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2:4). Intimacy with God must be our first priority before anything else, even before our works of service. The second commandment (loving others, which are our works of service) “is like” the first commandment, according to Jesus, and yet Jesus clearly called it “second” (Matthew 22:39). It’s an extremely close second and difficult to separate from the first, and yet it is second.
It’s vitally important that we keep first things first. When our love for God gets our first and best attention, then we will function in the spiritual wholeness necessary to execute the second com- mandment. When our priorities become inverted and we begin placing more emphasis on loving others than loving God, we are headed for certain burnout. The only way to avoid an eventual collapse is to keep returning to our first love.
The Holy Spirit is profoundly committed to restoring the first commandment to first place in our lives. We must be established in our primary identity before God. It’s so important to be able to say, “This is who I am.” I am not primarily a worker for God; I am first and foremost a lover of God. The Holy Spirit is visiting
Secrets of the Secret Place
many of us in this hour and turning the tables of our priorities and understandings upsidedown. His mandate is to establish our primary identity as lovers of God. By the time He is finished in our lives, we will be lovers who work rather than workers who love. The secret place must have top priority in our calendars and schedules because it is the place where the incubation of intimacy is facilitated. You can’t garner intimacy on the run. You must stop, pull up a table, lay out the bread and the cup, and dine with Him and He with you. It’s great to enjoy His presence while driving to work in the morning, but if your commute to work is the totality of your secret place, then you will lack depth of connection in your intimacy with Jesus. The responses of His heart are lavishly
explosive when we give Him our first and best energies.
Speaking from personal experience, I know what it’s like to get the two greatest commandments inverted without even realizing it. There came a time when the Lord pulled me up short and in His kindness showed me how my life priorities were imbalanced. He said, “Bob, you come to Me like to a gas station.” Now, I consider a gas station to be a “necessary evil.” I don’t like to fill up with gas, I like to drive. But I know that if I’m going to do what I re- ally want to do (drive), then I’ve got to fill up with gas. The Lord was saying, “Bob, you come to the place of prayer in order to get filled up. You don’t come to Me because I’m the first love of your heart; you come to Me to get recharged so that you can go out and pursue the first love of your life.” You see, my first love was the ministry. I loved to drive! I wanted to see souls saved; I wanted to win my city for Christ; I wanted to change the world. I was motivated more by what I did for God than by being with Him. I claimed, “All my springs are in You” (Psalm 87:7), but in fact what sustained me most was the “rush” of ministry accomplishments. And I didn’t even realize it until the Lord showed it to me.
When I saw this, I went into writhing pain. I fell before Him and cried, “Lord, I’m sorry, this isn’t how I want it to be. I don’t want to have a filling station relationship with You! I want so much more! I want to be Your lover, Your bride. I want You to be the number one love of my life. I want the secret place to be what I live for. I want to enjoy being with You so much that they
The Secret of Intimacy First
have to drag me out of the secret place!”
I sensed the Lord responding, “Yes, son, I know that’s what you want. And that’s why I’ve come to you and shown you the true condition of your heart. I’m going to allure you into the wilderness (Hosea 2), and there I will awaken you to a depth of love relationship beyond anything you’ve known in your young and busy years.”
The Lord has many ways to bring us to proper priorities. In my case, He simply removed my ministry. Oh how it hurt! I cried out, “Lord, why does this hurt so much? You haven’t removed Your presence from my life; all You’ve done is remove my minis- try. And I am in incalculable pain. Why does it hurt so much?” It was in this way that the Lord showed me how much the ministry had become the fountain of my soul. When He removed it, I was granted an opportunity to find an entirely new basis for relating with Him. I began to learn what it means to come to Him simply for the joy and delight of who He is.
He doesn’t remove everybody’s ministry in order to teach them this valuable lesson. In same cases, He simply starves out our fulfillment in our labors for Him. We’re still doing the same ministry, but it no longer fulfills us. The ministry becomes dry, dusty, lifeless, and laborious. We find ourselves dreading what once energized us. It’s the same net effect: the Lord is trying to show us how we have derived sustenance from our works of service instead of from the kisses of His mouth.
He wants us addicted to the wine of His love (Song of Solomon 1:2), but it’s so easy to become addicted to the wine of ministry. Ministry can be intoxicating. There is a certain “high” that hap- pens when the grace of God flows through you and ministers to the bride. When her face lights up with the glory of God, you feel a sense of fulfillment and significance because God honored your obedience and blessed others. Furthermore, you had the privi- lege of watching God use the gifts and talents you’ve cultivated. Your inner response is like, “This is it! This is what I was created for! I’ve found my niche. This is my calling and ministry. Now I
know my place in the body. Serving in this way is giving me such a wonderful feeling that I want to do it again!” It’s not wrong to
Secrets of the Secret Place
enjoy ministering to others, but it’s so easy for this to become the addictive wine that intoxicates and fulfills us, and the wine of His love takes second place to this “new wine” we’ve tasted called ministry.
So the Lord comes to us, like He did to the Ephesians who were so successful in ministry, and He says, “I’m calling you back to your first love” (see Revelation 2:4). He wants us to be people of “one thing”: the passionate pursuit of His face. David said, “One thing I have desired of the LORD, that will I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in His temple” (Psalm 27:4). David chased after “ one thing ”—the face of God; Paul said, “But one thing I do”—which was the pursuit of “the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13-14); Mary of Bethany discovered that, “ One thing is needed,” and Jesus added that she had “chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42). There’s only one thing that is really necessary, and that is to sit at Jesus’ feet and hear His words. David’s one thing was Paul’s one thing was Mary’s one thing. It’s the first commandment in first place, the pursuit of a loving relationship with our dazzling Bridegroom.
All of hell will militate against your becoming a man or woman of one thing. Circumstances will go haywire; your to-do list will mushroom; the demands on your life will escalate. Satan will employ whatever device will work—anything to keep you from becoming a person of one thing. Because if you find this attainment, you will become a passionate firebrand for God, set ablaze with fiery bridal passions for your Lord, and you will be a dangerous weapon in the hand of your God for endtime exploits. The greatest dimensions of kingdom power will be touched by those who are truly ignited and energized by their personal love relationship with the Lord Jesus.
Ask yourself this question: Am I ever relieved when my prayer time is over? For me the answer was, “More times than I care to admit!” There were so many times I was relieved to be finished with the filling-up process so that I could go out and drive the machinery of my ministry. But the Lord has been kind to me, and
The Secret of Intimacy First
He is teaching me the secret of loving Him first and deriving my fulfillment and sense of success from the affections He gives me in the secret place. When I’m a success in His arms, the ministry can go well, or it can go not so well; I’m a success on the inside either way. Thus I am stabilized by the power of an inner life with God, rather than being jerked around emotionally by the vicis- situdes of the ministry’s ups and downs.
In closing, look at Matthew 5:15, “‘Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.’” The Lord wants to set you ablaze with zeal for the face of Christ so that you might shine with the light of a relationship that enjoys intimacy first. If this fire of love is pure and bright, the Lord will set you on a lampstand so that you might give light to the entire household of faith. But if the light of your life isn’t pure—if it’s energized in part by the wine of ministry—then the Lord will place your light under a basket. Some of the most gifted ministries have been placed under a basket and been limited to a localized sphere of influence because the Lord was not willing to export the impurity of their love to the entire body of Christ. May you learn the secret of loving Jesus first and foremost, that He might see fit to place your lamp on a lampstand and make the simplicity and purity of your devotion an example to the greater household of faith. Amen.
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