God is particularly teaching me new blessings through this study. God as my Father is the primary topic of upward ascent for me personally. John 14:6 breathes fresh meaning and hope into my spirit, knowing now that Jesus is the Way, but the Father is the Destination. So much in John 14 and 17 confirms that He came to reveal God as Father, as only the Son can. This sermon greatly impacted my view of Jesus' role of bringing each of us into direct relationship with God as our Father.
The Spirit challenged me with a question today. What if today marked a season in my life where I embraced my heavenly Father’s love for me in the fullest sense possible? Since I am 43 and I’ve easily lived at least half of my life already, what if I had another 43 years to live? If I passed into glory at 86, the age Jerry Bridges died, I would have certainly been given a long life. Though it is easy to think that I’ve lived a major part of my years, what if my primary contribution in life is yet to come?
I’m beginning to journey with Jean Fleming. This morning I began reading her book, Pursue the Intentional Life (PTIL). I spoke with her at Jerry’s funeral just 2 months ago and then I was delightfully surprised when she called me a few weeks later. What a neat woman she is, full of fresh passion for Christ, even in her seventies. If you read or see nothing about her, you’ve got to check out this 11 minute talk she gave at The Navigators’ staff conference this past fall; talk about perspective and passion. You can get to know her at her blog. Several entries down starting in Jan 2016, you’ll find a video series about PTIL. Boy, do I want to be like her when I’m her age! Chapter one of PTIL has several statements that deserve attention and chewing.
“…all things unchanged, the women we will be at seventy, eighty, and ninety are the women we are at forty and fifty—only distilled. Have you noticed the flaws and weaknesses of a forty-year-old concentrate with age?… a person doesn’t suddenly become a wise, kind, gracious, fruitful old person just by reaching, say, seventy years.”
I’ve seen this to be so true on my journey. Let’s take for example money management and living within a budget. This is natural to some and a skill to develop for most. If you don’t have this skill established when you’re single, almost 2 decades later with 5 kids, you'll find your lack of skill in this area magnified exponentially and maybe even come to bite you! Guess what I’m going to work on today? YNAB! The budgeting software which we recommend is called You Need A Budget. It helps to categorize and plan for future expenses. It also only helps if you use it! Lol.
Just a few weeks ago with the girls’ discipleship study in Week 7 Choices, I talked about how our choices establish patterns in our lives. These patterns take us on a path. This path reflects the direction and ultimate purpose of our lives. Our starting trajectory, or our trajectory TODAY, is rather crucial then.
Is Christ your True North? If He is our goal, then our path will be set and we will meet Him with gladness in glory. The opposite is just as true. Oh, how we need to take constant inventory of our lives, evaluating whether our pursuits are aimed at God and God alone. Along the journey, we should expect to make constant course corrections. Surely, He is the only worthy aim of our life’s love.
Puritan writer, Henry Scougal, Professor of Divinity at Aberdeen University who died at 27 in 1657, said in his book, The Life of God in the Soul of Man,
“Love is that powerful and prevalent passion by which all the faculties and inclinations of the soul are determined, and on which both its perfection and happiness depend. The worth and excellencies of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love: he who loveth mean and sordid things doth thereby become base and vile; but a noble and well-placed affection doth advance and improve the spirit unto a conformity with the perfections which it loves.”
Scougal continues, “The true way to improve and ennoble our souls is, by fixing our love on the divine perfections, that we may have them always before us, and derive an impression of them on ourselves, and ‘beholding with open face, as in a glass, the glory of the Lord, we may be changed into the same image, from glory to glory.’”
Again, Scougal enlightens us on how to understand life by saying, “Love is the greatest and most excellent thing we are masters of; and therefore it is folly and baseness to bestow it unworthily… as divine love doth advance and elevate the soul; so it is that alone which can make it happy: the highest and most ravishing pleasures, the most solid and substantial delights that human nature is capable of, are those which arise from the endearments of a well-placed and successful affection. That which imbitters love, and makes it ordinarily a very troublesome and hurtful passion, is the placing it on those who have not worth enough to deserve it, or affection and gratitude to requite it, or whose absence may deprive us of the pleasure of their converse, or their miseries occasion our trouble. To all these evils are they exposed whose chief and supreme affection is placed on creatures like themselves; but the love of God delivers us from them all.”
Life is far too short to make anyone or anything other than God the aim of our life’s love. Tim Keller speaks of how the gospel, deeply understood, addresses this. We are creatures made to worship and love with passion. Material goals will crumble, rust or burn. Status, approval, achievement, image, etc. are added to the list of things which will not deliver their promises in the end. None of these will ever truly satisfy. These will not be able to sustain our God-given cravings for the eternal, for the divinely beautiful. We were made for the Eternal One alone. Our natural appetite for performance and approval from people is merely an indication of our own empty state, our need for love. It reveals that we have set our affections on the wrong aim to satisfy our hunger for love. God alone can requite this hunger for divine love. Scougal concludes that when our “soul is possessed with divine love,” our will is transformed into doing God’s will and our greatest desire is to please our Master. Only then will we find peace, rest and satisfaction.
With having just one life to live, and now maybe only half of it remaining, it seems too brief a time to adequately give enough love back to the Lord. Maybe life is a journey of understanding this: we get to love God every day, in various forms throughout the day, in every possible way. What does this look like in my life?
I want my goal of loving God to be reflected in growing as an increasingly kind mother and wife. It’s easier to be kind to friends and strangers. My family gets more of the unedited me. I also want to plan ahead to meet their needs more and not live as haphazardly as I’ve been living. What if I responded with attentive kindness when my goals are interrupted by one of my children’s questions? What if I stopped to clean up a meal when I’d rather do something else? What if I sought God for His view of each of my family members and asked Him how my relationship with each of them was going? What if I served to meet their needs above my own? What if I listened to Him for what I should do next in my day and prioritize His goals? What a challenge to stay on course at every possible turn! Each day I get a new opportunity to seek His help to improve in these important areas of my life. Making constant adjustments along the journey will prove to be worth it, I’m sure.
Jean Fleming goes on to say, “…everyone, regardless of age, is already setting patterns for the shape of his or her life. These patterns of thought and practice will either serve the glory and purposes of God or hinder them.”
Jean's book is a compilation of her musings from her own journey. She “studied Bible passages, collected quotes, hoarded odd pages, snippets of conversation and insights from books,” which she compiled in her “Old Woman File.” Pursue the Intentional Life is a culmination of this file, where her life's aim, to make Christ her number one passion and to finish well, comes through for the reader to join in on the journey. She says the we need to live, knowing that our lives have an expiration. She invites us on the path of intentional living with two questions:
“How will I live the rest of my life?”
“What kind of old woman will I become?”
What good questions to start with God during a time alone with God coffee outing!
How would you answer?
(no kids' names request: if you leave a comment, please use only first initial of names. many thanks!!)