Category Archives: Contemplation, Devotional, Inspirational, Meditation, Prayer, Spirituality

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How to Love God without Faking It: Part 1

How did you come to love God? How did I come to love God? What does it take to love God? Sort and classify. What in your experience tells you that you love God? We love with the mind. We love with the heart. We love best when love in the mind reaches to connect with love in the heart. Full-circle love encompasses the whole being: heart, mind, and soul.

Do YOU love God?

Back to the original question. How did you come to love God? Was it practice? (sure) Was it intentional? (sure) Was it desire? (most certainly). Was it in response to God’s love for you? (absolutely) Or was it incremental, a little more each year? (probably) Maybe it isn’t true love quite yet but a growing fondness for God. (heading in the right direction)

Let’s be honest here, loving God isn’t something you can manufacture. (that’s true) But it is something you can desire, experience and grow. (now you’re talking)

How did I come to love God?

I plumbed the depths to sort and classify how I came to love God. For many years I loved God without thinking about it. I loved God for what he did, who he was, his majesty, his attributes and for everything I knew about him. I had a holy reverence and a healthy respect for God. I believed in God and knew his goodness. Spending time in bible reading and prayer fostered this closeness with God.

But my love for God fell short in one particular aspect. (didn’t know it) Although my love for God was meaningful and real, it came up short. (Oh no!) My love had not moved me as in partaking of living water. (not enough, anyways) Loving God wasn’t that inner connection you find in intimate love. The kind of love where your hunger is filled, your soul is joined together, (we’re talking soul-mate), safe and secure, to know and breathe as one.

Prior to intimate joining with God, I loved God in a limited, but sincere, way. (not enough)

You don’t know what YOU don’t know.

How did I change it up? Well, for starters, I didn’t; but God did. God lit the flame and grew a desire. Love for God, like love for others, takes openness on our part. An apt question, “Is God on the throne of your life?” When God takes center stage in your life– things begin to happen. (like what?)

Love takes God entering in—being invited in—and him placing his love, his being, into our heart and then taking over wherever we allow him to. The path of least resistance is to compartmentalize our faith, to manage our spiritual walk. (not good) But when God is managing it, when God is in control, you can’t fake it or maintain business as usual.

As a result of God being given the reins to our lives, we change our mind about how we’re going to live out our faith. Our determination to love God is acted upon. Soon our desires change. Our bent to rebel becomes more obvious (and we nip it in the bud), and our capacity for love increases exponentially (becomes part of who we are and how we think).

It works like this. For example, when we determine to love our neighbor, a choice is made to begin loving them. Reality sets in and effort is required. But the part we may lack, the ‘loving them,’ is a God thing. (so we ask God for it, hint, hint) God places the love for our neighbor in our heart. The mind says, this is what we’re going to do. The heart says, okay, let’s get started. The Spirit says, I’m going to enable this, show you how, and make it happen.

We may ASK for God’s love.

All love is related to God’s love. How do we come to love God?  Can we change our desires? Yes, we can, but this is only part of the solution. On the heels of that, comes a harder question. How can we worship a God we don’t love? (pretty hard to do) Or maybe it is an infantile love. Worship may be wrapped up in form and may be real (unless we don’t mean it) but worship can become much more meaningful when passion for God accompanies our love for him.

In that scenario, we are worshiping ‘what’ God does and has done, who he is—the greatness and goodness of God—but we are not fully engaged in worshiping his very eternal essence.

To be continued next week. (yippee!)

Y’all come back now, y’hear. (counting on it)

 

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Awakening

My spiritual journey is an honest one at least as much as is possible within me. I am a seeker of God and a follower of his way. God has healed me and renewed me. My life is changed because of God, and I owe him a debt of gratitude.

Father God blesses me at his table of grace and fills me with his ever-deepening love. I have received God’s unmerited favor. I experience his unadulterated peace and holy presence. To be God’s child is lovely beyond loveliness. I find myself safe and secure in my Father’s house.

I have had to look at what I believe and sort through a lot of it. The truths found in the Bible shaped my thinking. Some doctrines strike me as absolutes that do not bend or alter for true Christ followers. They are the foundation on which the church has built its belief. Most or all of these tenants establish the Church’s theological backbone.

These constitute Christianity’s common core beliefs, the structures on which the biblical mandates are formed and erected, the absolutes that are ‘must haves’ according to the Word of God. Christianity is centered and built on the authority of the Bible and the divinely inspired words of its text. Without these as central, core beliefs, the bible is little more than a good book.

*Excerpt from my upcoming book, written at the Vina Monastery, Abbey of New Clairvaux, a Trappist, Cistercian monastery.

I’m not settled on a book title yet but am narrowed down to two at the present time.

  1. THE CHURCH REVISITED: A Contemplative Montage: Moments with God at Vina Monastery: In search of authentic Christianity across the Church divide.

2. THE GOLDEN SILENCE: Moments with God at Vina Monastery: In search of authentic Christianity across the Church divide.