Like a lost wandering child you lead me by your hand through the dry wasteland. Showing me the hidden springs of life and bounty in what appears to be desolation. Your presence with me is life and comfort, your voice is the song of heaven, your words like dew on the leaves in the morning sun. Be still my heart, be silent mind storms of fear and worry. Yeshua is here at hand leading the way into peace and joy regardless what I see with my natural eyes I know my way is smooth and safe.

Listen to the sounds of heaven, frequencies of life and love, healing and restoration. Rest in the presence, do not be swayed by the physical realm and what’s happening there, hold fast to my promises and to what you see in the heavens. That’s what is true and real.

My heart is overwhelmed by the beauty of Your countenance.  That is a fancy way to say I’m totally undone by Papa’s glorious presence.  All those Christian-eeze terms make things sound flowery and all, but when it comes down to it plain language is best.  Just remember when you first fell in love, how you couldn’t spend enough time together how you longed for their company, the sound of their voice, the look in their eye, the tenderness of their touch.  Simply sitting together, even without a word exchanged is completely enjoyable.   Be captivated by His extravagant love….

Why do we think a little time, here or there, spent reading our Bible or praying over our meals constitutes intimacy? The picture of intimate relationship pictured in Song of Solomon is so intense and even a bit racy at time. But it pictures our relationship with Papa inside the marriage covenant.

“Then may your awakening breath blow upon my life until I am fully yours. Breathe upon me with your Spirit wind. Stir up the sweet spice of your life within me. Spare nothing as you make me your fruitful garden. Hold nothing back until I release your fragrance. Come walk with me as you walked with Adam in your paradise garden. Come taste the fruits of your life in me. I have come to you, my darling bride, for you are my paradise garden! Come walk with me until I am fully yours. Come taste the fruits of your life in me.”
‭‭Song of Songs‬ ‭4:16‬ ‭TPT‬‬
https://www.bible.com/1849/sng.4.16.tpt

We ARE the apple of His eye, the Bride to His Bridegroom.  Song of Songs has so many passages that show our enraptured passion for Him in the words of the Shulamite.  But what is truly outrageous are the passages from the Bridegroom expressing His undying desire for the Bride, in other words, us!  He wants to be intimate with us even more than we want to be with Him.  I know, that doesn’t really surprise me, if I look at my life, I know how luke-warm I’ve been over the years.   Keeping our passion alive is impossible under our own power but when the Holy Spirit awakens desire for Him it is impossible to resist His wooing…

We went to a lovely Christmas Eve candlelight service with family this year. It was the first time in years we had been in an institutional church. The preachers did a tag team message on, “Why?” and it got me thinking of how my understanding of the Gospel has changed.

Traditional evangelical teaching says Papa had to send Jesus down here to die for us on the cross. The standard message is, Papa was locked into sacrificing His only beloved Son to assuage His wrath. However, what if the whole sacrificial system was really instituted by man as our way to appease our perception of God? Did Papa really setup the whole sacrificial system? It just sort of appears in the Genesis story as a thing we humans do, not necessarily as a thing God commanded initially.

It is a universal concept that we must appease God, but does He really want worship through sacrifice or is it worship through fellowship that pleases Him most? Would it not be that He prefers fellowship, by virtue of the revelation of His all consuming love through Jesus? In the Garden, “before the fall”, Papa walked with Adam in the cool of the day. What better image of perfect fellowship could there be?

It makes much more sense to me that God sent Jesus to obliterate our misunderstanding of worship. To show us exactly what Papa is really like through Jesus’ life here. To let us let us know how much he wants fellowship with us. Jesus submitted to our twisted sacrificial system to break through our traditions and prove that God’s way of Love and Grace are indeed higher than our systems of religion.

We’ve started learning about spending time in the heavenlies. Walking with Papa and Jesus in the cool of the day in the garden, going places in the heavenly realms.

John was in the spirit on the Lord’s day, Paul was caught up to the third heaven, Jacob’s ladder was two way, up and down, we are seated with Christ in the heavenlies.  All these were/are present tense experiences of the believers in question.

Jesus spoke to Nicodemus of how, at that moment, he was on the earth talking to him and in heaven simultaneously. If you add that to the mind blowing concept of being born-again it is no surprise that Nicodemus didn’t understand the conversation right then. Now remember that Jesus also told us we would do the things He did while he was here on earth and more.

Therefore, being here on earth in the physical realm and seated in Heaven at the same time is mind blowing, but it’s our reality.  Actively walking in it has increased intimacy with Papa, Jesus and Holy Spirit to a degree I’ve not experienced in a good long time.

