Yesterday I wrote about visualising the presence of Jesus as you pursue hearing the voice of God and communing with Him. I wrote about seeking to abandon all of our thoughts and submitting our will entirely to God. When we do so the Lord gives us His mind about how to live out our lives.
While I have been thinking of emptying ourselves so that Jesus can live and breathe within us, my dear friend *, the one who suffered horrendously under a brutal regime, sent me another poem in which he referred to the “raw love” of Jesus. It’s a concept that will help you to give up on yourself and submit to Jesus.
When he wrote in this poem about the rawness of Jesus’ love, I initially baulked. From my safe western world, I never see emotions made raw but here is someone who has known raw fear, raw terror, raw horror and who can recognise the raw love in Jesus.
What exactly does “raw love” mean? I would say it means a love that is free of pretension, falseness and dishonesty. It is a love that is real and transparent. In pondering that love I realise that it demands I abandon my own thinking and my own pursuits after false gods and to submit my entire self to His lordship. I need to make myself raw and vulnerable to Him, just like He did for me.
I find that concept so challenging. Every person in the world is seeking God but they are looking in all the wrong places and making God out to be some temporal pursuit or object.
I heard that pretty much said in the recent movie, “Jesus Revolution” by the lead character, a hippie named Lonnie: “There is an entire generation right now searching for God. I know we must seem a little strange. But if you look a little deeper, if you look with love, you’ll see a bunch of kids that are searching for all the right things, just in all the wrong places.”
Jesus chose to be raw with us. He voluntarily came to the earth as a humble baby in a poor household and died carrying all of our sins with Him to the cross. He just asks us to be the same with Him.
Here is my lovely deep-thinking friend’s poem:
Why I remember Him
As I wander through the sylvan glade,
And gaze upon the floral display,
My thoughts turn to a figure betrayed,
Whose sacrifice would all sin repay.
For in the beauty of this verdant maze,
I see the echoes of a life divine,
And in the gentle rustling of the leaves,
I hear the whisper of a love benign.
The trees, like stoic sentinels tall,
Their branches reaching up to touch the sky,
And in their shadowed boughs, I recall,
The cross upon which Jesus chose to die.
The flowers, with their petals soft and bright,
Seem like a symbol of His boundless grace,
And in their fragrant scent, I take delight,
As I recall the radiance of His face.
Thus, in this bower of green and gold,
My heart is filled with sorrow and awe,
For in the beauty of this world, untold,
I see the wonder of a love so raw.
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*He wants to remain anonymous as he is sensitive about a number of issues including that he is writing in his 3rd fluent language and feels he is inadequately expressing himself. Judge for yourself!
All quotations are from the NLT.
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