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RELATIONSHIP LEADS TO REST

When God first started revealing this truth to my heart, my prayer life was turned upside-down, and I didn’t understand why. I found myself not knowing what things to pray for since my heart was being established in the rest of truly belonging in God’s family. I no longer felt like an outsider beseeching a distant God, hoping that my words and the posture of my heart were just right and that He would be stirred to act on my behalf. Instead of asking God to change circumstances or do things for me, I found myself at rest just being with Him. It was as if being with Him was all my soul really wanted, and the things I used to pray for became less important. At first I thought something was wrong because I no longer felt the familiar urge to petition God for things. Before then I had only known prayer to be that of coming to God with a list of things that I wanted or hoped would

change. I foolishly believed that my requests would be answered based on the sincerity and length of my prayers. I would have never admitted it out loud, but this was the attitude of my heart.

I was deceived, believing that God was withholding from me unless I positioned myself in the exact way He wanted. Once I started to believe that the God of the universe was my Father, I found it difficult to even ask Him for the very things for which I used to beg. It seemed like the moment I turned my heart toward Him and rested in my identity as His son, I already had what I was looking for all along. It is as Paul writes in Romans 8:32, “If He gave us Christ, how will He not, along with Him, freely give us all things?”

When we truly grasp how the gospel takes us and lovingly places us into the family of God, through the broken body of Jesus Christ, we will realize that we are established in a place of favor and blessing with God. Our posture in prayer is not as important as what He has done on our behalf. I am not diminishing the joy of posturing ourselves before God in humility, brokenness, and utter dependence, but we do this because He first loved us. Paul explains this relationship to the church in Ephesus:

“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.” (Eph. 3:14-19)

It is because God is now our Father and we are co-heirs with Christ that we come to Him with bended knee, with honor, worship, and love in our hearts. When we come to Him, it is not so that we can get

things from Him—it is simply to enjoy fellowship with Him. In the place of fellowship, we will develop a confident faith that everything in our Father’s house now belongs to us. If the foundation of your prayer life (to receive “things” from God) is “how you come” or “how often you come” or “how long you stay,” then you will always feel like you did not come in the right way, come often enough, or stay long enough. You will feel as if you are on a hamster wheel of spiritual activity, trying to find the right “formula” to get God to do what you think should be done. All the while, He just wants us to come to Him and find rest for our souls. The “things” we desire from Him will be sorted out by simply abiding in His presence.

It is in the intimate moments of fellowship with the Godhead, simply delighting in the gospel and the fact that we have been thoroughly cleansed by the blood of Jesus and made one with the Holy Spirit, that we will discover that anything is possible. We know that whatever we ask will be given to us because we are in the most privileged place in all the universe, the heart of our Father. I think this is perhaps the greatest privilege of being a Christian. We find our home in God’s heart, and the reality of His heart overwhelms and overcomes anything we could possibly face in this life. Our lustful and carnal desires for the things of this world drastically fade away because of the joy that overtakes us being in such close proximity and oneness with God.

WHEN WE COME TO HIM, IT IS NOT SO THAT WE CAN GET THINGS FROM HIM—IT IS SIMPLY TO ENJOY FELLOWSHIP WITH HIM.

There is a belief I have found in the Church that blinds us to the generosity and kindness of our Father. It’s the belief that what we do and how well we serve God will cause Him to be more or less gener

ous with His affections and blessing. We come to this belief “honestly” because it is the “way that seems right to man” (Prov. 14:12).

We are trained from the time we are young that we get what we deserve or that we receive only to the measure that we work. We receive praises for doing things rightly and are disciplined for performing poorly. I know some could interpret this to an extreme and presume that what we do does not matter and that God does not require obedience to be pleased, but that is not what I am saying. I am suggesting that our serving God does nothing to open His heart toward us any more than it already is open.