The Glorious Bridegroom Part 1
As we face our own fears, there is often a sense of unrest
rooted in the fear that God will measure us by our standards rather than by
His, and that we will be judged unworthy of His affections. While these
feelings may rightfully accompany true conviction and repentance, all too often
they are simply the recurrent accusations of the enemy and of our own minds,
passing judgment on ourselves based on the faulty assumption that God has done
so, too.
What is almost impossible for us to
understand (indeed, it requires the ministry of the Holy Spirit!) is that His
assessment is based on totally different information from what we see. He is
gazing upon a Bride who is fully formed, whose life is hidden in the life of
His Son at the Father’s right hand, and who therefore can embrace with total
confidence the character we already have been given. We, like any child growing
up into the identity made certain by his or her heritage, are becoming who we
are.
In the aftermath of the Shulamite’s
hesitancy to follow the king, she experiences this kind of restlessness, the
fear that she has lost the One her heart desires:
By night
on my bed I sought the one I love; I sought him, but I did not find him.
"I will rise now," I said, "And go about the city; in the streets and in the squares
I will
seek the one I love." I sought him, but I did not find him.
Song
3:1-2
When my own passion for intimacy with
Jesus was being birthed, there came such a crisis moment. My soul was awakening
to His wooing, and I had begun to ask the Holy Spirit to increase my sense of
longing for the presence of the Lord. I continued in this mode for some days,
until early one morning I had a profound and powerful encounter with the Spirit
of God. It was as though He decided, in a quite literal way, to take me up on
my request for a greater sense of longing.
In that hour-long confrontation (my wife
awoke to the sounds of my anguish and knew it was the Lord, but feared I was
having a heart attack!), I began to feel an overwhelming sense of desire, an
experience that was not wholly positive. I had been asking for a longing to
know the Lord, but wrapped in that awakening desire were the memories of all
the disappointments and anguish associated with unfulfilled dreams and deferred
hope. My heart was sick in a more desperate way than I had been able to
express, and in this moment the Spirit of God was inviting me to dance upon the
waves of those fears and disappointments. And I said “No.”
It was too frightening to go there. I couldn’t
bear the thought of facing all that “stuff,” so I did what the Shulamite did,
what Peter did. I looked at the mountains of difficulties instead of at the
strength of the King, and said, “You go ahead. I’ll be along some other
time.” In the days immediately following that decision, His presence
withdrew (or was it I who cowered away?), and I could not find that sweet voice
anywhere.
(to be continued in the next post)