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This morning I woke up a little earlier
than I have for awhile. I feel an urgency today to synchronize my
heart even closer to the heart of God, for He knows what is coming
today and knows when I need extra grace to encounter things I may
know nothing about. That's one of the wonderful things about God,
that His Spirit is always ready to prepare me to meet everything, and
I don't need to know what it is ahead of time. But what I do need to
know is God's presence with me and who I really am in His eyes. I
need a secure attachment to His heart that will give me the assurance
and peace that I need. But that can only happen as I cooperate with
His preparation in my heart on a daily basis.
I enjoy my intimate times with God in
the morning. But I also know that I am still not really pressing in
to receive all that He wants me to enjoy in His presence. I am
increasingly aware, the closer I come to knowing His heart, that I am
only scratching the surface of what I could be experiencing with Him.
But that too in a way is good news, for as I become more and more
aware of how much I am not tapping into, that can work to intensify
my appetite make me more hungry to compel me to be more intent on
tuning in more acutely to His heart and lingering longer in His
presence. I know that the more I am willing to marinate in His
presence the more of His grace and love will be available for Him to
squeeze out of me throughout the day to bless others that I may
encounter.
As I opened my Bible to listen for what
He wants to share with my heart this morning, I decided to restart my
meditations in the book of 1 John. I have spent many weeks now
lingering in John chapters 14-17 in parallel with 1 John and it has
proven to be extremely enriching encounters for me. My heart and soul
have been awakened in ways I have not experienced before, but as I
said previously I feel I am only barely scratching the surface of
what I am confident is embedded in these parallel passages. I want to
become as passionate about Jesus and His revelation of the Father as
John was.
So I began reading in the first
chapter of 1 John and not surprisingly I began seeing many
connections to other things both in 1 John and in the book of John
that I had not noticed the last time I read through here. Some of
them are direct links that I like to mark in the margins of my Bible,
but others are not quite so direct but still resonate closely. As I
began noting the links so I can find them easier at a later time, it
began to dawn on me that the patterns I am starting to see here are
very similar to patterns that I learned about years ago in music
theory.
Now, for those who know little about
music, this may prove to be rather boring. But to my mind this is
actually a very exciting discovery. At the same time however, I also
realized very quickly that what I am seeing emerge from Scripture,
the patterns I see with varying degrees of connections, are like
trying to learn about music by only studying the very fundamental
basics of how chords are constructed. But if all one knew about music
was the theory and mathematics of how a chord is constructed, they
could not experience the thrill of just basking in the glory of a
full blown musical production and they would be very shortchanged
indeed.
That is a bit depressing at this point.
But I suspect this is most likely very true. How the angels must
agitate with eagerness trying to get us to turn our attention away
from the stupidity of the mundane things of this world that
constantly distract us while they yearn to introduce us to the
amazing, thrilling, enriching experiences and music of heaven that we
cannot even begin to imagine because we so stubbornly resist allowing
heaven to dwell in our hearts. Our theological theories, our petty
arguments about what God is like, our dark views of salvation that
promote such horrific assumptions about God must make angels cry
every day. All heaven is intent on introducing us to the music of the
heart that ever fills the atmosphere of heaven; but on earth we
remain content to listen to the harsh tones of man-made music that
only produces shallow pleasure but does little to transform our lives
for enjoying the pleasures of real thriving.
Yet God is not put off. His patience is
far more than our dullness and He keeps bringing us around again and
again with His offers to tutor us in the ways of heaven. He created
and designed us for far greater pleasures and joys than anything we
have yet tasted, and He does not desire for us to postpone
experiencing those joys for after the Second Coming. He wants us to
enter into the joy of the Lord now so that we can become examples of
joy attracting others to desire to enter into a similar joy of
personally knowing the One who is to know is to have eternal life
within.
I don't think it is wrong to become
aware of the basic fundamentals of heaven's kind of music. Its better
than being completely ignorant altogether I would think. I know in my
own brain that music is different than for many. My mind has always
related to music from the perspective of intervals – distances
between various notes relative to each other. There are many
different potential intervals between notes, and when you consider
more than just two notes there are multiplied variations of intervals
that all intertwine to produce even more complex effects.
The intriguing thing that I have only
begun to discover about music is how various intervals interact with
each other. There are very powerful, compelling intervals that
resonate intensely with each other such as an octave, a fifth or a
third. These are well-known intervals that show up nearly all the
time in music. What is more interesting however is that these basic
intervals also produce what is called sympathetic resonance
with intervals that are similar to themselves. What that means is
that when you play two notes on a stringed instrument that are say, a
third interval apart, sympathetic resonance is induced rather
strongly in strings that are a fifth interval even though they were
not played.
