Devotions

One year, we had an Easter outreach. We had three services, and lines were around the building; it was a long day. Afterward, I’m sitting on the edge of the platform by the pulpit, and people are being ministered to at the altar. I look up, and I see this dude with his cap in his hands, looking bad. He looked 50; he was actually 32. He gives me a sheepish look like ‘Can I get close to you?’

Now at that time, in that building, we had everyone coming in off the streets to mooch money. People were coming in with incredible scams they were running, and they would go to church members and collect ‘subway fare’ from 25 different people.

I thought to myself, “Man, this is a downer, but maybe he wants lunch. I’ll give him some money.”

This guy started walking up to me, and then the smell hit me. Feces, urine, sweat, hot street — stir gently for about an hour. It was the worst smell I ever smelled, and I worked on a dairy farm during the summer as a kid. He told me he was an alcoholic, did drugs too, slept in his truck the night before. He didn’t dare go to a shelter because people got killed in there.

So I pulled out my wallet. He pushed my hand down, and I’ll never forget what he said. “I don’t want your money. I’m going to die out there. I want this Jesus you were talking about.”

I raised my hands and wept like a child, praying, “Jesus, forgive me.” He felt what the Spirit was doing, and he started weeping too and threw his arms around me. We cried together, him for his sins and me for my sins. He went to detox for a few days and then spent Thanksgiving and Christmas at the table with my family. He joined the prayer group; he married a beautiful woman, and a couple years later, he got ordained into the ministry.

This is what Paul meant when he wrote, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing…. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:1-2,7, ESV).

^{Jim Cymbala began the Brooklyn Tabernacle with less than twenty members in a small, rundown building in a difficult part of the city. A native of Brooklyn, he is a longtime friend of both David and Gary Wilkerson.}

You’ve heard of the prayer of faith. I believe there is a mirror image of this prayer, a prayer that is based on flesh. I call it the prayer of unbelief.

The Lord spoke these very words to Moses: “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Why do you cry to me? Tell the children of Israel to go forward’” (Exodus 14:15, NKJV). Essentially, this verse in Hebrew would have read something like “Why are you shrieking at me? Why all the loud pleading in my ears?”

Why would God say this to Moses? Here was a godly, praying man in the crisis of his life. The Israelites were being chased by Pharaoh, and they had no escape. Most Christians would probably react as Moses did. He set out for an isolated hillside and got alone with the Lord, then he poured out his heart in prayer.

When God heard Moses shrieking, he told him, “Enough.” Scripture is not explicit about what followed, but at that point God might have said, “You have no right to agonize before me, Moses. Your cries are an affront to my faithfulness. I’ve already given you my solemn promise of deliverance. I’ve instructed you specifically on what to do. Now, stop crying.”

Beloved, God didn’t change between the Old Testament and the New. He’s a God of love and mercy as Isaiah points out, but he still hates sin because he’s holy and just. That’s why he told Israel, “I can’t hear you because of your sin.”

Consider the words of the psalmist, “I cried to him with my mouth, and he was extolled with my tongue. If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear. But certainly God has heard me; he has attended to the voice of my prayer” (Psalm 66:17–19). The psalmist is saying, “I saw there was iniquity in my heart, and I refused to live with it. So I went to the Lord to get cleansed. Then he heard my prayer. But if I had held on to my sin, God wouldn’t have listened to my cry.”

As we face our own crises, we may convince ourselves, “Prayer is the most important thing I can do right now.” But a time comes when God calls us to act, to obey his Word in faith. At such a time, he won’t allow us to retreat to a wilderness to pray. That would be disobedience, and any prayers at that point would be offered in unbelief.

Let me give you one of the most powerful verses in all of scripture. Proverbs give us these prophetic words of Christ: “Then I was beside him as a master craftsman; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him, rejoicing in his inhabited world, and my delight was with the sons of men” (Proverbs 8:30-31, NKJV).

Beloved, we are the sons being mentioned here. From the very foundations of the earth, God foresaw a body of believers joined to his Son. Even then the Father delighted and rejoiced in these sons. Jesus testifies, “I was my Father’s delight, the joy of his being, and now all who turn to me in faith are his delight as well!”

So how do we love Jesus in return? John answers, “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:2-3).

What are his commandments? The gospel says, “Then one of them, a lawyer, asked him [Christ] a question, testing him, and saying, ‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?’ Jesus said to him, ‘”You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.’” (Matthew 22:35-40).

The first and most important command is to love the Lord with all our heart, soul and mind. We’re to hold nothing back from him. The second is that we love our neighbor as ourselves. These two simple, non-grievous commands sum up all of God’s law.

Jesus is saying here that we cannot be in communion with God or walk in his glory if we bear a grudge against anyone. Therefore, loving God means loving every brother and sister in the same way we’ve been loved by the Father.

Many Christians talk about intimacy with the Lord, walking with him, knowing him, having fellowship with him; but we can’t have true communion with God unless we receive into our hearts the full revelation of his love, grace and mercy.

Communion with God consists of two things:
1. Receiving the love of the Father
2. Loving him in return

You can spend hours each day in prayer, telling the Lord how much you love him, but that isn’t communion. If you haven’t received his love, you haven’t had communion with him. You simply can’t share intimacy with the Lord unless you’re secure in his love for you.

I know when I come to my Lord, I’m not coming to a hard, fierce, demanding Father. He doesn’t wait for me with an angry countenance. He doesn’t trail me, waiting for me to fail so he can say, “I caught you!”

No, I’m coming to a Father who has revealed himself to me as pure, unconditional love. He’s kind and tenderhearted, full of grace and mercy, anxious to lift all my cares and burdens. I know he’ll never turn me down when I call on him.

The prophet Zephaniah says something incredible about God’s love for us. He writes, “The Lord your God in your midst, the Mighty One, will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing” (Zephaniah 3:17, NKJV).

God rests in his love for his people. In Hebrew, the phrase “He will rest in his love” reads, “He shall be silent because of His love.” God is saying, in essence, “I’ve found my true love, and I’m satisfied. I don’t need to look elsewhere because I have no complaint, and I won’t take my love back. My love is a settled matter!”

He cares about everything concerning me (see Psalm 100). Can you receive his word that he loved you before the world was created, before humankind existed, before you were born? Can you accept that he loved you even after you fell into Adam’s sinful ways and became an enemy to him? That’s why I come into his courts with praise and thanksgiving because I’m thankful for who my God is.