Dear Friends,
If you haven’t already, I pray you will join me in this quest to live loved in 2009. If you’ve been pressing into this since January, I know you’ve been changed, and I believe there are amazing treasures yet to come. And for those who may have fallen back along the way, this is the perfect time to re-join the journey. Jesus eagerly longs to show you that His love does not fluctuate with your weaknesses or failures, your busyness or even your sins. He has engraved each of us on the palms of His hands and we are ever before Him. He wants us to see this, to know it in our depths, for it has the power to draw us to Himself like nothing else. May He open our eyes in such a way that we can do nothing else but run to Him in response. << Go to Soul at Rest Home Page
I have a secret desire to get a tattoo – well I guess it’s not so secret anymore – but anyway, I’ve even gone so far as to plan the whole thing out. I’ve decided what I want inscribed, where it would go on my body and which shop I would go to in order to get it done. I’m not sure why I want to do this, especially since I was horrified at the thought of my own kids getting one when they were teenagers. Now my adult son is a bit horrified that I’m even considering the idea. When I mentioned it recently, he threw the argument I’d always thrown at him, right back at me, which is that I’d be making a lifetime commitment about something I might change my mind on someday. Good point. But I’m still thinking about it.
The whole idea came up this morning when I was reading Isaiah 49:15-16:Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me.
As I read that, I thought of the people who tattoo the names of their lovers on their arms, which is a pretty bold way to tell the world that there is someone who belongs to them. While this has always seemed foolish to me, I can’t help but admire a person’s willingness to go out on a limb, so to speak, to declare his or her devotion to another in such a permanent way. All these thoughts went through my mind when I read of how God has engraved my name on the palms of His hands and I found myself right back in the wonder of what it means to live loved by the Almighty. Think of it. With reckless abandon, God has written my identity on His very being, inscribed it there permanently with blood through stakes that nailed Christ’s hands to the cross. Though a mother might in some very rare instance forget her children and lovers spend a fortune to remove tattoos when they’ve moved on to someone else, God will not forget me for I am always on His mind.
That He has written my name there, is a bold declaration of belonging – I am His and He is mine; something He wants the world to know. In fact, He guards our relationship with a tender jealousy. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, "He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us"? (James 4:5) This is not the moody recriminations of a petulant lover, but a jealousy that is pure and holy for He knows the destruction to my soul and to His honor when affection for other things overtake me. God urges you and me to reciprocate His passion in kind, by setting Him like a seal upon our hearts. Why? Because His love is stronger than death and His jealousy fiercer than the grave, flashing in flames that are the very fire of His heart (Song 8:6).
I don’t know about you, but as we come to the end of this quarter and our focus on John 17:20-25, I feel like I’ve only begun to grasp what it means to live in God’s love. Like the pulse of a beating heart, those three words Jesus prayed – Father, I desire – now reverberate within, drawing me to the Lord with desperation to understand this yearning desire that makes Him jealous with a fiery passion and that sent Him to the Cross to engrave my name on His hands. This is why I am eager to make Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3:14-21 my own for the next three months:
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
In Christ,
Tricia
Click here to go to the “LIVING LOVED 2009” Challenge page, where you will find the passage and all the tools you need for the next three months!