I will not bore you with the details
much beyond this. But what I am trying to share is that there are
fascinating and very complex mathematical explanations for why music
sounds the way it does and what makes it appealing to our ears. There
is also the factor of harmony and dissonance in music. Some assume
that dissonance is bad while harmony is good. That may have some
validity at a certain point, but on the other hand it is far too
simplistic and can even be misleading. This thinking is usually more
reflective of the black and white kind of mentality that can be so
debilitating in religion where people assume that every idea or
action must be categorized as right or wrong. That kind of dogmatic
logic quickly becomes counterproductive and even destructive if not
remedied.
I learned that music cannot move and
flow and produce pleasure in our minds and hearts if there is no
tension or dissonance involved. So too, our lives cannot thrive and
grow if we are not challenged with things that appear to be dissonant
at first or that produce a certain level of discomfort. This may
sound like heresy to some who prefer being dogmatic, but I am
convinced that when we live in God's presence for eternity we will be
constantly encountering things we don't understand and that at first
may seem like dissonance to us until we begin moving into even higher
levels of appreciation for the complexity of God's wisdom and
knowledge and love.
So I find myself just beginning to
sense the similarities between what little I have learned about music
and what I am starting to sense while reading concepts related to
each other in Scripture. I see patterns between words, concepts,
phrases or truths that link to each other and that say almost the
very same thing but maybe in slightly different words. These are like
listening to notes that are an octave apart in music. These kinds of
notes have so much in common that we give them the very same name yet
realize that they are in fact different in that their frequencies are
direct multiples of two.
But I also find many things in what I
come across in Scripture that have obvious connections to other ideas
that are not so directly similar but are very closely related. These
remind me of the tight relationships found in fifths and third
intervals in music, relationships that make up the vast majority of
our music, at least in the Western culture I am familiar with. I
understand that Eastern cultures and maybe others have different ways
of thinking about music that can sound strange and foreign to the
Western mind. That does not make them wrong – just different.
I have noticed over the years that as I
have tried to document the basic connections between various thoughts
that I find all throughout the Bible in margin notations, some of the
verses I mark are overflowing with cross-references while others seem
to have very few. I find this revealing, for there seem to be
foundational truths found in certain passages that act almost like
hubs that anchor spokes going and coming from them to many other
things ideas. The complexity of the interactions between various
truths and concepts become so intense very quickly that it is easy to
become overwhelmed trying to make sense out of them all. How can a
person figure out all the connections in order to make sense of how
it all fits together?
Ah! It is starting to make even more
sense now. My musical mind knows intuitively that God never intended
for me to be able to appreciate the power and joy of experiencing
music only after I have mastered all the mathematical formulations
that constitute how it all is constructed. If that were the case no
one anywhere would be able to enjoy music much at all. Music is not
meant for only super-mathematicians but is designed to simply be
experienced and enjoyed whether one knows much at all about how it is
constructed or not. Being able to appreciate the logical
constructions of how it is designed might enhance one's ability to
enjoy it. On the other hand, if a person becomes too obsessed with
needing to know all the details and making sure they are just right,
that kind of perspective may even destroy their ability to enter into
the joyful bliss of just letting the music wash over them and let it
do what it is designed to do at levels of the soul that are far
beyond our capacity to figure out logically.
I am starting to see part of the
problem that God is up against with us, particularly those of us who
find ourselves obsessed with trying to figure out all the right
answers for everything. We can become so consumed with having to know
'correct doctrine' that we can turn away from the very experiences
that the doctrines were meant to bring into our lives. We can become
so distracted by insisting on not accepting anything from God unless
we can first approve it with our left-brain logic and verify it with
sufficient proof-texts that we might literally block God's work of
salvation in our lives and miss out altogether on eternal life, all
the while believing we are on our way to heaven.
Knowing how chords are constructed and
having a better appreciation of how they interact with each other in
logical progressions is very helpful at times for me when I want to
express myself or desire to reconstruct music I have heard somewhere
else. But I do not need to know any of the answers that my brain
craves to understand about what chords are being used where before I
can simply let music do its thing in my soul and experience the
benefits that far surpass my brain's ability to analyze and explain
it all. If my musical appreciation were limited to how much I can
explain the enormous complexity of how music is put together, I would
be a hopeless case. But if I simply allow the power of good music to
just have its natural effect in my life and be willing to lay aside
my penchant for knowing the answers I often desire to have about its
construction, my soul is enriched and I can experience feelings and
transformation and experiences far, far beyond anything my logical
brain could ever hope to explain.
