If I love someone, I want them to have their heart's desires. What does God desire?
Have you ever heard of WIIFM? It stands for “What’s in it for me?“ It’s a staple of marketing thought because any product that someone offers has to answer that question for customers- what’s in it for them? When you think about it, it goes back to the basic heart question: “What do you really want? What is the desire of your heart?” Remember, there’s nothing wrong with desire, it’s something that God built into us. Our problem is that we go looking to have our desires met outside of God and His provision.
God's Heart
But remember that God Himself has a heart - mind, will, emotions. God Himself has desires. There are things that He wants a lot, to the point that He sacrifice His Son to get it!
Ephesians 1:18 refers to the saints as "God’s inheritance." He wants us! We are God’s inheritance! So what’s in it for God? What does God get when He gets us?
Children for the Father
In John 17:23 Jesus says this to the Father about us: “You sent Me and have loved them just as You have loved Me.” Now think about that just a minute, let that sink in. How does the Father love the Son? Completely, passionately, deeply, perfectly. This is God’s paternal/fatherly love. God wanted to expand that love to include us - more children that He could love like he loves His eternal Son. This is why He tells us to relate to Him as our Father in Heaven, and tells us we have received adoption as sons. If we want to do our part in giving God what He wants out of our relationship, then we must be devoted to obedience, trusting that our Father loves us and is working things in our lives to mature us to be like Jesus.
A Bride for the Son
The Church corporately is known as the Bride of Christ, showing us God’s husbandly love. Now this is crazy: not only does God want to care for us as a Father, He wants to raise us to a place where we will rule the universe with Him in some capacity in eternity. Our responsibility in giving God what He desires here is to be devoted to our first love for Jesus Christ with no competition for our affection. “First” is not a time word here as in “we love Him because He first loved us.” Here it’s a priority word, as in “seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.” He is the center of everything. In an earlier post, I said that your life is not supposed to be like a series of boxes with Jesus in a prominent box. Your life is supposed to be a circle with Jesus at the center, and everything radiating out from your relationship with Him. He colors everything that your life touches.
Temple for the Holy Spirit
Ephesians 2:20-23 says about the whole capitol C Church that we have been
”...built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.”
Instead of living in a stone temple, He wants to inhabit a Temple made of all of us together, with each of us growing more and more like Jesus. God’s goal for us here is unity (not uniformity-that’s a different thing that is so NOT like God). Here’s what Paul says he’s after:
“...the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ;”
That’s Ephesians 4:12-13. Our part in making sure God gets what He wants is to be devoted to edification, which means building up. We’re responsible for helping each other grow. That’s why I’ve written this book! These are things that God has been teaching me from His Word, and I’m responsible for passing it along to anyone else with ears to hear!
So: Devoted to obedience,
Devoted to First Love, and
Devoted to Edification.
The Seriousness of Devotion
I don’t use the word “devoted” lightly.
Let me go all Greek on you here. The word “devoted” in Greek is proskarteréō and it means "to continue to do something with intense effort, despite difficulty, to be given over wholly to something.”
So to be devoted to obedience, first love, and edification will require commitment and effort. Is it worth the effort? It is if you love someone fiercely. And we love Him fiercely because He first loved us.
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