New Covenant Life

This article is Chapter Nine excerpted from Tonia’s book Rooted & Established In Love: The Power & Purpose of the Greatest Commandment:

In the course of my first three years of being a Christian, the happiness of being loved by God gradually faded. One day it dawned on me that while I’d been immersing myself in being a pastor’s wife, I had drifted into being one of those people I had avoided for so long: a joyless religious person who had very little real satisfaction in knowing God. I had never stopped appreciating what God had done for me, so there was always thankfulness in my heart, but I increasingly had to force myself in matters of prayer and study and church attendance. That is a serious problem for a pastor’s wife.

When I read my Bible in those days, scriptures like this one really bugged me:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.

Mark 12:30, NIV

I knew I didn’t love Jesus like this; yet Scripture often spoke of drawing near to God with a heart full of passion for Him, and it seemed every time I opened the Bible I encountered one of these. I tried to make myself feel this love for God by increasing prayer and Bible study, but these didn’t change my feelings for God; they just made me more deeply aware of how dull my religious life now felt.

I knew life with God was based on faith, but it didn’t sound to me like the Bible wanted me to just love God by faith; it seemed to me it taught that once I’d found faith IN God I should then progress to something like real heartfelt love FOR Him. Not only did I not love God like this, I didn’t know how to make myself do it. I wondered how anyone really did that.

I realized I needed more than a Bible, a church and good intentions to carry out the command to love Him. It seemed I had two choices: to settle for the dry toast dutiful Christian life — and the secret shame of not loving the Lord as I should — or figure out what piece of the puzzle was missing and beg for help. I decided to beg for help.

My plea went something like: “Lord, I really don’t love you like this. To be honest, it’s not even that high on my priority list. Jesus, I know it is right to love you like this, and I want to, but I don’t know how. Please create in me the desire to love you, and show me how to keep this command.”

Amazingly, I felt great relief after I confessed this to God. The fresh breeze of honesty between myself and God actually caused me to feel closer to Him immediately, and to my surprise, the sense of anxiety and shame I had been feeling was replaced with peace and hope.

Not only did I now feel no condemnation, I actually sensed his deep approval and pleasure that I was concerned about being able to love Him

Confessing our sins draws out the compassionate Father who wants to help us. (I understood much later that confession is a joy to God because from his standpoint, confession removes barriers of sin and guilt, opening the way for Him to fully embrace his child again, so that child can receive his strengthening help. Seeing our true state and confessing it draws out the compassionate Father who wants to help us. When we allow our sins and failures to cause us to hide from Him — as Adam did in Eden — then even if God wants to embrace us, we won’t show up for it as long as we’re hiding out somewhere.

Searching for a way to sincerely love the Lord

As I pondered these things, the thought kept surfacing that in the Bible, it seemed God was always promising to provide the strength or ability needed to obey Him in anything. For instance, when he sent men to war, he would often promise to fight the battle for them. It wasn’t unusual for Him to send his people to fight a much stronger adversary, and when they stepped out to obey, he would do something like put the enemy to sleep, or confuse them, so that his less powerful army won great victories. And I then “just happened” to read 2 Peter 1:3

“His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.”

2 Peter 1:3, NIV

I began to see that in order to obey the command to love God I needed a power I didn’t have. While believing that God was the powerful creator of the universe, I still had no understanding of what it meant to experience God’s power on a really personal level. I asked the Lord to show me how to connect with his power in the real ways needed to carry out what this love command required.

Within a few days, God arranged for me to learn of my need to be filled with the Holy Spirit, through some mature Christians and a book (that just appeared on our coffee table, I kid you not — and still don’t know where it came from) called “Nine O’Clock In the Morning” by Episcopal priest Dennis Bennett.

I didn’t know much about the Holy Spirit, but I was ready to trust what these other Christians and Rev. Bennett had to say because I saw that Jesus confirmed what they said in his teaching about the Holy Spirit, especially in the gospel of John. The Bible clearly taught that Jesus’ followers needed to be baptized by Him with the Holy Spirit.

How had I missed it before? Up until now, all my “god” focus had been on God the Father and God the Son; I had paid little attention to the Holy Spirit. I just knew this was God’s answer to my cry for help. So I asked Jesus to baptize me in his Spirit, and he did.

