Praise for "He Loves Me"

I don’t think there’s a single book that has more revolutionized my relationship with God other than Wayne Jacobsen’s He Loves Me: Learning to Live in the Father’s Affection.

I first heard about his book, as I heard this excerpt read at my first time at Take T.W.O. Take T.W.O. is a women’s ministry at another church in town that I participate in to grow spiritually and as a way for me to connect with other women my age and older. Last semester’s theme was “Trust.” And the tagline was “Trust is the fruit of knowing God’s love” and the leader starting off with words I’ll never forget…

“Just hearing the word TRUST can evoke all sorts of feelings in us. Especially when it has to do with God.

.and why should we trust God? …and why do I want to trust Him ? Is He really for us? Is He really trustworthy?

In a crowd this size I’m sure we have many different levels of trust toward God. Some of us have trusted Him since birth. Some of us have trusted Him and been very disappointed. Some of us are working on it; some of us want to…but don’t know how. And some of us wouldn’t dare trust Him.

To tell you the truth, I think I’ve been in all of these places at one time or another.
Giving trust away is hard…it is risky.

When your circumstances are screaming for your attention…..who do you trust? Many of us would answer “me”.

Oh I think a lot of us say “I trust in God” or “I believe He’s fully in control”, but when life starts spinning out of control (for big or small reasons) do we really act like it ?

I know for me, often when I am thrown into a crisis, or caught up in a moment of uncertainty – my default is to try to control my situation, to panic or to just whine. I don’t always “live out” what I so easily proclaim.

I think I’m probably not alone…huh? …”

This journey of trust and journey to learning how to live in the Father’s affection has changed me from the inside out, and it’s a journey that is only beginning. I loaned this book out to someone this semester but had the last two chapters unfinished, but had moved on the other books, but recently getting it back and getting to finish the book has reminded me how much has changed since God started doing this change within my heart and my life. I’ll be reflecting on the first chapter of the book to the last couple of chapters, as it most accurately reflects a tiny portion of the conversion from Daisy Petal Christianity to Learning to Live Loved…

All Creatures of our God and King

We are mere creatures, the created, before our Creator God. He is everything; we are nothing.

Revelations come and reveal things fresh within us. Today was the refreshing realization, as I was keenly aware of my weakness and nothingness and need for God this morning…

That is why I must cling to God. The creature is nothing; the Creator is everything. But in clinging to the Creator, the creature becomes something. If I have nothing, this is why I need God,

as Mother Teresa says, “The greatest humiliation is to know that you are nothing. This you come to know when you face God in prayer. Often a deep and fervent look at Christ the best prayer: I look at Him and He looks at me. When you come face to face with God, you cannot but know that you are nothing, that you have nothing… If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself.”

I don’t think a day goes by anymore without my prayer being for God to fill me with Himself. This is my greatest need: the presence of God in my life. Experiencing Him and being in fellowship with him.

This book met me where I was at this morning, as the desire continues to burn intensely, a desire to know who He is and who I am as a result, for we can only come to know our true selves when we have a true picture of our Creator, and this picture changes everything about the way we live, how we feel, see things, and how we think. It is this picture that opens the door for us experiencing the love of the Father in our head and in our heart that surpasses understanding. Today I experienced and felt and knew the Father’s delight and am in awe of my Creator.

A.W. Tozer is one of those writers with such a strong voice, you wonder what it would be like to have a conversation with him. He just seems like such an interesting man. He speaks with so much conviction and authority, he speaks from the heart of a man who has seen and wrestled and met with the Lord, intimately and deeply…

Having coffee with him would have been incredible.

I recently heard Ruth Haley Barton, a truly dynamic woman who leads a national ministry serving pastors and church staff and she is also an author and speaker. I’d never read any of her books (but am now and it is rocking my world) but everything she said was a quote. Like you wanted to take notes but seriously every sentence that came out of her mouth was worthy of writing down… She said we could find it all in her book lol, but it was so intense yet incredible at the same time. So much wisdom. The thing was everything was straight from her heart. It didn’t even feel like she was “speaking” but she was just having a conversation with us and sharing insights. And I can hear her audible voice as I read her book now... and her words pack a lot of punch. I feel that’s what sitting down or listening to Tozer would be like. He’s ballin’. From Knowledge of the Holy.

