Daily Readings by Wild at Heart

John the Beloved, also called John the Seer because of his authorship of the book of Revelation, was taken into the Kingdom of God by the Spirit. He visited the city of God, and there he saw the River:

The City of God is a real thing, certainly; the Tree of Life is real; the River is real.

It is critical for the ordinary mystic to understand the availability of the River in this current life:

It is an invitation as powerful as when Christ said, “If anyone opens the door, I will come in.” Jesus comes, really; the River comes too.

We also have the wonderful promise of Psalm 1, which links our humanity to the Tree of Life planted by the River in the City of God:

A human life can only be evergreen if it is drawing upon the River of Life!

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The story of Cinderella turns upon an invitation.

Up until the moment that the courier from the palace arrives at her door, Cinderella’s life seems set in stone. She will always be a washerwoman, a cellar girl. Her enemies will forever have the upper hand. She will live a life of enduring disappointments, though she will suffer them nobly. No other life seems possible. This is her fate. Then, word from the prince arrives—an invitation to a ball. It is at this point that all hell breaks loose. Her longings are awakened. Her enemies become enraged. And her life is never the same.

How gracious that it comes by invitation. As a woman, you don’t need to strive or arrange; you don’t need to make it happen. You only need to respond. Granted—Cinderella’s response took immense courage, courage that came only out of a deep desire to find the life her heart knew it was meant for. She wanted to go. But it took steadfastness to press through her fears just to get to the ball. It took courage not to abandon all hope even after she danced with the prince. (She ran back to the cellar, as we all do.) But she became the woman she was born to be, and the kingdom was never the same. It is a beautiful parable.

The same holds true for Mary, the mother of Jesus—only it’s far, far more weighty. Her life also turned upon an invitation. The angel came as the courier of the King. But still, she needed to say yes. He would not force the whole thing upon her. Her heart needed to be willing. She would need her heart through all that followed. Accepting God’s invitation required remarkable courage, and once again all hell broke loose. Her Enemy raged. She nearly lost her marriage. She and Joseph certainly lost their standing in the synagogue. Her life became an incredible story. Mary needed a steadfastness of heart to keep saying yes to God. But she became the woman she was born to be, and the Kingdom was never the same. It all started with an invitation.

The invitations of our Prince come to us in all sorts of ways. Your heart itself, as a woman, is an invitation. An invitation delivered in the most intimate and personalized way. Your Lover has written something on your heart. It is a call to find a life of Romance and to protect that love affair as your most precious treasure. A call to cultivate the beauty you hold inside, and to unveil your beauty on behalf of others. And it is a call to adventure, to become the ezer the world desperately needs you to be.

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I will go before you
 and will level the mountains;
 I will break down gates of bronze
 and cut through bars of iron.
 I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel, who summons you by name. (Isa. 45:2-3)

God's imagery of going before us lets us know that he desires us to go on a journey. This is not so frightening. Most of us are aware that the Christian life requires a pilgrimage of some sort. We know we are sojourners. What we have sometimes not given much thought to is what kind of a journey we are to be taking.

Not realizing it is a journey of the heart that is called for, we make a crucial mistake. We come to a place in our spiritual life where we hear God calling us. We know he is calling us to give up the less-wild lovers that have become so much a part of our identity, embrace our nakedness, and trust in his goodness.

As we stand at this intersection of God's calling, we look down two highways that appear to travel in very different directions. The first highway quickly takes a turn and disappears from our view. We cannot see clearly where it leads, but there are ominous clouds in the near distance. Standing still long enough to look down this road makes us aware of an anxiety inside, an anxiety that threatens to crystallize into unhealed pain and forgotten disappointment. We check our valise and find no up-to-date road map but only the torn and smudged parchment containing the scribbled anecdotes and travelers' warnings by a few who have traveled the way of the heart before us. They encourage us to follow them, but their rambling journals give no real answers to our queries on how to navigate the highway.

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Today's Daily Reading is from Stasi's new book The Ladder of Love, available now — order your copy today!

