In our day God forming Lovers and Leaners at an accelerated pace.
Many of you have been through an extended Wilderness. It’s all been about accelerated maturity. The Lord tells us in John 15 that pruning accomplishes accelerated fruitfulness. God will sometimes sacrifice the external to develop the internal and eternal. It’s the Lame that take the plunder. Song of Solomon 8:5 tells us that the point of the wilderness is that when you come up out of that place, you will COME UP LEANING on the One, who has in the wilderness become your Beloved. In these critical times God is accelerating maturity for those whose hearts have caught a vision that “His love is better than wine,” and that He is the “fairest among ten thousand.” For those who have discovered in the wilderness that He is the love of their life, and they have come up leaning, there will be an accelerated maturity in their inner man regardless of physical age. They will have the youthful heart of the elderly saints, whose inner man lives in perpetual renewal, and who carry a heavy weight of eternal glory. Listen to Jesus’ words to Peter about the difference between youthfulness and maturity. John 21:18-19, “Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to gird yourself, and walk wherever you wished; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will gird you, and bring you where you (flesh) do not wish to go. Now this He said, signifying what kind of death he would glorify God. And when He had spoken this, He said to him, “Follow Me!” When we are young in the Lord, we are strong, and we are driven by zeal. We are full of passion and options. When we are mature we are weak, and we’ve learned to lean. The mature are compelled by love which transcends the shifting sands of zeal. The mature are girded about by SOMEONE else, for they only have one lovesick option. The compelling love of Christ drives them to Follow, ignoring the whimpering of the flesh. They stretch out their hands as a sign of one who has been marked by the madness of the Cross. The thirsting heart of Christ, revealed fully at the Cross, and radically realized in the Wilderness, has rendered them helpless (helplessly in love) and fully surrendered. In the wilderness they have surely died to all other options than Jesus. This is the kind of death that glorifies God.
The children of the Wilderness are coming up out of the wilderness, but no longer children, but as a powerful burning army empowered with supernatural weapons, because of their leaning, and compelled by love to follow Him anywhere, and to pay any price love may require.
In these days, if you are in the Wilderness, don’t pray for God to deliver you from that place; instead, pray that God will bring you up leaning on the one you have deeply fallen in love with.
In these days, many of you WILL come up out of your wilderness having been formed by God in that place to be Lovers and Leaners.