The Self-Existence of God:

“God has no origin,” said Novatian, and it is precisely this concept of no-origin which distinguishes That-which-is-God from whatever is not God.

Origin is a word that can apply only to things created. When we think of anything that has origin we are not thinking of God. God is self-existent, while all created things necessarily originated somewhere at some time. Aside from God, nothing is self-caused….

The child by his question, “Where did God come from?” is unwittingly acknowledging his creaturehood. Already the concept of cause and source and origina is firmly fixed in his mind. He knows that everything around him came from something other than itself, and he simply extends that concept upward to God. The little philosopher is thinking in true creature-idiom and, allowing for his lack of basic information, he is reasoning correctly. He must be told that God has no origin, and he will find this hard to grasp since it introduces a category with which he is wholly unfamiliar and contradicts the bent toward origin-seeking so deeply ingrained in all intelligent beings, a bent that impels them to probe ever back and back toward undiscovered beginnings. To think steadily of that which to which the idea of origin cannot apply is not easy, if indeed it is possible at all

Just as under certain conditions a tiny point of light can be seen, not by looking directly at it but by focusing the eyes slightly to one side, so it is with the idea of the Uncreated. When we try to focus our thought upon One who is pure uncreated being we may see nothing at all, for He dwelleth in light that no man can approach unto. Only by faith and love are we able to glimpse Him as He passes by our shelter in the cleft of the rock….

The human mind, being created, has an understandable uneasiness about the Uncreated. We do not find it comfortable to allow for the presence of One who is wholly outside the circle of our familiar knowledge. We tend to be disquieted by the thought of One who does not account to us for His being, who is responsible to no one, who is responsible to no one, who is self-existent, self-dependent and self-sufficient.

Philosophy and science has not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being that they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself. The philosopher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting that there is something which they can never know, which indeed they have no technique for discovering.

To admit that there is One who lies beyond us, who exists outside of all our categories, who will not be dismissed with a name, who will not appear before the bar of our reason, nor submit to our curious inquiries: this requires a great deal of humility, more than most of us possess, so we save face by thinking God down to our level, or at least down to where we can manage Him.

Yet how He eludes us! For He is everywhere while He is nowhere, for “ where” has to do with matter and space, and God is independent of both. He is unaffected by time or motion, is wholly self-dependent and owes nothing to the worlds His hands have made….

It is not a cheerful thought that millions of us who live in a land of Bibles, who belong to churches and labor to promote the Christian religion, may yet pass our whole life on this earth without once having through or tried to think seriously about the being of God. Few of us have let our hearts gaze in wonder at the I AM, the self-existent Self back of which no creature can think. Such thoughts are too painful for us. We prefer to think where it will do more good—about how to build a better mousetrap, for instance, or how to make to blades of grass grow where one grew before.

And for this we are paying a too heavy price in the secularization of our religion and the decay of our inner lives..

Perhaps some sincere but puzzled Christian may at this juncture wish to inquire about the practicality of such concepts as I am trying to set forth here. “What bearing does this have on my life/” he may ask. “What possible meaning can the self-existence of God have for me and others like me in a world such as this and in times such as these?”

To this I reply that, because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological. Some knowledge of what kind of God it is that operates the universe is indispensable to a sound philosophy of life and a sane outlook on the world scene.

The much-quoted advice of Alexander Pope,

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan:
The proper study of mankind is man,

If followed literally would destroy any possibility of man’s ever knowing himself in any way but the most superficial way.

We can never know who or what we are till we know at least something of what God is.

