out ever since I saw the pelicans. Because they looked like a wheel out there on the water, they had made me think of Ezekiel‘s vision. I looked it up in Ezekiel 1:5-21 and was musing on this strange description of the four creatures and their wheels when suddenly I was interrupted by a flash of inspiration coming across my mind.

The problem with the cover had been that having the picture cropped just above the lips, at the top of the book cover the way I had imagined it, could cause a problem when it came to trimming the cover. One never knows exactly where the cutline will fall, and yet for it to look right, it had to be cropped perfectly. What had just jarred into my mind in the middle of my scripture reading was that the picture should be on the bottom half of the cover with the title and subtitle above it, such that the edge of the picture would be set, written in stone as it were, against the bottom of the subtitle box.

I jumped up, went to my computer, and printed off what we had so far of the cover so I could cut it up and rearrange it and think about it. I was swept away with this for a good hour, and then I headed back upstairs for the “second shift” of sleep I always need. I settled down and, as a peaceful way to drift into sleep, opened the Scriptures back up to where I had been before God interrupted me.

I had been in Ezekiel 1:5-21, reading just those few verses; but lying there in bed with Bible Gateway’s mobile app, it occurred to me that I should start at the beginning of the chapter to get the context and see if there was something else God wanted me to see. I had been reading from the Young’s Literal Translation (1862), but now as I scrolled back to the first verse, I thought, I should read this in one of the modern translations. After brief consideration, I chose the New Living Translation and opened it up. What I read there absolutely riveted me.

For the last many days I had been doing a final proofread of the story of our marriage. I had been reminded again and again of God’s moving in our relationship: how we prayed that God would give us everything in marriage that He ever intended it to be; how He promised us, through a devotional we happened to read together on the night Greg proposed, that He would make us one, even as the Father and Son are one (John 17 again); that the kingdom of God would fully come in our marriage and bring the healing we both needed. All this caused me to marvel and give thanks over and over again for the wonderful man God brought into my life back then. And then with the work on the front cover, I had been spending long hours staring at a photo that was taken on our wedding day, July 31 of the summer when I was 30 years old.

Now I had turned to Ezekiel 1:1, NLT, and this is what I read: “On July 31 of my thirtieth year, ... the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God.”

I was so amazed and excited; the awareness of God’s glory was so intense in that moment that I didn’t think I would ever be able to go back to sleep. But sleep I did, deeply and restfully. Later on, after I had begun my day again, I went to my computer and checked that verse in the other 50 English translations on Bible Gateway’s full version. Every other one of them expressed the date by the Hebrew calendar, “in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month,” except for the Living Bible, the predecessor of the NLT, which had the date roughly pegged as “late June.” I had randomly chosen the only English translation that had carefully pinpointed the date of Ezekiel’s vision on our calendar, and it was the same date as our wedding. Furthermore, I was 30 years old and Ezekiel says he was “in my thirtieth year” when God showed him His kingdom and His glory.

With full confidence now of God’s involvement and blessing, work on the cover went forward in the direction I believed He had shown me. When at last it was mostly to my satisfaction, I sought out a couple of opinions. Our daughter Melissa was up for a visit; I showed it to her first. Although she was careful to find some positive things to say, the main drift was that she felt the photo was too dated to appeal to my target audience: young adults, especially young women. My best friend, when I sent it to her, felt the same way. I had sensed the same from the designer, when she encouraged me, earlier on, to look again at the royalty-free sites. And in my gut, I knew they were right, from a marketing point of view. I know that the cover of a book is the most important part in selling it, as that is how people judge a book (in spite of the proverbial advice to the contrary!). Now I was in a quandary about what direction to take.

In my questioning, I was drawn again to Ezekiel’s vision: “All four wheels looked alike and were made the same; each wheel had a second wheel turning crosswise within it” (1:16, NLT). It’s been suggested that this describes a gyroscope. A gyroscope is an instrument for orienting oneself and finding the right direction (for instance when piloting an aircraft) when the natural senses might leave one in danger of confusion and error. Surely allowing the Spirit of God to orient us and determine the correct direction when we are uncertain and in need of guidance is the safest and wisest way to proceed. The creatures and their wheels “went in whatever direction the spirit chose” (v.12, NLT).

After Ezekiel’s vision, God began to share messages with him that he was to take to the rebellious nation of Israel. But first He gave him this advice, which I take to heart as well: “Let all my words sink deep into your own heart first. Listen to them carefully for yourself” (Ezekiel 3:10, NLT).

