God Thirsts For Us

It is time to write again as God pours new meaning into old understandings.  Several years ago God called me to dance in the rain with the children of Red Lake, one of the first mass school shooting locations.  After over a month of His asking, I said yes.  What followed was an amazing time of fasting, prayer, healing, letting go, intense warfare, and final surrender to the one and only one who could bring me through many months of trail.  God worked through me and others to heal the land through forgiveness, and to save the souls of three lost children in only twenty minutes.  My worldly mind kept trying to balance the amount of prep time (trials) to the amount of healing.  By earthly standards I had expected more.  So one night during youth group God cleared the confusion.  While meditating on the prodigal son I asked God to show me what I needed to understand.  He had me open my eyes and look around at the 70 some kids that where hanging around on the floor; some of them were deep in prayer, but most of them where totally lost.  When I asked God what he wanted me to do his response was “love them like I do.”  Then for one brief moment I felt a love so strong my heart couldn’t stand it.  I gasped for air, unable to breath.  For just a second I felt how deeply God loves us.  It doesn’t even come close to comparing how we are able to love.  The next thing he said struck me to the core.  I heard “I would suffer an eternity for just one of them.”  That is how much God loves each and every one of us. It is a love so deep we can’t even comprehend it.

I have been reading the book Radical by David Platt lately.  He shares an interesting perspective about Jesus’ last request to God about not having to experience “the cup.”  He suggests “it is not a reference to the wooden cross but to divine judgment.  It is the cup of God’s wrath.”  It wasn’t the physical pain he was fearful of, it was the total rejection.  In that final sacrifice God cleansed himself of all disappointment and what was left was pure grace and love. The cup that Jesus took was not just the final sacrifice for our sins, but also he took on himself all of the disappointment God had felt.  What I felt in that moment was nothing but love.  Not an ounce of regret or disappointment.  What I experienced after that was an unexplainable love for everyone around me whether they hurt me, disappointed me or failed me.  I couldn’t help but feel anything but love.  In Lamentations God is very specific when it comes to sacrifices.  He understood the specific requirements that were needed to repair and cleanse the broken relationship between God and man.  He was the chemist perfecting the blood that was needed to foster a physical, emotional, and spiritual relationship with each and every one of us.  The living water inside of us purifies in a way nothing else can.  It is a constant source of hope, peace, joy, and love.  Jesus is the only way to that relationship.  Have you cried out today for the cure inside you?  It is your only hope.