Fully Captivated
When Jesus said…
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength…AND
Love your neighbour as yourself.
He wasn’t commanding us to a place of spiritual discipline.
He was inviting us into a place of flourishing, of healing, of power, of freedom in our minds and our emotions, of deep abiding assurance and peace, of healing and flourishing in our human relationships.
Into a place of the restoration of our God designed, God inspired lives of abundant life that can only be found when He is our true, first thought and first source.
What happens when we do something with all our hearts, minds, soul and strength?
This is a picture of what being fully captivated looks like. It’s what being ‘totally fixated’ could be described as.
Have you ever been totally fixated?
Ever been so engrossed in something - that the outside world, with all its noises, distractions and demands vanished from your awareness. You were so fully focused that time itself just seemed to disappear and you were lost in a zone of complete ‘absorption’ and ‘preoccupation.’
Fully engaged, fully lost, yet sharply aware that the thing your were doing had almost, as it were, ‘taken you prisoner.’ You were literally - heart, mind, soul and strength - taken captive.
It’s actually a wonderful place of bliss for the human soul.
This happens to me often when I am writing. I get so caught up in the direction of thoughts and language, and the meanings of words, and the ways words can be assembled to sharpen both my understanding and hopefully the readers understanding towards new ideas and expressions…that time literally flies.
Sounds pretty geeky…eh?
But I have friends that find this same place of abandon and bliss in their running, or in their woodworking shed, or when they paint, or spend time in the garden. It’s in that place where our entire being is captivated by a singular flow of our consciousness, and we are lost in the captivity of that consciousness, that we feel fully engaged, fully alive and fully free.
And so, when we come to God - it is in this place; the deep conscious awareness of God’s abiding presence, where our attention is captivated entirely by Him - heart, mind, soul and strength - that we find a deep sense of His affirmation and assurance, His healing, and the strengthening that comes from being saturated to the core, with the Source of Life itself. It’s not something that comes from our labor, or even from our intention to gain blessing from Him. Instead, it is purely just relational. Our hearts sold out to Him and Him alone. Pursuing our connection to His Presence.
Jesus is the Tree of Life from whom we must eat.
And in consuming His fruit, we find that we can tap into the Kingdom dynamic of “eternal life” in the here and now. You see, we are living our eternal life right now. It doesn’t start when we get to Heaven, even though it originates from there. We can live from the realities of this spiritual realm in our life here on earth, today. Jesus Himself taught us to pray, “Your Kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven.” This is praying into God’s will for the earth that is both now, but also, the fulness of which is yet to come. The Kingdom is both at hand - and - is to come.
Jesus Himself is our Life. But often, we are too busy, or too full of anxious thoughts, or the pressures of our ‘to do lists,’ to stop and actually commune deeply with God. Often, we spend more time thinking about going into the secret place than we actually spend in the secret place. And then, when we do stop for prayer, we rarely take the time to get centered and really focused on God. We’ve got a million other busy thoughts raging in our heads.
Sometimes it takes our whole prayer time just to get still before God and to stop feeling guilty for not praying enough. Then, because we think prayer needs to be about telling God what is happening in our lives, about naming all the people, things and projects we need His blessing in, we never really get to fellowship the actual Person of God, His Presence and Mind, and hear what He actually wants to tell us. We come to our prayer time so focused on US, and our agenda, that we have little time for Him and His agenda for us. It’s as if we believe that God wouldn’t know what we needed unless we told Him and if we leave any details out He is under no obligation to do anything about those things. This whole way of praying comes out of a performance mindset; a system of works and doing good; a slavery mentality that sees ourselves as agents of God, rather than sons and daughters on co-mission with God.
We forget the statements of Jesus, in Matt 6, that say -
“your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.”
Why? Because this is what good Fathers do. They already know.
When we see God in His rightful place then we stop projecting onto God our insecurities - and we start living from the place of rest; the place of relationship and truth of the Fatherhood and the covering of our heavenly Father.
Like Psalm 91 says,
He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. It’s only from the secret place that we can see the shadow that already sits over us and it gives us rest and peace. From the secret place we can see that God is already our refuge and our fortress. He is not waiting to be asked to be that for us. He is already standing over us in this way. We just need to see it; often many times over, so that we can take comfort and assurance from this fact.
Our walk with God is about adjusting our view of God to what is actually true about Him until it becomes the way we automatically relate to Him and enjoy Him.
In this way, His actual Person is revealed in us; in all its restful power and vibrant, peace giving, assurance…until it becomes our daily lived experience.
