Speaking to Hearts

I have been pondering the prayer of  Teresa of Avila, hundreds of years ago,.... she prayed that if she would not be able to speak to people in such a way as to cause them to become "mad" for God, (that is to be set on fire for God), then she asked that He would not let her speak at all.

I am relating this to what our Lord said about coming to cast fire into the earth and how greatly He desired that it would be enkindled.

Lord, keep this concept in all of our hearts. 

Hidden Life

“Those whose hearts are locked up with Jesus walk this earth in the present age as princes in disguise. They move around in the temporal duties of life like private detectives in a distant and unfriendly nation. They are breathing prayers, and thinking thoughts, and nursing hot fires of love, and ruminating on vast and amazing events that stretch over coming times and distant worlds. They are silently loading themselves up with a divine dynamite, that Daniel and Jesus both tell us will sone day grind the kingdoms of this present world to powder. Their joys are hidden, for it is written ‘that a stranger doth not enter meddle with it’. And their sorrows, also, are cloistered in the ear and bosom of God, for they know they need not look to the people of the world, and not even to the people of the church, for heart-felt sympathy; and so, like venturesome pioneers, they leave the crowded walks of life and traverse the great, solitary mountains, and take up claims on new and unexplored territory, and hold communion with the unseen God, and are more at home amid the great snowy mountain peaks of the divine perfection, then with the crowds that live only for the flesh and time.
The saints are called in Scripture ‘the hidden ones’. Their life is doubly hidden, in the Son and in the Father. God says to them, ‘call unto me, and I will show you great and hidden things’. Their life is constantly fed by secret prayer…..... God is working, as it were, by stealth, in this present age, and moves softly amid the affairs of life, as if shod with wool.”
… George D. Watson, ‘The Heavenly Life’.

Our Focus

I was thinking about the verse in the Song of Solomon - "Draw me, we will run after Thee." I am stressing the "me" and then the "we". If we maintain our focus and single eye on the Lord and nothing else, (beholding Him as in 2 Cor. 3), then others will also be drawn to seek Him. This reminds me too. of what the Lord tells us in John, that believing on Him is our true work.
And St. Seraphim of Sarov says that if we abide in His peace, then many others will come to salvation through our peace.

The Mass Media

I have a strong sense that the mass media/popculture idolatry is coming to its fulness and a point of no return.
We need to find that place in the wilderness where we can flee from it. I am not speaking of a literal wilderness, I am certainly too old to live off of the land, but the true meaning of what that wilderness is in our inner life and our spiritual reality. I am speaking of the wilderness of that hiding place and inner chamber such as Isaiah 26:20 or Ps. 91 or Rev. 12. The place where we will be protected from all this deception and intrusion into our minds.
I pray we will all be able to come to a deeper insight and pursuit of that place apart from all the madness going on these days.

Inner Life, a quote from Tozer

"A German philosopher many years ago said something to the effect that the more a man has in his own heart, the less he will require from the outside; excessive need for support from without is proof of the bankruptcy of the inner man.

If this is true (and I believe it is) then the present inordinate attachment to every form of entertainment is evidence that the inner life of modern man is in serious decline. The average man has no central core of moral assurance, no spring within his own breast, no inner strength to place him above the need for repeated psychological shots to give him the courage to go on living. He has become a parasite on the world, drawing his life from his environment, unable to live a day apart from the stimulation which society affords him."

.....from "The Root of the Righteous" by A.W. Tozer, published in 1955.

God Has Spoken

A Prayer of T. Austin-Sparks~~~
Lord, Thou who readest all hearts, how reticent we are to add words.
Thou hast spoken, and Thou hast spoken more than we can carry out in a lifetime.
Why Lord?
And so our need is very real,--great, --a matter now of capacity, God given;
to receive, to be able to receive.
O Lord, help us at this time in this very real need,
to speak, to hear, to further profit.
Around us there is help, O Lord, around us Thy help at this time.
For Thy Name's Sake, Amen.
1966.

A Help in Prayer

My heart desperately wants to go to the beach. I have not been in over 6 years. It is the only place on earth I really want to be. I would probably be the same way about the desert, (I have never actually been to one, but the ocean has the same effect on me). Being a desert pilgrim is something that is an inward reality for me, though I have never had the opporunity to experience a natural desert.

The ocean speaks to me of the vastness of our Lord, and also His silence, and the silence we enter into in deep prayer.
I set this old beat up watercolor I did many years ago in the window opposite where I sit in the bed to pray. I noticed the light was coming through it and keeps changing as the day goes on. This makes the painting somehow "alive". Anyway, it has given me a great uplift. So, I am sharing this photo. I wish you could see how the light moves through the painting.