For a while I had had a sinking feeling that in spite of my consulting God on the matter—and receiving His three powerful responses, I was going to have to start over on the cover and yield in the end to worldly wisdom.

But as I deliberated back and forth about whether to choose the world’s marketing savvy or what I believed were God’s directives regarding the cover design, I saw clearly how God had interjected these ideas into my mind independent of my own thought processes. I could not pretend they were just some more of my own thoughts, on par with the “marketing savvy” that was now coming my way, to be accepted or rejected on a whim. They stood out clearly as God’s counsel in the matter. I was free to choose, certainly, but why would I choose in the line of common sense, my “own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5), when I had asked God to supernaturally direct me—and He had?

Perhaps the most important lesson of this story is that we learn to yield our intelligence and, as do the lowlier creatures of land and sea and air, hear and obey the subtle promptings of the Spirit of God. With my whole life I am trying to live by the rhythms of the kingdom of heaven. Here was an opportunity to throw my entire lot in with God (and what I understood Him to be saying) and let Him prove Himself to me—let Him establish the reality of His guidance and the wisdom of His counsel. I will choose to submit to the gentle nudging of His Spirit and allow Him to direct me, the same way He directed a small flock of pelicans into a simple and spectacular formation, for my eyes only, early on a Sunday morning.

What (on Earth) is Holiness?

I’ve been thinking about the word holiness. Probably because I’m reading a book right now, by John Eldridge, called The Utter Relief of Holiness. I’ve never really liked the word, and never really understood what it meant. Never had anyone satisfactorily define it for me. It is a severe word, conjuring up images of an austere and unapproachable God, even though what we as believers come to know about Him increasingly, especially in the character of Jesus Christ, is His goodness and kindness and grace.

The word holiness makes me think “absolute sinlessness.” It sounds completely out of reach. And yet God has said, “Be ye holy, even as I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44, 45; 19:2; 1 Peter 1:15, 16). That’s a pretty intimidating command. Overwhelming. Impossible. I don’t think I can become that, and I still don’t even know what it really means.

So I looked it up. Do you know what the definition of holiness is? It’s the state of being holy. Okay, that didn’t help me much.

It occurs to me that holiness is like humility, in this way: if you’re trying to achieve it or measure it, you probably don’t have it. Oswald Chambers talked about “unconscious holiness,” and he implied that it comes about through “conscious repentance.”

We can find religious articles that encourage us in our quest for holiness, advising the practice of things like praying daily, reading the Bible, meditating on God’s word, spending time in silence and solitude, fasting, and serving. And of course, these lists also add in things you should avoid, things we know are contrary to God’s righteousness. Dos and don’ts: they can seem a dreary obligation of requirements for earning God’s favour. We can employ some of these things in our life and yet still feel no closer to God. We can completely exhaust ourselves trying. It can be a whole lot of self-effort, very little of which seems fruitful. It’s a lonely place to live. We feel we just can’t do it by ourselves.

And that’s the first thing God wants us to recognize: we can’t do it by ourselves, and he never intended that we would. His whole plan is based on “Christ in us, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27), the only hope for holiness here on earth. May He increasingly make real in our lives the mystery: “…I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20, KJV).

He also wants us to stop thinking in terms of earning his favor. We already have it, and we didn’t earn it. Remember the message from the angels to the shepherds on the night Jesus was born, Luke 2:14: “Peace on earth, goodwill toward mankind.” It was the announcement of the fulfillment of a prophecy of Isaiah (61:2, NLT), “The time of the Lord‘s favor has come.”

 It’s a good book I’m reading, The Utter Relief of Holiness, but I have probably spent more time thinking about the title than about the contents, trying to understand that word. Something that gives me a huge clue is the subtitle: How God’s Goodness Frees Us from Everything that Plagues Us. With this title and subtitle, the author is clearly equating holiness with goodness. So that is a great place to start. And if God’s holiness truly can free us from everything that plagues us, it surely must be an extremely important and practical thing. I mean, wouldn’t you like to be free from everything that troubles you?

So we’ll start by equating holiness with goodness. But God is more than just goodness. Now my memory retrieves something from the Amplified Classic Bible: Oftentimes when the word faith is used there, it is broken down into this: “the leaning of the entire human personality on God in absolute trust and confidence in his power, wisdom, and goodness.” What if these other two words give us a fuller picture of holiness? What if, in addition to goodness, holiness also means power and wisdom?