The word “servant” doesn’t translate well into our modern- day vernacular. It’s a word that feels like you’re welcome in the house— but only in certain rooms. You must stand up straight. Keep your eyes cast down. You are less than.

But that is not what it means to be a servant of Jesus or a servant of the ones He loves. We are not less than. We don’t have parameters around our access to God— indeed, we have unlimited access. We can walk in the front door, and into His throne room, boldly. What if we renamed “Servant” to “Devoted Ones”? Or how about “the Smitten”? Because that is the heart of a servant of our King— both in pouring out our lives to Him in secret and in pouring them out visibly on behalf of others. It is the heart of Jesus.

“Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning, like servants waiting for their master to return from a wedding banquet, so that when he comes and knocks they can immediately open the door for him. It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes. Truly I tell you, he will dress himself to serve, will have them recline at the table and will come and wait on them” (Luke 12:35–37).

In a stunning twist of the story, Jesus says He longs to serve us. There must be a dignity here we have lost, a beauty worth recovering.

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We must open our hearts to all the other ways God is bringing beauty into our lives. The beauty of a flower garden or moonlight on water, the beauty of music or a written word. Our souls crave Beauty, and if we do not find it we will be famished. We must take in Beauty, often, or we will be taken out by beauty.

Learning to be loved, and learning to love, learning to be romanced, and learning to romance — that is what this stage is all about. Not duty. Not merely discipline. But an awakening of our hearts to the Beauty and Love of God, and at the same time (we cannot wait until some later time), we offer our hearts as well — to God, to the women in our lives, to our sons and daughters, to others. This is a love story, after all. As William Blake said, “And we are put on earth a little space / To learn to bear the beams of love.” Or, in Paul’s words, “Be imitators of God ... and live a life of love” (Eph. 5:1–2 NIV). He is a great Romancer.

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Every great story involves a quest. In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins ran from the door at a quarter till eleven without even so much as a pocket handkerchief and launched on an adventure that would change his life forever. Alice stepped through the looking glass into Wonderland; Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter stumbled through the wardrobe into Narnia. Abraham left his country, his people, and his father's household to follow the most outlandish sort of promise from a God he'd only just met, and he never came back. Jacob and his sons went to Egypt for some groceries and four hundred years later the Israel nation pulled up stakes and headed for home. Peter, Andrew, James, and John all turned on a dime one day to follow the Master, their fishing nets heaped in wet piles behind them. The Sacred Romance involves for every soul a journey of heroic proportions. And while it may require for some a change of geography, for every soul it means a journey of the heart.

The choice before us now is to journey or to homestead, to live like Abraham, the friend of God, or like Robinson Crusoe, the lost soul cobbling together some sort of existence with whatever he can salvage from the wreckage of the world. Crusoe was no pilgrim; he was a survivor, hunkered down for the duration. He lived in a very, very small world where he was the lead character and all else found its focus in him. Of course, to be fair, Crusoe was stranded on an island with little hope of rescue. We have been rescued, but still the choice is ours to stay in our small stories, clutching our household gods and false lovers, or to run in search of life.

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Giving up has always been a struggle for frail humanity. But when Jesus urges us to ask for strength to escape, he has something particular in mind, something he sees coming: “At that time many will turn away from the faith” (Matthew 24:10).

Saint Paul was deeply troubled by this as he wrote his friends living in Thessalonica: “Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day [the day Christ returns] will not come unless the falling away comes first” (2 Thessalonians 2:3 NKJV). Prior to the climax of this story, and the wonderful return of Jesus to make everything new, there will be some sort of global Falling Away. The Greek word here is apostasia, and that is why some translations put it this way: “No one is to deceive you in any way! For it will not come unless the apostasy comes first” (2 Thessalonians 2:3 NASB).

But the word apostasy conjures up more zombie apocalypse imagery, and that’s not helpful in our effort to understand our situation. I don’t think we’re going to see millions of people tattooing “I hate God; I love Satan” on their chests, or marches in every major city blaspheming Jesus Christ. Satan is much cleverer than all that. I believe what we will see — what we see happening now — is simply people giving up on God in large numbers. Which is why I think the New Life Version has it right: “For the Lord will not come again until many people turn away from God” (2 Thessalonians 2:3).

