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knows it. The accuser wants you to see a Father who is harsh, demanding, never satisfied with your performance, mostly disap- pointed with you, and frustrated with the rate of your spiritual growth.
If that caricature of your heavenly Father is even close to the image you carry on the inside, that false idea of how God views you will begin to drive your emotional responses to Him. You will be wearied with trying to please Him, and your spirit will not soar in the liberty of loving adoration that He has designed for you.
Nothing is deadlier to the secret place than a false idea of how God views you; and nothing is more powerfully energizing than when your mind is renewed in the word of God and you come to understand how He looks on you. When you gain ownership of the fact that God is smiling on you, that He is desiring your company, and that He longs to be intimate with you, then the truth of that reality starts to touch your emotional chemistry, and you actually begin to feel attractive to God! This attainment has the power to change everything about how you relate to God.
Secrets of the Secret Place
It all starts with understanding how God feels about the cross of Christ. Revelation 5:6 describes Jesus as a Lamb standing before the eternal throne “as though it had been slain.” In other words, the death of Christ is as fresh to God’s mind as the day it happened. Time will never erase from before God’s eyes the immediacy of the horror of Calvary, and the powerful atoning work of the blood of Christ. God is eternally and infinitely passionate about His Son’s cross! Those who place their faith in this great demonstration of love come under the intense favor of God Almighty. Your faith in Christ’s sacrifice unlocks the infinite passions and delights of an exuberant God who yearns to be joined to your heart in eternal affection. Because you have set your love upon the One whom the Father has set His love upon, you now have an automatic “in” with God. You’re His child; you’re family.
When you know you’re attractive to God, you come into His presence with boldness. You come into His presence the way He wants you to, with a lifted face, with expectant eyes, with a de- lighted smile, with an eager voice, and with a burning heart.
He doesn’t enjoy you any less because you struggle. He knows your weakness, He sees your failures, but yet He owns you as His child and enjoys you even when you fall! He loves it when you pick yourself up and keep stepping forward again into His arms. How comforting to know we can bring the entire package of our inadequacies and shortcomings into His presence and know that He lovingly embraces us and delights in us! He enjoys us at every stage of the maturity process.
Psalm 45:11 tells us how our beloved Lord feels when He looks at us: “So the King will greatly desire your beauty.” This is how the King looks at His bride who has left everything in order to be joined to her Husband. You are stunningly beautiful to Jesus! When He looks upon your beauty, He longs to have you and hold you, for ever and ever. When you come to the secret place, you are coming into the chambers of the King who finds you both beautiful and desirable. Not only do you long for His presence, He longs for yours!
Maybe we could call this “the secret of appeal.” It’s the secret of understanding that He finds us appealing. This understanding
The Secret of Feeling Attractive to God
empowers us to desire His chambers on a continual basis. As we come into His glorious presence we are changed into His im- age (2 Corinthians 3:18), and the continual transformation into Christ’s image causes us to be—if it were possible—even more attractive to Him! As the bride adorns herself with “the beauties of holiness” (Psalm 110:3), the lavish affections of a lovesick God are only intensified. What 1 Peter 3:3 calls “the hidden person of the heart” is made increasingly beautiful in the hidden place of the Most High, where “the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit” is perfected through intimacy.
It’s here that the bride begins to cry, “Set me as a seal upon your heart” (Song of Solomon 8:6). The bride is saying to her Beloved, “Cause Your life to be bound up in my life. Cause the primary affections of Your heart to be fastened upon me. Make me the center of Your universe. I don’t want You to feel anything without including me. I want to share every passion of Your heart. I want Your thoughts to become my thoughts. I want to be joined to You in love.”
It’s a cry to become His soul mate. A soul mate is someone who not only arrives at the same conclusions as you, but who gets to those conclusions the same way you do. They think like you. Their line of reasoning aligns with yours. You have the same thought processes and responses to life situations. Jesus is turning His bride into His soul mate, and the secret place is where that love is incubated and enflamed.
Not only are you attractive to Jesus, but you are also em- braced passionately by your heavenly Father! He describes you as “the apple of His eye” (Deuteronomy 32:10; Zechariah 2:8), which means He guards and values you as you do the very pupil of your eye.
The description of Jacob’s preoccupation with his son Benja- min parallels our Father’s preoccupation with us:
“Now therefore, when I come to your servant my father, and the lad is not with us, since his life is bound up in the lad’s life, it will happen, when he sees that the lad is not with us, that he will die. So your servants will bring down the gray hair
Secrets of the Secret Place
of your servant our father with sorrow to the grave” (Genesis 44:30-31).
They said of Jacob that “his life is bound up in the lad’s life.” Jacob represents your heavenly Father. Your Father’s life is also “bound up” in the life of His beloved children. He lives when He sees that you live; He thrills when He sees you fulfilled; He rejoices when you are liberated; He is content when you are at rest. He con- strued this awesome thing called “redemption” because His heart is bound up in yours. You are the center of God’s universe!
Jesus testified to this truth when He prayed to the Father, “‘That the world may know that You…have loved them as You have loved Me’” (John 17:23). Think of it! God loves us just as much as He loves His only begotten Son! He feels the same way about us that He feels about His holy, spotless, selfless Son. Incredible!!
God feels much more deeply and passionately about me than I do about Him. Even when my passions are burning hot and bright for Him, they do not approach the intensity of His love for me. Here’s one way I’ve noticed this to be true. The intensity of my love is very limited because I can only think upon one thing at a time. So when I work or go about the duties of the day, cognitive thoughts of God actually disappear totally from my mind. My mind will return to the Lord a few hours later, but for certain periods of time I’m not even thinking about Him. But He never stops thinking about me. His eyes are constantly riveted on me, and His mind is incessantly focused on who I am and who He is making me to be. When I return to thoughts of Him, the immedi- ate witness of the Spirit is, “I’ve been here all along, waiting for you. I love you so much!”
He waits for you to come to Him! He waits all night long, watching over you, waiting for you to rise, hoping that He might be the first thought of your morning. You don’t have to wonder if He wants you to come into the secret place. He has been waiting for you, and He’ll continue to wait for as long as necessary—be- cause His heart is bound up in your life.
May you have grace from above to truly own the reality of
The Secret of Feeling Attractive to God
this powerful secret: God finds you attractive! “Lord, may I never again withhold myself from Your embrace!”
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