I have often thought of and spoken of that definition of faith in the Amplified translation in this way: “God is all wise, so He knows the best thing to do and when to do it. He is all good, so what He chooses in His wisdom is always the most beneficial thing for us. His word assures us that He is always working everything together for good, that He intends for our ultimate benefit even the things that the enemy intends for evil, things that certainly to us seem at first to be nothing but disastrous. So God knows the wise thing to do; He anticipates the good thing, the best thing, to do; and then, being all powerful, He also has the power to pull off what needs to be done.”

I recently found these three attributes echoed in a description of “God’s essential nature” written in the 1800s by Adam Clarke, a Methodist theologian and biblical scholar: “God is ... of perfect goodness, wisdom and power...” (quoted by Dallas Willard in Life Without Lack).        

Back to that intimidating list and how it seems to tap in to our subconscious striving for God‘s approval: we  must understand that these “spiritual disciplines” (on the list) do not lay claim to any merit; they will not earn us any points with God. But rather, they benefit us directly by our practicing them, building our character and faith, deepening our knowledge and understanding of God, so that He can entrust to us greater responsibility and blessing. We also will find that He surprises us with deep insights and sudden visits of His presence, right in the middle of such practices, and we will find ourselves thinking what we would have missed if we had instead been off running after our busy lives.

But as far as finding acceptance with God and being declared righteous in His sight, we must always remember that that status comes only by God’s grace, through our faith in Him, our trust “in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead (Romans 4:24, NIV).

Once we have been converted, reconciled to God through faith, we may be ready to die and go to heaven, but we are not yet ready to live on this planet, at least not victoriously. This is where discipleship and the practice of the spiritual disciplines are so key. So if you find you’re not living the life of an overcomer, you might want to ask yourself: “Am I a disciple, or just a convert?”

When the Bible tells me to be holy even as God is holy, I feel at first like I’ve come up against an insurmountable wall. But if holiness is power and wisdom and goodness, I can begin to see some hope. It’s not hard to believe that God wants to bring more of these three things into my life—and through my life to others. As I trust God, as I truly seek Him, reading His Word and allowing it to be “functionally authoritative”* in my life, I grow in the character of Christ. I take on more of His goodness and wisdom.

As we pursue Christ by way of the spiritual disciplines, as we spend time with Him, we catch glimpses of Him. Scripture says that “when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2, NIV). But that process is already in motion here on earth. The more we “see” Him, the more we are becoming like Him.

As we walk with Jesus, He teaches us to take up our cross daily. We learn to die to ourselves and, in love, to put others before our own needs and desires. Death to self slowly and surely brings humility. It is only in true humility that we can be trusted with God’s power. Having the ability to exercise the power of God is much too heavy an experience for our flesh to handle. It would gorge itself on aggrandizement, pig out on pride.

Many Christians yearn to walk in the power that we see displayed in the Book of Acts and in the stories of great men and women of God through the centuries. We have not understood that the uncrucified self stands in the way of God’s entrusting His power to us. As we will slowly come to learn, it is a kind and merciful thing that God calls us to die to ourselves, because it will free us from the tyranny of self. My husband said recently, “Jesus didn’t die for us so that we wouldn’t have to; he died so that we could die too.” I’ve often thought about the verse that calls us to “make up what is behind of the sufferings of Christ” (Colossians 1:24): What spiritual provision could possibly be lacking in the crucifixion of Christ? The answer is death to self. It’s the one thing Christ cannot do for us. But He commanded it, and He showed us how it’s done, not just in His death, but all throughout His life.

 Jesus said that if we try to save our life, we’ll lose it, but that if we lose it for His sake, we will truly find it (Matthew 10:39). This is a verse that comes to me over and over in my own thinking and writing. I want the life He offers; it’s worth giving up the life I think I have, in order to find it.

When God calls us to holiness, I believe he is calling us to continually greater wisdom, greater goodness, and greater power. How else will we ever be and do what Jesus has called us to: “The works that I do, these shall you do and even greater” (John 14:12)?

There is another way I think about this command from both the Old and New Testaments, “Be ye holy, even as I am holy,” and it really takes the pressure off us. When God commanded light into being, saying, “Let there be light,” the word let does not appear in the original language; therefore He was saying something more like “Be light” or “Light, be!” He commanded the light to be. And yet none of the power to become, none of the effort, came from the as-yet-nonexistent light itself. It all came from God.

In the same way, think about the command to be holy: not so much a commandment as a proclamation and a promise, with the power to do it coming from the One who “is at work in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13, KJV). Our job is simply  to come to him, and to yield to Him. This is part of ongoing repentance: we cooperate; we align ourselves with him. Holiness is His work and His alone.

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* “functionally authoritative” is how Dallas Willard describes what kind of place we should give the Word of God in our lives.