We must use our spiritual senses to experience the spiritual dimension of heaven. That may sound woo-woo or even scary but, if you’ve ever sensed the presence of Jesus, Holy Spirit or Father in the midst of worship then you’ve already used your spiritual senses to one degree or another. Learning to use them more is like walking or talking we start as young child and grow to where it is second nature.

There’s that quiet time of the day somewhere between sleep and waking when Papa calls out to you.
“Come away with me, my beloved.”
“Come dine with me”
“Walk with Me in the cool of the day”

When the cares of the day are just beginning to dawn and the glory of His presence shines in with the sunrise. This is the time to lean into Papa’s bosom, to fall into His arms and start the day with feet firmly planted in the heaven-lies.

Don’t let the worries of the day to come overwhelm you.
Don’t let the urgency of a scheduled meeting or some pending project alter your course.

Press into His beckoning call and listen to His heart.  Breath in His life giving breath, breath out the tensions and concerns.  His name is the simplest way to experience this exchange. Yahweh, the breath of life!

We have this perception from religion that heaven is “up”.  However we live in heavenly realms, seated in heavenly places, just as we live in this physical realm.    We needn’t “ascend into the heavens” to touch His face with our worship.  However the heavenly realms are all around us all the time.  Stepping into the heavenly realm is an act of faith based on our revelation of His love.  In fact Heaven is as near as our next breath not just our destination when we die.

Papa promised through Jesus to lead us into all wisdom and that by faith.  Our real problem with this reality is how strongly we are tethered to the physical world in this body.  Our physical senses scream so loudly to us about our surroundings that our spiritual senses seem silent at times.  However our spiritual senses are indeed more real than our physical ones as this body will pass away but our spirit will continue on and we shall be like Jesus when we see Him face to face.

Let us step out in faith with our spiritual senses and realize that our worship can expand into the heavens all around.  Into the kind of reality that our big Brother Jesus walked in when He was here over-riding the “physical laws” and literally revealing heaven on earth.  Not “bring them down” but opening the eyes of those around Him to the reality of heaven as a present destination that we actually live in at the same time as this physical world.

We recently made a trip to Puerto Rico and I was very impressed with the people and the atmosphere of the island.  In Post Maria, Puerto Rico, there were still abundant signs of destruction even six months later.  But the repairs in place and the work being done were downright heroic.  I remember similar scars left by the ravaging random winds of tornados when we lived in Oklahoma.  But we humans are a resilient species, not just muddling thru the ravages of natural disaster but rising above the chaos and improving on our former condition whenever possible.

What I learned from the People we met was the model of perseverance.  Like our innkeeper who lived thru the hurricane on the second floor of her hotel because the first floor had flooded and the third floor was damaged when the roof tiles blew off.  Or our waitress who described the howling winds and pounding rains as she an her mother rode out the storm just a few blocks from the beach.  We ate lunches and dinners at kitchens setup in tents by the beach or the roadside and in ocean front restaurants which had been flooded.   We met people who lived with spotty electricity from generators that could only be run a few hours a day.  We heard stories of having to decide what to do with the last liter of water, “do I drink it now or keep it for tomorrow?”

We visited the historical sites there, learned the history of the island and people who made Puerto Rico what it is today.  It was then I realized that the faith and resilience we saw in the Puerto Rican people was an innate sense of destiny and love of freedom created in their collective memory.  The suffering and trials they experienced thru conquest, slavery, war and the regular patterns of horrific storms steeled their constitutions to rise up yet again and overcome.   They showed me a microcosim of mankind’s greatest attributes and renewed my faith that we will overcome no matter what nature or others can throw at us.

This desire to find the good and make it so in our world goes back to the Garden where the troubles began but also where the goodness Papa declared over us was spoken forth as prophecy, that man would eventually get it right.  In fact He sent Jesus to show us what that actually looks like when lived out to the fullest extent.  So, for me as in all things, I join Jacob and bend my knee to worship the One who alone is worthy of all praise Who will also work out all things to His glory.

There’s a river of life that flows deep in us. Sometimes it gets dammed up by the pain and disappointments of life. But as we sit in His presence with no particular agenda. Not looking for anything more than just to be with our Papa God. The stream begins to trickle through the dam and slowly but surely it breaks forth into the river that has been restrained. For in His presence is fullness of joy and life everlasting.

That river is in the deepest part of us, our spirit man.  For most, it is buried way under the cares and occupations of this life we live on the earth.  But once it is activated by the Spirit of God bringing life back into our being it can never stop bringing forth life.  We can dam it up and even restrict its flow but in the end the river of life will prevail and bring us into the joy I spoke of above.

Give into the flow of life, do not resist the Spirit as He calls you to life and joy.