Just as I had felt the overwhelming wave of God’s love for me on that day, this time I now experienced an intense new love for the Lord! It was mysterious to me, but wonderful, and very real. You can’t make this stuff up — believe me, I had really tried.

The Holy Spirit changed everything

After Jesus filled me with the Holy Spirit, everything changed. I was hungrier to know the Lord, and I really longed for Him, so I went to prayer more often, and with real expectation of encountering the Living God. Instead of just going down my list of prayer requests, I often enjoyed just sitting and resting in his presence. He seemed so near, and I sensed Him speaking in my spirit with a frequency, familiarity and ease I’d never known before. I felt, for the first time, like John leaning against the bosom of the Lord.

It also became easier to simply turn my attention upon Him and become aware of his presence as I went through the hours and activities of my day. When you truly adore someone, you want to be with them, share everything, know their thoughts and feelings, experience life with them. Love stirs in you a natural longing to do things for them, to serve them, to bless them.

I just wanted to share life with God, and to discover more about Him, to get to know Him. For the first time since becoming a Christian I felt that God was truly sharing life with me. Of course, He had been with me all the time, but my ability to be aware of and respond to God had been inconsistent and feeble without the Holy Spirit.

I discovered that the Holy Spirit passionately loves the Father and the Son, and loves to help us do the same. Just as Jesus promised, the Holy Spirit is indeed the Helper who comes alongside us in this world.

With his help, I learned to direct my affection towards the Lord and develop the intimacy I had read so much about. No matter what problems I faced on a given day, anxiety rarely stayed with me, as I tapped into the reliable peace and presence of the Holy Spirit.

With that experience over 25 years behind me now, I know without a doubt that being filled with the Holy Spirit is the key to the promised treasure that is satisfying life with God. When your whole being is filled with the Holy Spirit, you begin to share life with God on a whole new level. I now believe this is meant to be the normal experience of every child of God.

I certainly didn’t deserve to have God’s love poured out on me that first day, but I do know why it happened: I cried out for it. And now I know that it was the Holy Spirit who came with that wave of love. Unquestionably, experiencing God’s love (or wisdom or grace or strength) is impossible apart from the help of the Holy Spirit. Romans 5:5 teaches that the Holy Spirit is the one who brings the experience of God’s love to you.

I believe a primary reason why so many in the Body of Christ are not rooted in love is that they have not been fully taught about the vital role the Holy Spirit plays in their experience of God.

The power to love comes only from the Holy Spirit

We must rely upon the Holy Spirit in every part of the transaction of covenant love between us and God. It is his task to make known to you the limitless and powerful love of God, and to enable you to love God in return, so that you can share life with God in true covenant faithfulness. He loves God the Father and Jesus the Son with a passionate pure love, and he loves you the same way.

Remember that anything God commands — and in which you find yourself completely powerless — if you humbly confess your weakness to Him along with your desire to obey, his power will come to help you. That’s just who this God is with whom we have been invited to share life. It’s a partnership: your choice, his power. He won’t choose for you, and you don’t have the power to carry out your desire to obey, but when you choose his will, he provides the thing you cannot, the ability to carry it through. That’s what Peter taught us in 2 Peter 1:3.

Like many others, perhaps you thought loving God was just hard because he is invisible and you can only know Him “by faith” — that it would be easier if only you could see Him. I invite you to consider those who first walked with the Lord, such as Peter, who brashly swore he loved Jesus enough to die for Him, yet denied he even knew Him three times as he went to the cross a short time later. He utterly failed to love Jesus in the hour of his greatest need, in spite of the fact that he knew Jesus face-to-face.

Though Jesus forgave his disciples, things did not change for them until after Jesus returned to heaven so they could receive the Father’s promised gift — the Holy Spirit. After that encounter we see Peter and the disciples going about in a new power. They not only performed great miracles, but history tells us that most of them endured persecution with strength and joy, displaying a powerful love for Jesus that never failed over the course of many years.

What was the difference? It was the Holy Spirit: He is the one who enabled them to love God with an unfailing love, to take them beyond their desires and good intentions. The Holy Spirit is the one Paul refers to in Ephesians 3:20 as he speaks of “him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us…

#love the Lord, #loving God, #greatest commandment, #rooted and established in love, #Holy Spirit

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You can read more about loving God in Tonia’s blog post, Loving God: The Surprise Gift.

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