In a similar way I find myself
challenged in how I come to God's truth. For most of my life I have
been taught that it could be dangerous to move even slightly past
what can be proven, explained, analyzed and verified with multiple
proof-texts, and even then is must be verified by the proper
authorities. Because of this approach to religion I have remained
starved for much of my life from experiencing what my heart was
designed for – intimacy of fellowship where I receive love and
passion from the Source of all love and be thus empowered to pass on
that love in blessing to those around me.
When I was about 17 or 18 I was given a
psychological test to figure out what was wrong with me. Having some
knowledge of how such tests are conducted, I was very careful in how
I answered the questions. This infuriated the amateur who had
insisted on giving me the test. But I had sensed from the beginning
that she had ulterior motives and was up to no good. When she passed
on my test results to a psychologist, he arrived at the conclusion
that what I really needed was to 'love and be loved.'
I was dumbfounded but also rather
bemused. I thought to myself I could have told him that without going
through all the testing and bother they had gone to to try to figure
me out. Of course I was starving for love. But I was not
impressed at all with what he insisted was the solution for my
problem. He said that if I would simply enroll in the college where
he worked hundreds of miles away, that I could find a nice young
woman who would provide for my needs for love and then all would be
well. Fat chance, I knew. He knew nothing about me and had no
awareness that I have always been socially inept. Trying to make
friends with girls has always been problematic for me, but he was
quite confident that this would solve all my problems.
What was the problem there? I was given
a test to analyze simplistically what mental problems I might have.
Now, I'm not against looking for problems with tests necessarily. But
far too often we fail to appreciate how little use it is to simply
analyze small parts of our lives while overlooking the major things
that have far more impact. Sin has given us tunnel vision, and the
tunnels we tend to look into are almost always the holes that don't
lead us to the light that we need to escape our darkness.
I am coming to see that a lifetime of
learning facts and doctrines and answers to questions few people are
asking has left me empty and disillusioned with religion. But God is
faithful and has slowly been turning my attention in a different
direction, the direction of paying more attention to my heart and
reining back the obsession of my head to have to know everything
first. This is the way of love. Love, like music, is something a
person must experience at a much deeper level than the logical brain
will ever be able to figure out or explain. One of the curses of
religion has been to convince us that what God wants is for us to
know all the right answers or perform in just the right way so that
He can be pleased with us and then consider us worthy to take to
heaven. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What I am discovering is what God longs
for the most is for me to allow Him access to the nebulous parts of
my being where I don't have the answers, hidden parts where I am full
of pain, fear, shame, condemnation or rage that no amount of logical
explanations or 'correct answers' can ever change. He wants me to
open my heart – a part of me I didn't even know I had for many
years – and allow Him to simply ravish me with His love that will
feel like an immersion in the intense joy of experiencing surround
sound flooding my body with rich music that overwhelms me with joy
inexpressible.
We were created for joy. Nothing short
of this will ever satisfy the deepest cravings of our soul. This need
for joy can never be satisfied with pleasures, for pleasures are most
often counterfeits of joy. It is true that joy can result in enormous
pleasure; but pleasures usually fail to satisfy our need for joy.
I have never forgotten what that
psychologist told me about my deepest need. He was right – I
desperately need to love and be loved. I still have that fundamental
need, for I am part of the human race and we were all created with
that deep craving. But while his offered solution felt like an
insult, I was made aware that I needed to pay more attention to
finding a real source of love if I was ever to feel more alive and
fulfilled and satisfied. Until I could find true love I would always
be living in malfunction and dis-ease.
I came to realize after many years of
marriage that not even a woman could ever be able to bring to my
heart what I need in this area of love. Not that I have tried to with
a number of them. But what I am coming to realize is that humans are
simply not capable of providing the deepest needs of our heart. We
are fallen and are all in desperate need of love, so none of us have
the resources or capacity to provide for this intense need in another
person. The best we can do along this line is to become more
efficient conduits of God's love so that others may become more
attracted to discover the original Source we have tapped into so they
can also feast on the good stuff for themselves.
I want to become a better conduit of
God's love. I want to have my own desperate desire for love find real
satisfaction by feasting on the unlimited supply of love designed to
ravish my heart directly from the God who created my heart. I want to
become such an example of transformation by being loved that others
cannot miss the spectacle, and in their hunger might come to ask
where I found all the good stuff. I don't want to keep God and His
love at arm's length until I understand how all the chord structures
work or all the answers to life's questions. I want to move past all
the nonsense of religion and plunge into the joy that my Daddy wants
to pour into my heart so that I can truly come alive. This is the
life I want to live. So help me God!