I believe we may be witnessing the Great Falling Away.

Let me be quick to say that there isn’t a simple explanation nor simplistic solution. Some people are fed up with religion. But much of the turning from God is born out of heartache and disappointment — God did not seem to help. He did not seem to hear. These are the deepest hurts of the human heart. We will explore what to do with those hurts as we go along, but let me say here that giving up your faith is like finding yourself in a desert, your weary legs throbbing with pain. You can’t find your way out by cutting your legs off. God can handle your anger, disappointment, even bitterness. But walking away from Jesus is forsaking your only hope out of the heartache.

I bring this up because the enemy is wickedly skilled at pouncing on our vulnerabilities. He is using these trying times to cloud our hearts with unbelief. If in fact the Falling Away is sweeping the earth, we want to have advance warning. It gets in the air like poison, and we don’t want to slowly succumb to it ourselves. It gains a social momentum, and since we are social creatures, we can get swept up in it without a conscious decision on our part.

But this is our moment, and Jesus offers us strength, so let us seize it now with both hands while we still can.

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Today's Daily Reading is from Stasi's new book The Ladder of Love, available now — order your copy today!

Weaned means “satisfied.” It means to have had enough. It means having had hunger assuaged not just temporarily but abundantly. They are full! A weaned child is at rest, knowing that more is always available. We can have that experience. We are meant to know that.

In Ephesians 1:3, Paul writes, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (esv). Every spiritual blessing, not some spiritual blessings. It doesn’t say He’s blessed us with a couple of things that will help us as we sojourn Home. It says He’s blessed us with every single one. What are they?

Paul goes on to outline “every spiritual blessing.” First, we have God’s gift of being chosen by Him to be His particular treasure. We have “adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ” (v. 5). Then Paul speaks of the “glorious grace” that God has “poured out on us who belong to his dear Son. He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins. He has showered his kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding” (vv. 6–8 nlt).

Our heavenly Father is rich in grace, kindness, forgiveness, freedom, wisdom and understanding, and every fruit of the Spirit, and He makes us rich in the same, in Jesus. For this reason Paul could say, “And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19). All you need.

Remember that 1 John 3:1 encourages us to “see what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” His love isn’t stingy. He doesn’t parcel it out depending upon His mood or current state. His love is abundant. His love is lavish. Always. And it always has been.

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Your sin has been dealt with. Your Father has removed it from you "as far as the east is from the west" (Ps. 103:12). Your sins have been washed away (1 Cor. 6:11). When God looks at you he does not see your sin. He has not one condemning thought toward you (Rom. 8:1). But that's not all. You have a new heart. That's the promise of the new covenant: "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws" (Ezek. 36:26 -27). There's a reason that it's called good news.

Too many Christians today are living back in the old covenant. They've had Jeremiah 17:9 drilled into them and they walk around believing my heart is deceitfully wicked. Not anymore it's not. Read the rest of the book. In Jeremiah 31:33, God announces the cure for all that: "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people." I will give you a new heart. That's why Paul says in Romans 2:29, "No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit." Sin is not the deepest thing about you. You have a new heart. Did you hear me? Your heart is good.

What God sees when he sees you is the real you, the true you, the man he had in mind when he made you.

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The Ephesians passage warns about spiritual strongholds created in our lives when we let “the sun go down” on something. Note that in this case that something isn’t necessarily sin. Paul says, “in your anger do not sin,” so anger does not equal sin. Anger can be a very appropriate reaction to life’s injustices. Nonetheless, failure to deal with that anger (letting the sun go down on it) clearly gives our enemy an opportunity to create footholds or places of bondage in our lives. (By the way, this is a letter written to Christians; it is therefore quite clear that Christians can have demonic strongholds in their lives.) If you let the sun go down on these unresolved issues in your life — the emotional issues, wounds, pain, and the sin that goes with them — you are going to create a mess for yourself down the road. And so a genuine pursuit of holiness requires going back into those places to deal with them now.

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