Sneak Peek into Love that is Blind

Prologue
       The shrill beeping of the fire alarm jerked fifteen-year-old Cora Abrams out of a deep sleep. Acrid smoke hit her nostrils.

       Fire! She coughed hard as she stumbled out of bed, the smoke activating her chest cold. She hurried to the door of her upstairs bedroom in central Los Angeles, then froze when a man shouted outside.

       “Burn the Jews’ homes!”
       She gasped in horror. Glass shattered downstairs, and trembling assaulted her. Oh, God, what am I supposed to do? Everyone else from the neighborhood had driven to the synagogue to celebrate Hanukkah.
       Staggering downstairs, she coughed harder from the thickening smoke. Then she entered the kitchen.

       Fire licked up the wall near the phone. A cold December wind blew in through the broken window, intensifying the flames.

       She swayed as dizziness swept over her, but she had to get to the phone. It was her only hope.

       Flames darted close.  She grabbed the receiver and frantically dialed 911.

       Someone shouted near the window. She clutched at the gold cross on her necklace. Dear Jesus! What if the men came inside? What if they found her?

       A calm, professional voice spoke over the line. “911. May I help you?”

       “My house is on fire, and a gang is vandalizing—“ The heavy curtain rod above her suddenly crashed down, striking the back of her head. She screamed as she plummeted into darkness.

***

        “Cops!” Rye Tyler grabbed the scrawny arm of his teenage cohort as sirens screamed close. “We gotta run!”
        “Yeah!” Dish threw his can of gasoline to the ground and tore across the residents’ lawns with the five other gang members.

        Rye raced after them, but whirled when a girl’s scream pierced the air. “What was that?”

        Dish swore, racing faster. “Forget her!”
        Rye stood, petrified. Flames billowed out the windows of the first house they had gassed. Dish had said all the Jews were gone. What if a girl burned to death because of what they had done? His mother had died in a fire, and her terrified screams still haunted him.
        Anguish ripped through him as he sprinted to the girl’s house. Locating a broken window, he shattered it with his elbow. Heat poured over him as he vaulted inside. Smoke stung his eyes, but he located the girl on the far side of the kitchen. She lay collapsed, fire licking at her nightgown.
        He ran across the room. Flames singed him as he scooped her up. He staggered toward the door, and the metal knob scalded his palm when he opened it. He plunged through the doorframe, but the top beam broke loose, knocking him to the ground.
        He fell on the girl, white-hot heat arcing into his chest from her cross necklace. Gasping, he stumbled to his feet, the unconscious girl flopping in his arms. His legs burned as he bolted away from the collapsing house.
        Flashing red-and-blue lights lit up the neighborhood, but escape didn’t matter anymore. He dropped to his knees on the dry lawn, cradling the girl against his chest.
        A cold voice said, “You’d better let me have her.”
        He looked up at the uniformed paramedic, who took the girl from him. Her arms dangled limply, and blood matted her long, dark hair. Had he been too late to save her?
        His self-control fragmented. Covering his shaved head with sooty hands, he broke down and wept.

 

Lighthouse

“We are born to burn.” ~Bill Johnson, Hosting the Presence

There is one house that is built to burn. It is the lighthouse. It’s whole design is for that one function: to burn with intensity, fierceness, and purpose.

It’s commonplace to look at a lighthouse and think: yes, a fire burns inside it. But what a fire! It’s a fire that burns day and night, in the blistering heat of summer as well as the deadly blizzards of winter. This fire blazes so high and so fierce that small pieces of kindling from the forest just won’t cut it. No, this fire requires massive logs, severed by the sharpest axe and carried by the strongest lumberjack up grueling flights of stairs to the highest level of the lighthouse.

A lighthouse is also a glass house: a house that everyone else can see through. It’s windows around that fire are transparent and clear. They have to be because the light is meant to pierce storms and ink-black darkness. This light is so strong and fierce that going near it could mean death, but to those at sea, it is life-preserving and even life-saving. It’s a light that illuminates the way.

A lighthouse without a fire blazing is an ornament of the past. A lighthouse with pulsating flames serves with relentless determination its greatest purpose. The lighthouse keeper lives within this house, may even have a family in its abode. But if the fire goes out, the lighthouse keeper no longer operates in his true identity and calling.

