Consuming Zeal

He said, "Take these things away; stop making My Father's house a place of business." His disciples remembered that it was written, "ZEAL FOR YOUR HOUSE WILL CONSUME ME." The Jews then said to Him, "What sign do You show us as your authority for doing these things?" (John 2:16-18)

I have felt a growing desire to shift the focus of my personal study and meditation time to something that will address more directly the deeper heart issues that are most important in my relationship with God. I decided after some thought to go back to the writings of John and dwell on them for awhile. Because of the different nature of the John's books compared to the other New Testament authors I feel that God may be able to speak more directly to my own heart through these passages. I want to catch up on getting my heart more matured as well as continuing to stimulate my intellectual understanding of reality and truth.

A few years ago right after I learned how to study inductively I chose to start here in John and see what God would show me personally. I was overwhelmed and amazed as each morning the Holy Spirit would surprise me with fresh, new, exciting insights as I allowed myself to open up to whatever He chose to reveal to me. I discovered to my amazement that I could literally spend weeks reading the very same verses over and over each morning and discover totally new concepts and truths when I felt that there simply could be nothing left to uncover. I finally chose to move on simply because I was getting tired of sitting in the very same place, not because I believed I had uncovered all there was to learn.

At that time I also discovered the incredible effectiveness of journaling or note-taking. I found that if I would simply begin to write down even the slightest new thought that came to my mind about a passage, that usually before I could finish writing it down there would be a whole string of related insights that would begin to emerge quickly and I often could barely keep up in capturing it on paper. I ended up with several legal pads full of notes and insights that had captivated my imagination, but tragically all of those notes seem to have been lost when we were forced to move suddenly.

Now I feel compelled to come back to these same Scriptures again and seek to encounter some of the same truths and more. But John's focus is on things so important and fundamentally core to having a genuine relationship with God that I am very sure that I will not be bored or disappointed. John, more than any other disciple, seemed to catch on to the real reason that Jesus came to this earth in the first place and was the most eloquent in explaining this to those who are willing to listen with their hearts.

That is precisely the thing that I feel that I need the most. I want to learn to live from my heart more effectively and more consistently. I want to encounter God at the heart level even more so than to perceive reality with my mind, as exciting and stimulating as that has been over the past few years. I have been learning many things about living from the heart and have been practicing them as much as I can. But the more that I do so the more I realize how stiff and malnourished my own heart and soul have been for most of my life.

My own heart has long been buried under years of performance-based ideas of religion and masses of lies about how God feels about me. On top of that the culture in which I grew up frowned upon expressing emotions very much so I learned to suppress my feelings in attempts to live a religion totally from the head without any reference to the condition of my spirit. This resulted in a very powerless religion primarily focused on behavior control and maintaining external appearances but did nothing to address the internal pain accumulated through years of neglect and abuse of my own heart and emotions. This has resulted in many buried land mines, triggers that became real problems whenever others might accidentally set off some of these. It created real stresses in my relationships with others, and my lack of emotional nurturing and development left huge voids inside of me that still crave deeply for real fulfillment and satisfaction. My external-based religion had nothing to offer me to effectively resolve these tormenting pains except demands for more struggle to ignore or repress them. But I have been learning that this is not God's way of relating to sinners.

What I really need and what John discovered for himself in the years he spent with Jesus was that the only thing that addresses the inner turmoil and pain that causes violent outbursts or despair and depression is a love that we can never find on this earth. John had a reputation for being a hot-head, and the anger that simmered in his soul was not unlike the ever-present resentment and anger that seethed in my own heart for many years. I am aware that there are still residual pockets of that anger hiding deep out of sight inside of me and I want to cooperate with God in allowing Him access to those places of fear, shame and anger inside so that He can bring real healing and wholeness to my heart. I want to experience more fully the incredible transformation that marked the life of John who became so changed by the love he encountered in his best friend Jesus that one would hardly recognize that he was the same man Jesus picked up along the lake front.

The last time I went through this book I spent a great deal of time on each verse and sometimes on each phrase and word. I really don't know what is going to happen this time, but so far I have simply chosen to expose myself to reading part of a passage and carefully listening to whatever the Spirit wants to impress on me. I am likely to find myself suddenly captivated by some new thought that explodes out of a particular word or phrase as I was last time. But after years of experience using the inductive method I am a different person now than when I passed this way before and I suspect God may have different things to say to me. But the main purpose that I want to marinate in these particular writings is, as I have said, to nurture and feed my heart with the assistance of my intellect as a helper and advisor. I want to have more balance between my intellect and my growing connection to the passion that I am increasingly perceiving glowing from the nuclear power-center of God's heart.

One of the early flashes of that passion appears in the verse quoted at the beginning here. This verse comes at the end of a story of Jesus entering the temple at the beginning of His public ministry years and becoming so overwhelmed with God's feelings about the suffocating lies about God that He carries out some very unusual actions that have baffled many and have even been misinterpreted by religion much of the time. I have been dwelling on this story for a couple days or more now just trying to absorb with my mind and heart the real significance of what this means in my own life. I don't think that it is all clear to me yet, but I do sense some very important sentiments in the heart of Jesus revealed in this story that I would like to resonate with more distinctly in my own spirit. At the same time, I perceive that the zeal that I am more familiar with from my own background is probably not reflective of the zeal that Jesus displayed in this event.

I want to become filled with His zeal, the pure and holy passion that drove Jesus to such extreme behavior without any taint of the false motives and prejudice so often present in common religious zealotry. I want to not only understand and know the zeal that comes from God but I want to be as consumed by it as Jesus was in this story. But one thing that I am aware of is that everything that Jesus did flowed from the heart of His Father and was for the purpose of demonstrating His love and a desire to draw everyone into an intimate connection with the real Source of life instead of depending on artificial, counterfeit ideas of religion to give us life. Everything in God's ways are designed to bring reconciliation, not confrontation as much as possible.