Just Jesus

God is doing something in my life right now. I don't know how to express it any more clearly than that, although I realize the general lack of clarity in that statement. I have been spending more time in Bible study, prayer, thought about God, and worship in the last month or so and I feel it. I realized just a minute ago as I was reading a book by Anne Graham Lotz that God has been doing "Jesus". Ok, this sounds weird and doesn't make any sense, but go with me. I just finished reading "Through Gates of Splendor" by Elisabeth Elliot. If you don't know the story, I don't want to take the time to summarize it thoroughly here, but basically she loses her husband along with four other missionary husbands/friends while they are attempting to reach a lost people group. She writes in her epilogue that often people want to see the death of these five men as part of a simple equation: five men killed equals multiple people saved. However, she writes, to do this is to put God into our own box and our own understanding of justice and purpose. Those men gave their lives to God and did so without reservation or bondage. As Elliot says, whether what they did was heroic or foolish, God can do what God wants with their lives and their story.

As I sat in bed reflecting on this, I felt the same thing that I have been feeling so often as I have spent time searching after God. I have felt God "doing" something. As I thought about this, as I really sat with it, I realized something quite profound and really quite telling. I so often associate my times of feeling closeness to God with a result. I feel God in my heart and feel the closeness of Him so deeply that I assume that what God is doing is a work ... an external work. Maybe it is that soon God is going to provide that amazing job or that my ministry will finally take off or that I will write the most amazing worship songs ever. And maybe these things will happen as an extension of God's grace. However, as I sat and listened to myself think and feel these things, I felt shallow. I wanted to go deeper. I asked God about these feelings. I asked God what He was doing. And this was the response I got: "Jesus". In my search for God and in His drawing near to me, God wasn't primarily blessing my finances or my ministry or my impact on my world, God was doing "Jesus". God was blessing me with the thing He knows I need more than anything else, which is the actual felt and awesomely real presence of Jesus Christ. He reminded me that whether or not my ministry flourished or failed, whether or not my family's move to Georgia would mean the beginning of something amazing and whether or not I was able to break into the use of what I perceive to be my gifts, He was doing a work and it was the best work He could possibly do. In giving me Jesus, He was giving me exactly that which I was seeking after. God's blessing that comes from obedience is simply the presence of Jesus Christ. Anything that flows out of that is icing, it's flocking on a bright green Christmas tree. It's meant to enrich, not to mask or detract from the true form. And if it does, it's time to scrape off the icing or hose down the big tree and get back to the substantial thing.
I pray that I will remember that Jesus is not only enough for me but truly all that I want. If God sees fit to allow me to express that relationship in other ways, all glory be to Him who exalts Himself through the wholeness and joy that flows out of relationship with Him!