Jesus called us to be consumed with Him. He is the fire that burns within us. His presence is warm and comforting, but He desires us to remember that He is meant to be more than a fire that flickers in an interior hearth. He designed our lives to be demonstrations of His love and fierce desire. He gives us His Holy Spirit to live within us as the Master LightKeeper, to empower us in our identity and teach us the skills necessary for the trade. Even our successes—those great oaks that are monuments of our most diligent efforts in God’s field—must submit to the Holy Spirit's greatest purpose: keeping the fire of abandonment ablaze in our hearts.

Breakout!!!

Wow. Saturday night's church service was  SO powerful. The Presence of God was so thick, all I could do was keep trying to soak in every drop.

It made me think of double-the-atmospheric pressure. Science has researched how creation would have to have been to keep dinosaurs alive because they are these mammoth creatures with nostrils no bigger than a horse’s. The larger the creature, the more oxygen it needs to live, but today’s level of oxygen wouldn’t be sufficient for muscular health. It would be like breathing through a straw for them. However, the giant plants, bugs, and animals that have been found fossilized show that the atmosphere back then would have had double the amount of oxygen in it.

That’s what I felt like at Faith Center this weekend: like I’ve been breathing in Jesus at home, soaking in Him, and then bam—when I enter church, I get hit twice as hard. Wow! There is something to the whole thing of gathering in one accord, with every heart and gaze focused on adoring Him.

Interesting too, because when people are placed in a hyperbaric chamber with double the atmospheric pressure, guess what happens? Healing!!! Intense, saturated oxygen enables the physical body to rapidly replace damaged cells. A little girl had fallen down a pipeline years ago and by the time they rescued her, one leg had turned completely black from the lack of blood flow. Instead of cutting off the limb, they placed her in a hyperbaric chamber. They saw pink flesh return and soon her entire limb was functioning in full strength again. Isn’t it amazing?

I think God’s doing the same thing with His Church. He’s upping the level of grace-filled atmosphere, flooding it with His Presence, like Bill Johnson at Bethel Church has said, bringing more and more into the House. And He’s going to keep bringing more, filling the place with His glory, flooding our lives with His peace, saturating our hearts with His presence so we can’t help but “leak all over the place” (Kevin Dedmon, founder of FireStarters) and people who just walk into Church will be smitten with His love and healing power.

Last night, the Lord kept soaking me at home as I meditated on what we’d prayed over at Corporate Prayer, and I saw fires breaking out all over. Not literal ones but symbolic of the Holy Spirit in people who are saturated with Him, and then all the sudden in the midst of our everyday stuff—bam! God is going to strike us with supernatural anointing. He’s already doing it! He’s breaking out in our midst.

I heard Him say in my spirit, “A wave of My Spirit is going to hit My church and it will be like the breaking of a dam or like the leaping out of flames from a wildfire that can’t be contained. In that moment, the last shall be first, the first last. Those who joined late will see the same effects of My Spirit as those who have been toiling and learning. Don’t let jealousy, resentment, grumbling, or complaining overtake those who have worked long and seen little. Now everyone will see together the results of the fire of My Spirit on a people dedicated to worshipping and adoring Me. Don’t dam it up or try to contain it. Young and old, men and women, learned and unlearned will all be hit by My Spirit together—an outpouring of My passion and goodness that will sweep across America, breaking asunder the religious spirit that has plagued this nation for generations.”

I can’t even imagine what this is going to look like! But I’m all in!!!

Every Fire Needs Grace

In the natural, every fire must have two ingredients to keep burning: fuel and oxygen.

Firefighters pre-burn an area of land with smaller fires they can control so that when the raging wildfire arrives at that strip of land, it finds no more fuel. With no more trees or brush to consume, the fire turns back on itself and dies. In his book Welcoming a Visitation of the Holy Spirit, Wes Campbell, pastor of New Life Vineyard Fellowship in Kelowna, British Columbia, shares, “In the same way, the fire of the Spirit must be touching new people every day in order to keep blazing.” I would add that the fire within our souls must stay in continual connection with God to stay alive.

Isaiah 9:18-19 makes this same correlation, although in a negative sense. Remember, what is true spiritually applies both in the positive and negative. The prophet writes, “For wickedness burns as the fire; it shall devour the briers and thorns, and kindle in the thickets of the forest. They shall mount up like rising smoke. Through the wrath of the Lord of hosts the land is burned up, and the people shall be as fuel for the fire. No man shall spare his brother.” The emphasis of the passage is not on physical fire devouring natural trees but about how spiritual wickedness devours people.

