God...HEEL!!!

Sounds a bit crazy, doesn't it? None of us would actually yell that out loud to God. Truth is, most of our lives are lived this way. We want God to quietly walk by our side and behave. We don't want him running too fast ahead of us. We don't want him leading us. We don't want him taking us down the street to that neighbors house we don't like. So maybe not from our mouths, but from our hearts we yell, "God...HEEL!

Bottom line. I want God to heel because, "I don't trust him"!

If I don't trust God enough to let him off the leash, then I will never come to know and rely on his love!

And so we know the love that God has for us, and we trust that love. God is love. Those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. (1 John 4:16 NCV)

If I never know and rely on His Love, I will never trust you to love me or risk loving you. And so we come to this stalemate of selfishness. We all attempt to manipulate and bargain or coerce each other to meet each others needs. The whole process is exhausting and scary. The whole time we all just want the same thing, TO BE LOVED.

But what if we would…come to know and rely on God's love?

The world will see…GOD!

No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us. (1 John 4:12 NLT)

And Love will be unleashed.

To come to trust God's love we must first Unleash God's love. When we do, we won't be yelling HEEL, we will experience HEALING! God's desire and design is not that we would leash him up and train him to heel, but that we would come to trust his love so well that we would unleash His love to HEAL!

God is so loving and patient he will actually wait for us to invite him to set His love free in our lives.
For us to unleash the love of God to our world, we first must unleash God's love so it can heal us.
This week I posted this question on Facebook: "How do you most often think/feel God think/feels about you?" These are a few of the responses.

"If I'm honest, disappointed & brokenhearted."

"Frustrated."

"I constantly question his desire to love me. I know the correct answer is He loves me, but I cannot shake sometimes He may be disappointed in someway. Too long to share reasons, but I think He lets go of things easier than I do. I know He is proud, but my mind doesn't always let me see it."

"I think right now He is worried about me because He knows me like no one else and knows my history and how easy it is for me to run away I am really struggling to stay on His path right now."

"Is she ever going to truly get it and understand that she doesn't have to earn it...that I'm not keeping score?" Because I feel like He's mad at me often, because I feel like I screw up so often.

From a Muslim friend: "For me to say what God feels or thinks about me would be pure speculation/assumption. For He doesn't "think" or "feel" as we do. However, I do know that when I do good He is pleased and when I do bad He is displeased."

"He LOVES me!"

Many of these honest responses tell me that we don't really believe that GOD IS LOVE. Try reading 1 Cor. 13 with the word GOD in place of the word love.

"Love [GOD] is patient and [GOD] is kind. Love[GOD] is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It[GOD] does not demand its own way. It[GOD] is not irritable, and it[GOD] keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but [GOD] rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love[GOD] never gives up, [GOD] never loses faith, [GOD] is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance." (1 Corinthians 13:4-7 NLT)

What does hearing that Truth do to your heart? To your faith? To your ability to TRUST God?

If its true that GOD IS LOVE, could you let him off the leash and let His love HEAL you?

KAIROS MOMENT = Why do you have His love on a leash? Stop. Listen. Ask Jesus. If you hear something that is condemning or impatient or mean or rude or brings up a wrong from your past that's not Jesus, that's the devil.

Once Jesus tells you why. Here is your next challenge. Ask yourself, "What am I going to do about it?"