Lynne Baab

Drawing Near to God with the Heart: God’s presence through the Holy Spirit

Thursday February 23 2017

Lent this year starts next week, on 1 March. You may be interested in the Lenten devotional I wrote two years ago, using a psalm for each day of Lent. The devotional is illustrated with beautiful paintings by Dave Baab. You can download the devotional in pdf form here: Draw Near.

In the interviews for my midlife books, many people told of their new appreciation for the daily guidance of the Holy Spirit. They have grown, they tell me, in their ability to hear the nudging and prompting of the Spirit, and they have grown in their willingness to follow what they hear. They have come to realize that God knows much better than we do what needs to be done in the world. Anyone of any age who wants to draw near to God with the heart needs to do some pondering of the role of the Holy Spirit in everyday life.

On the night he was betrayed, Jesus told his disciples that the Holy Spirit “will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). After the resurrection, Jesus told the disciples to stay in Jerusalem “until you have been clothed with power from on high” by the coming of the Holy Spirit (Luke 24:49). The work of the Spirit in us, leading into truth and giving us the power to obey, helps us feel a heart awareness of God’s companionship, guidance and empowering.

For me, most of the Holy Spirit’s promptings involve people I need to contact or to pray for. “Make that call now,” I seem to hear quite often, and I will find the person at home, needing to talk or wanting to share a prayer request. Often I am right in the middle of something else when I feel nudged to act. Often it’s an interruption in my life. But time after time good fruit results from my obedience. I believe that each time I hear the voice of the Spirit and obey, I am training my soul and spirit in a kind of responsive living that can only result in good things for me and for others.

This responsiveness to the Spirit can bring about a spirit of rest and peace, as we realize more deeply that our lives are in God’s hands and that God is guiding us each moment. We don’t have to strain to obey a set of distant and stringent rules. God calls us gently to obedience as a part of a tender relationship with him. We don’t have to rush around, frantically filling our lives with meaningless possessions and thrilling experiences. There is nothing as thrilling as being in the right place at the right time to help someone, and to know that we are there because we listened to the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking into our daily lives.

We often feel we should be working extremely hard, straining to serve God and make a difference in the world. Iin contrast, this dependence on the Holy Spirit can lead us into a very different style of service and ministry. Instead of feeling like we have to dream up ways to serve God and then execute our ideas with our own energy and perseverance, we can trust that God, through his Spirit, will show us where he is working and where he wants us to be a part of what he is already doing. This view of ministry can free us from pressure to perform and enable us to rest in God as we try to serve him.

This reliance on the Holy Spirit plays a significant part in our desire to bring our hearts before God and know God deep in our souls. It is the Spirit who illuminates our hearts with God’s wisdom and values, guiding us “into all the truth” as Jesus promised (Jn. 16:13). The Spirit brings the love of God to our inner being. The Spirit guides us in our inner journey, and the Spirit calls us to intimacy and community. Without the Spirit, we cannot experience the passionate wooing of God, and we cannot know how tenderly God longs for us to bring our whole selves to him in integrity and genuineness.

This is the fifth post in a series about Drawing Near to God with the Heart. Previous posts:
Introduction: Drawing near to God with the heart         
God woos us          
A journey with the Psalms           
Praying the Psalms         

(The series continues next week with “Facing the inner darkness.” Illustration: St Clair Beach Dunedin at high tide by Dave Baab. If you’d like to receive an email when I post on this blog, sign up under “subscribe” in the right hand column. This post is excerpted from my book, A Renewed Spirituality: Finding Fresh Paths at Midlife, available in paperback here and on kindle here.)

Trust and obey for there's no other way

Saturday August 8 2015

Ten years ago my spiritual director began talking to me about trust in God. “Trust is something you need to focus on,” she said to me more than once. Several times after I described difficult situations and my conflicting emotions about them, she said, “You either trust God with this or you don’t.”

Her words about trust were like some obscure foreign language to me, maybe Sanskrit or Sioux. Sure, I’d been a Christian for several decades at that point. I’d studied the Bible and prayed in many different ways. I’d kept a Sabbath for many years and fasted many times. I’d written books on Christian spiritual practices. And I hadn’t done those things by rote. I really did desire to drawn near to God and I knew Christ was transforming me (slowly!) into his image.

But the word “trust” really didn’t resonate with me.

At that point, I was a PhD student hoping for a teaching job in a seminary. My husband and I were praying fervently for a place for me to teach, and I was doing a pretty good job of resting in God’s peace about our future. I was, in fact, trusting God for our future without using that word. (Evidently my spiritual director saw other areas where I was not trusting God very well!)

Because my spiritual director’s words about trust truly didn’t help me, challenge me or encourage me, I tuned them out. They were just confusing babble.

I wonder now if part of why I tuned them out was that I had always disliked a schmaltzy old hymn, “Trust and Obey.” The tune was sappy, and the words, which I viewed as overly simplistic, went like this: “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus than to trust and obey.”

If I were to pick a word for what God is teaching me in 2015, trust might be that word. I find it amusing that each day I feel called by Jesus to trust him for so many things, and then to do the tasks of the day laid out for me, whatever they are. And to do those tasks in a spirit of trust and joy, not in a spirit of drudgery or irritation. If my call this day is to trust and then do what I’m supposed to do, then the words “trust and obey” work pretty well to express the goal for each day. It’s pretty amusing to circle back to a word recommended to me ten years ago and to a hymn from my early adult life that I never liked.

I’m writing about this because I want to encourage you about two things:

1. Never underestimate the significance of words of encouragement or exhortation you say to friends and family members. Maybe it will take ten years for those words to make sense to the hearer. Our job is to speak the truth in love in all situations and to leave the results up to God. Sometimes we say something to someone that we think is really important, and they totally disregard our words, which is frustrating. Maybe to them it sounds like we are speaking Sanskrit or Sioux. But maybe later on the words will have a clear meaning to them.

2. Never underestimate the effect of things you learned or heard in the past. God brings ideas and thoughts back to mind. God is in the business of transforming us into the image of Jesus Christ, and God will use an astonishing variety of things to do that, including words from a spiritual director ten years ago and words from a schmaltzy hymn.

Now, back to my central calling and privilege of the day, to trust and obey God.

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