Spiritual passion operates by the same principle. Love for the Lord ignites in our hearts when we offer our lives as fuel for the Lord’s flame, the flame of Yah. This fire then leaps forward, blown by the wind of the Spirit, to the next willing heart—the next person hungry for God’s love and personal Presence.

Jordan Fowler conveys this principle with beautiful and powerful imagery in the song Fuel:

“I have no silver and no gold to give.

No frankincense or precious myrrh.

But what I have to You I give: a heart that’s broken for the world.

Consume me for Your fire and use me for Your heart’s desire:

To spread Your flame to every tribe and nation.

I give up my life to You to burn as Your holy fuel.

Ignite my heart to burn up for the nations.

My life can be Your fuel—my hopes, my dreams, my wants, my all.

My life can be Your fuel.” 

Second, fire must have oxygen. We can have all the wood in the world, but if the atmosphere is sucked dry of oxygen, every fire will instantly extinguish. That’s why small fires can be suffocated with a heavy blanket or stomped out by a tough boot. The same truth applies to us as people. In the realm of spiritual analogy, oxygen represents grace. Robert Louis Stevenson once said, “There is nothing but God’s grace. We walk upon it; we breathe it; we live and die by it; it makes the nails and axles of the universe.” Ole Hallesby said, “The ‘air’ which our souls need also envelops all of us at all times and on all sides. God is round about us…on every hand, with many-sided and all-sufficient grace.”

Without grace, we perish. “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God!” (Ephesians 2:8). Without grace, our passion for God suffocates. “Our sufficiency is from God…not of the letter, but of the Spirit, for the letter kills but the Spirit gives life” (II Corinthians 3:5-6). The fastest way to kill passion for Jesus is with legalism. Will we still love Him? Yes, but our strength to serve Him will be gone. Why? Because “The joy of the Lord is our strength” (Nehemiah 8:10) and “Desire gave you renewed strength” (Isaiah 57:10 NLT). This spiritual principle also applies in a positive and negative. We can be passionate for things that are not of God, pursuing them, such as Isaiah talks about, because desire spurs us on. Or we can crucify sinful passions and cultivate passion for Jesus. This passion becomes our strength to keep running after Him and keep pouring ourselves out to others. Proverbs 11:29 says, “The way of the Lord is strength for the upright.” Why? Because He is our delight and greatest pleasure (Psalm 16:11).

However, legalism kills desire. When we “ought” to do something and are critically judged by others around us, or even by ourselves, when we fail to get it right, our mistakes become a towering wall of perfectionism—an impassable barrier between us and the joy of the Lord. The Apostle Paul writes with rejoicing, “But now we have been delivered from the law, having died to what we were held by, so that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.” Why is he rejoicing so greatly? Because Christ paid the cost of all our mistakes! Every sin and failure and misunderstanding was laid upon His shoulders at Calvary. He hung upon that tree to make sure we’re never trapped behind the Wall of Perfectionism again!

Does His incredible grace mean we can sin and not be called to account? No, but grace means that when we realize how badly we’ve blown it and that we’re on the wrong side of the wall again, we can leap over it, back into the place of right fellowship with the Lord (Psalm 18:29, I John 1:9). The Holy Spirit declares to us with beautiful invitation, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Romans 8:1). The Spirit calls out again to us through the prophet Isaiah, “Ho! Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come buy and eat. Yes come, buy wine and milk, without money and without price…. Let your soul delight itself in abundance! Incline your ear and come to Me. Hear, and your soul shall live!” (55:1-3)

We come to God through grace. There is no other way. Anyone who tries to live by the law must keep every part, but there has never been a man or woman who can (Galatians 6:13). Nor can the law make anyone perfect, even after salvation through faith (Galatians 3:3). Grace alone is God’s tool to form His Son in us. Grace is the oxygen of the soul.

When grace abounds in a life, a church, and a community, then the fire of the Spirit will blaze free and strong. Our hearts will be ignited with a holy thirst to partake freely of the waters of life (Revelation 22:17).

Then we will be the Bride who calls along with the Spirit in her, “Come! Everyone who thirsts, come to the River of Life!!!”