Be Open, Walk Slowly, Bow Often

Receptivity is a very important part of spiritual growth. It’s especially important if, like me, you grew up in a church that emphasized knowing about God over the direct experience of God. Several years ago, I felt prompted to write a post on Facebook about my experience with the traditional evangelical path to discipleship. In that post I said that this traditional path, with its emphasis on Bible knowledge, sound doctrine and apologetics, is a path that often leads to familiarity with God but not intimacy. That describes my life experience and I’ve observed similar results in others as well. Here’s the thing. I contend that any really healthy relationship requires both — head and heart, knowledge and experience, familiarity and intimacy. My heart’s desire is to get beyond familiarity and discover true intimacy with God.

Looking back on my life, I find it remarkable how easily I accepted ideas about God as substitutes for the direct experience of God. It’s especially puzzling because I had what I thought was a wealth of experience. I had an angelic encounter at age fifteen, another at age twenty-three. I had experienced the presence of God, heard the voice of God on a handful of occasions. But I was filtering these isolated events through my theological disposition. See, I had an idea about God that God only did stuff like that if He had some pronouncement to make, some major course correction or specific thing He wanted done. Having received His pronouncement, like Mary with the angel Gabriel, I came to never expect anything like that again unless, of course, God had further pronouncements. I was receptive to God’s interventions in my life, but I had no room for the ever-presence of God, for the love of God expressed in real time, for daily conversation with God, let alone companionship. I retreated into my ideas about God, content with familiarity. I had made His acquaintance and that, I thought, was as far as it goes.

It’s weird, when I think about it. I had examples of something more all around me. I had the living witness of my maternal grandmother who continually demonstrated unconditional love while living with a life-long alcoholic. This woman exuded, toward the end of her life, an other-worldly gentleness, an abiding peace and sense of contentment that I’ve rarely seen since and you can only get, I know now, from a long time spent with God. When I was a young pastor, struggling through failure, disillusionment, bitterness and frustration, when I was so depressed I was chronically ill, God, in his mercy, gave me a series of dreams. There were five dreams in total, each played out frame by frame over four or five nights in a row. The exact same dream five nights in a row, five separate dreams over the course of a single year. In each of the dreams, there was a baby in distress — abandoned, drowned, dismembered and under attack. In each of the dreams, I was the hero. I know what you’re thinking, “In your dreams…” but that’s the way it played out. In the dream, the baby was rescued, saved, healed, restored to life, protected from the evil one. It was all very encouraging at a time when I need encouragement but somewhat of a mystery nonetheless. What did it all mean?

I ran down a number of paths, over the years, trying to figure it out. One Sunday, I shared how God can speak through supernatural means and, in the process, I shared my “baby” dreams with my church while mentioning that I didn’t fully understand them. “Who was this baby that I was meant to save?” I said. A few folks at the church offered some helpful suggestions but nothing rang true. Then, one day, I got an email from one of the men in the church who said, “As you shared your story about your dreams, I wondered if the baby might be you.”

Immediately, it all came clear to me. I hadn’t wanted to consider the possibility that I was the broken one, the dead one, the detached one. In my dreams, I was always helping and healing and saving and rescuing when all the while, I was the one who needed to be rescued. I was the one who needed to be healed. I was the one who needed restoration. The irony was that I was receptive to the idea of God speaking in dreams but I wasn’t open to the idea that the person who needed help in those dreams was me. Receptivity, a willingness to be open, is a very important part of spiritual growth. How receptive are you?

Enemies of Receptivity

Over the years, I’ve identified fear as one of the enemies of receptivity. To experience God’s perfect love, you have to ask God for the power to overcome a fear-based life, you have to ask him to drive out fear, as John wrote, with the application of his perfect love. Fear and love are antithetical. Fear is a major hurdle keeping us from marrying experience to understanding, from adding a regular experience of God to what we know about him. Are you afraid to let God love you?

A second enemy of receptivity is pride. Pride keeps the followers of Jesus from experiencing God’s perfect love. Some people don’t think they need to feel loved by God, that others might need that, but not them. Others think they know everything there is to know about God’s love. “This is so shallow,” they might say at a small group. “I already know all of this. It’s elementary.” Pride. Pride kills receptivity. By the way, Ephesians 3:17-18 takes direct aim at spiritual pride. You think you know everything there is to know about the love of God, you don’t, Paul says. It’s wider than you think, longer than you think, higher than you think, and deeper than you think! “I’m praying for you,” Paul says, “that God would give you the power to get your hands around it.”

A third enemy of receptivity is unbelief. As you think about the unimaginably extravagant love God has for you, you may realize that you ‘know’ this, but at a deeper level, you don’t fully believe it. If that’s the case, you might want to repeat the prayer, “I believe, help me in my unbelief.” That’s a prayer Jesus heard and answered. Look. I get it. The love of God is a one-of-a-kind, nothing-can-separate-you-from-it love. We can hardly perceive it, get our hands around it, let alone fully embrace it, so give yourself time and grace as your ability to hold on to God’s love for you grows.

A fourth enemy of receptivity is trying too hard. Some of us feel like we’ve got to make something happen to jump start our experience of God’s love when all that’s required is that you relax, rest in his love for you and let him carry you wherever he wants you to go.

A fifth enemy of receptivity is resistance.* Whenever you become aware of resistance, whenever you find yourself pulling back or withdrawing, as you’re learning to rest in God’s love, you need to respond to it like a warning light on a dashboard and ask God to help you discover the source. How receptive are you?

*The five points listed here were gleaned from Journey with Jesus by Larry Warner.