For this reason the self-existence of God is not a wisp of dry doctrine, academic and remote; it is in fact as near as our breath and as practical as the latest surgical technique. For reasons known only to God Himself, God honored man above all other beings by creating him in His own image. And let it be understood that the divine image in man is not a poetic fancy, not an idea born of religious longing. It is a solid theological fact, taught plainly through the Sacred Scriptures and recognized by the Church as a truth necessary to a right understanding of the Christian faith.

Man is a created being, a derived and contingent self, who of himself possess nothing but is dependent each moment for his existence upon the One who created him after His own likeness. The fact of God is necessary to the fact of man. Think God away and man has no ground of existence.

That God is everything and man nothing is a basic tenet of Christian faith and devotion; here the teachings of Christianity coincide with those of the more advanced and philosophical religions of the East. Man for all his genius is but an echo of the original Voice, a reflection of the uncreated Light. As a sunbeam perishes when cut off from the sun, so man apart form God would pass back into the void of nothingness from which he first leaped at the creative call. Not man only, but everything that exists came out of and is dependent upon the continuing creative impulse. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . All things were made by him and without him was not any thing made that was made.” That is how John explains it, and with him agrees the apostle Paul: “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him; and he is before all things, and by him all things consist.” To this witness the writer to the Hebrews adds his voice, testifying of Christ that He is the brightness of God’s glory and the express image of His Person, and that He upholds all things by the word of His power..."

(part two to come soon)

- excerpt from Knowledge of the Holy, chapter on the self-existence of God

my delight is in her...

with a melody you free me...

she sits in fields of grass
away from the world
and basking in the Father’s affection

won’t you sing over me?

with a melody you
free me

"The LORD your God is with you...
He will take great delight in you,
he will quiet you with his love,
he will rejoice over you with singing."

- Zephaniah 3:17

True worship

Is being found in you; experiencing a divine fellowship more sweet and more real than anything this world has to offer; clinging myself to you, a creature to her Creator; a freeing realization that my identity and the place from which I derive life, find meaning and being, is solely: I am yours and you are Mine.

"The greatest need of the human personality is to experience God Himself. This is because of who God is and who and what man is."

"God and man exist for each other and neither is satisfied without the other."

"We are called to an everlasting preoccupation with God."

- From A.W. Tozer’s classics: The Pursuit of God and Knowledge of the Holy

Take my life

Take my life, All I have, I’m leaving here... Be all my hopes, Be all my dreams... You’re my delight, My everything... And I will... Worship... You Lord, Only You Lord... And I will... Bow down... Before you, Only You Lord

mystery and truth for the heart

"The doctrine of the Trinity is truth for the heart. The spirit of man can enter through the veil and penetrate into that Holy of Holies. 'Let me seek Thee in longing,' pleaded Anselm, 'let me long for Thee in seeking; let me find Thee in love, and love Thee in finding.'

Love and faith are at home in the mystery of the Godhead.
Let reason kneel in reverence outside.

… Only so we may think rightly of God and in a manner worthy of Him and of our own souls…

- Tozer

Inner stillness

You alone give perfect peace, O Lord, to those who keep their purpose firm and put their trust in you. -- Isaiah 26:3

Jesus, I thank you for peace.
Thank you for security.
A peace and security that only comes from You.
You are My Provider.
Thank you for being My Rock.
Thank you for giving me life again, for breathing life into these broken bones.
Thank you for feeling alive again.
Thank you for restoring my soul.
Thank you for redeeming me and choosing me and delighting in me.
Thank you for my identity as Abba’s child, the only “me” that makes sense, the true self… every other identity is an illusion.

I cannot place how different life feels. Or how this lasting peace keeps catching me off guard.
I owe it all to you.
Thank you for breathing life into me.
For inner separation from the world as You’ve drawn my heart closer and closer to you.
Thank you for all that you are.

You’re more wonderful.
God of unending grace…

“You’ve been more wonderful to me… than I could have ever imagined…”

Thank you for peace. A peace that transcends all understanding.
Amen.