After
spending many hours before Jesus one night, I left the Friday night
"Watch of the Lord" sulking in discouragement. Once again, He had not
come as I desired Him to.
 As I got into my car, anxious tears freely
streaming down my face, a dear friend came up to my window. I voiced my
pain that I desired the Lord so much, and yet He still was not
revealing Himself to me. To my surprise, she smiled. She leaned in and
whispered, "It's happening. You love Him! You love Him so much you weep
for Him. Your heart is moving in love just like you've been praying
for." Her unexpected angle of discernment struck me. I thought of the
prayer I liked to pray over and over again throughout the day, "Cause
this heart to love You. Cause this heart to love You." Suddenly, I
realized that my longing was His answering of my requests. My tears
were love for Him, the very thing I had been asking for. I loved Him by
longing for Him. My heart was beginning to actually move in love, to be
tenderized in love and to feel love for my Beloved rising within.
Our
journey begins with longing. And before longing is the longing to long.
It is the yearning to desire Him. We find in our hearts an awakening
that beckons longing and paves the way for desire. It begins with the
Lord Himself placing His divine drawing upon the heart of the one who
loves Him. We find ourselves desiring to desire Him and pained by the
present shallowness of our hearts. He awakens us to the great obsession
of Himself, and we find this new ache within our hearts: our lack of
love and absence of tenderness. We begin to hunger for the capacity to
hunger. We begin to thirst for the ability to thirst. The longing to
long is the escort into longing itself. It is the God-ordained gateway
into the true gift of God to crave Him with all of our beings.
To
long for God is to give witness to the Transcendent One. Longing is the
echo of eternity within our souls. It is that which sets us apart and
makes us pilgrims on the journey. This world is not our home, and our
inner ache gives testimony to the brevity of life and the weight of
eternity. "I am a stranger in the earth; do not hide Your commandments
from me. My soul breaks with longing for your judgments..." (Ps.
119:19-20). Something within us reaches for One who is other than and
for a realm that is beyond. We long for One whom we have not yet seen
but we love (1 Pet. 1:8). With hearts empowered by a divine ache, we
cry out for more of God. We search for any sign of Him. This is the
precise position that He wants us to be in. It is the hungry that He
fills. It is the desirous that He satisfies.
All
divine longing is a gift. It takes God to love God, and He Himself must
place within us the love with which we love Him. "...For it is God who
works in you both to will [desire] and to do for His good pleasure"
(Phil. 2:13). Longing is the beginning of that gift of love. We imagine
this gift to be only the actual experience of intimacy with Him. Part
of the actual knowledge or experience of Him in intimacy is the longing
for that experience. The longing prior to the felt-experience is just
as much a part of loving Him as the experience itself. They go hand in
hand and cannot be separated. The initial longing is an irreplaceable
part of the eternal intimacy. Both the craving and the satisfaction are
equal parts of the gift of intimacy. It all plays a role in the
impartation of Divine Love to our hearts. Oh, the gift of longing for
God! Oh, treasured companion on the journey! For surely we need this
Helper for the entirety of our way forward in love. Longing and our
ache for His greater revealing are here to stay.
Love's Delay
"Tell
me, O you whom I love, where you feed Your flock, where you make it
rest at noon. For why should I be as one who veils herself by the
flocks of your companions?" (Song Sol. 1:7).
In
Song of Solomon 1:7, the young maiden inquires of the Lord where He
feeds His flock. She has just told the Lord in verse two that His love
is better than wine. She knows His love far exceeds all other
pleasures. Her whole life vision has changed because of this
foundational revelation. Yet the mere acknowledgement of His love's
superiority is not what will ultimately satisfy her hungry heart.
Though she has been overcome with the vision of His great love, her
heart is still hungry to actually experience it. Only He Himself can
answer the craving in her soul. She must personally partake of His love
in order to find satisfaction. She must drink in order for her thirst
to be quenched. She asks with desperation, "Tell me where can I go to
drink of You; where do I feast upon this love?"
She
is saying, "Where do You cause my heart to be satisfied with You and
You alone? How is it that a soul drinks deeply of You? For now I am
ruined for lesser pleasures. You are my Reward. Now I know that You are
exceedingly broad. Who can know the vastness of Your personality? I
know that there is more to You than I can fathom or imagine. You are an
Ocean, and I stand gazing from the shore. I have been ruined by an
awakening, but now my pain is greater than before. The high vision is
before me, but I know only hunger and desperation as my reality."
She
had not anticipated a delay in experiencing the pleasures of His love.
She gave her wholehearted "yes" to the life vision of holy passion yet
now finds herself in an unexpected quiet. Here she waits, ruined for
lesser pleasures and kept from Divine consolations, in the boundless
space between her passion and the beautiful experience of His. He is
cultivating longing in her heart. He desires more than a recognition of
His greatness; He wants a desperation and lovesick yearning to come to
maturity within her. And so for a time she remains in this breach
between the reach for and the fulfillment of superior pleasures. She is
ruined by the vision of His beauty. She now knows He is altogether
lovely and that no other pursuit will ever satisfy the deep cravings of
her heart. Yet He keeps her here in this Divine delay for a season and
she only knows the ache of longing and not the pleasure of its answer.
She only knows the wound of love and not the actual experience of His
healing cure.
This
is the pattern of His way with our hearts; knowing this should bring
great consolation to our hearts. He is actually drawing us in the
delay. He is enlarging the capacity of our hearts to experience the
pleasure of His presence by withholding it. This is the perfect, Divine
wisdom of the Lover of our souls, to bring us forth, to His side,
leaning and loving, a pure and spotless bride!
Dana
Candler is a teacher at the Forerunner School of Ministry, and is on
the senior leadership team of the International House of Prayer
Missions Base. Her book, Deep Unto Deep: The Journey of His Embrace,
and other audio resources by Dana are available at www.afterhisheart.com
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