Sequel to The Fire of Delayed Answers, this book contains devotional meditations upon the most glorious theme of all Scripture - the love of God. This book explores how God is igniting His Bride in this hour with His fiery love, awakening us to blazing passion for our Beloved Lord Jesus.
Emerging from the crucible of fiery dealings of God is a Bride who has been purified of all other affections but one - her desire for her Beloved, the Lord Jesus. Look into this furnace of God's love at your own risk. It is a fire that consumes all but love.
Take the time to come to the passion that blazes on the cross; let that love purge you of every defiling desire. Above all, listen as the Lord Jesus draws you into an intensity of love relationship that outshines the brightest sunrise. He intends to capture and possess every part of your being by revealing to you the fire of His love.
Pages: 192
Retail: $12.00
ISBN: 0-9621185-4-0
Here is the first chapter from The Fire Of God's Love, as a sample chapter for you to enjoy:
Chapter One - God’s Fiery Love
The most sublime theme in all of Scripture is the love of God. There is nothing higher or nobler toward which we can direct our meditation. God’s love is altogether wonderful, beyond our complete comprehension, and entirely inexhaustible in its scope and intensity.
To know and experience the love of Christ is the happy and eternal pursuit of all God’s saints. It is an ocean that beckons our exploration, a massive sun that blazes like the face of God Himself. Its gravitational force derives from its sheer immensity, pulling the awe-struck believer into the heart of its blazing inferno.
River Of Love
Love is the thing that moves and mobilizes God. It is the energy source which empowers all of His activity toward us. Should you tap into God’s divine power source, you will discover that it is a rush-flow of electric love that will drive and carry you along as well.
There is a river that flows from the throne of God; the Bible calls it “the river of life.” But I am suggesting that its current is “love.” The outflow of God’s life is propelled toward us by His love.
I do not envision this river coming to us as a serpentine, meandering, lazy river that barely ambles along as it shuffles toward mankind. No, it is a swift-flowing, sweep-you-off-your-feet kind of torrential current. Like the churning waters of a flood-stage river, the love of God is unstoppable. It is violent, overwhelming, ruinous--it is destructive.
“Destructive?” someone might ask. “How is God’s love destructive?” To be straightforward, it was the love of God that took Jesus to His death. It is this love which has inextricably captured the hearts of the martyrs over the centuries. When the love of God pulls you into its vortex, it will very possibly lead you to your death, too.
Ah, blessed death! which produces everlasting life.
Swept Away
Paul tells us that he was “compelled” by this love. “For the love of Christ compels us,” he writes in Second Corinthians 5:14. This New Testament word “compel” means literally “to hold together” or “to grip tightly.”
It is the word that is used at Jesus’ arrest to describe the manner in which they “held” Him (Luke 22:63). So in using this word “compels,” Paul is basically saying, “I got arrested, bound, and incarcerated by this love.”
I can hear Paul testifying, “I decided to make the love of God my singular pursuit. But when I found it, His love grabbed hold of me, swept me off my feet, caught me up in its vice-grip, and now my life is completely out of my control. I am being propelled forward by a force greater than my ability to resist. I have no choice; this love is squeezing the very life out of me.”
Paul is saying, “I am in a headlock. I have been captured--I am a slave to a love that is beyond my imagination. The love of God has taken hold of me, and I am no longer my own.”
Be warned: step out into the river of God’s love, and your life will careen out of control too. If you surrender yourself to the current of God’s love, you too will lose all control to a love that may take you, as it did Peter, a way in which you don’t want to go (see John 21:18).
The Unity Within The Godhead
We understand from the Scriptures that the Godhead is comprised of three distinct Persons--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--who abide in such incredible unity of heart and purpose and understanding that they are said to be One. Their oneness is so complete that we do not have three Gods, but one God. This is the mystery of the Trinity.
What force would be so great that it would take three eternally self-existent Persons and meld them together into such a cohesive unity that they call themselves One?
The fusion of three distinct personalities into one Godhead would require a force greater than the gravity of the largest stars. It would require a gravity greater than that of what astronomers call a “black hole,” the gravity of which is thought to be so powerful that even light rays are not able to escape it, and thus it appears as a formless hole in the expanses of space.
What strength of gravity would have such an inward pull that it would not even allow light to escape its clutches? And yet the even more profound question is, what sort of gravity would fuse the three Persons of the Godhead into One?
This force that unites the Godhead--greater than the gravitational pull of the most powerfully imploding stars--is none other than love. Love is the thing that binds the Trinity together.
Jesus pointed to this love that exists within the Godhead when He said, “I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me” (John 17:23).
Imagine it: the Father’s heart is drawn toward you in the same intensity of passion with which He loves the Son! It is an immeasurably awesome gravity that has pulled the Son into the heart of the Father, the Spirit unto the Son, and the Father unto the Spirit. This love that joins the Trinity together is beyond all human comprehension. It is eternal in its intensity, its longevity, and its dimensions.
And here’s the incredible part. This immeasurable force, this flaming love, reserved in its exclusivity throughout eternity to just three Persons, has now chosen to reach out and pull in a fourth--you!
Even as Nebuchadnezzar looked into a flaming furnace centuries ago and saw the form of a fourth person in the fire (Daniel 3:25), so too there is a flaming furnace of eternal love into which the angels now look, and they see the form of a fourth! There is a dimension of love that for all eternity had been reserved to just three, and now the cherubim and living creatures gaze with rapt wonder as they behold the form of a fourth in that eternal furnace of divine love. And this fourth has to them the form and appearance of the Bride of Christ.
SECTION ONE: FURNACE OF LOVE
1. God’s Fiery Love
Song: “Face To Face”
SECTION TWO: THE CROSS
2. Three Dimensions Of God’s Love
3. The Cross: Invitation To Love
4. Embracing Death
5. Sharing In His Sufferings
SECTION THREE: MOTIVATIONS OF THE HEART
6. Purifed Heart Motivations
7. I Want To Be With Him
8. I Want To Know Him
9. I Want To Please Him
10. I Want His Honor
SECTION FOUR: FRIENDSHIP WITH GOD
11. Three Stages Of Consecration
12. Little Children, Young Men, Fathers
13. Partnership With God
14. A Servant, Or A Friend?
15. Obedience To His Purposes
16. Becoming His Friend
17. The Bridegroom’s Friend
18. Friendship With God: The Pain And The Glory
SECTION FIVE: THE SONG OF SOLOMON
19. Beginning Fervency
20. Her Spiritual Journey Begins
21. She Embraces His Disciplines
22. His Affirmation
23. Fully Mature Love
SECTION SIX: THE GREATEST IS LOVE
24. God’s Jealous Love
25. The Love Hermeneutic
26. Perfected In Love
27. A Simple Prayer
28. The Ultimate Pinnacle
Song: “From Your Grace Flows”