John 14:21,23 NKJV – He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.” [23] Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him.
The commandments of Jesus are (1 John 3:23):
- that we love others and
- that we believe on his name.
This is the lifestyle of someone who keeps the words of Jesus in his heart. Jesus is promising that we will experience what it feels like to be home in the presence of God. Jesus promises also to manifest himself to us. Holy Spirit is a big part of this promise and how God chooses to make it possible for us to experience God making his home with us. He is how we get to experience the manifestation of the presence of God and his love as part of his family.
God is inviting you into family life with him.
John 14:16-17 NKJV – And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever- [17] the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you.
John 17:21,23 NKJV – that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. [23] I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.
Let us tarry before the Lord until we are able to place faith upon these promises. Very few people are living like they are family with God. Very few understand what it means to have God as their home. They live chasing happiness and are unable to access the fruit of the Spirit. God didn’t design us to live as if God is hard to reach. We are destined to experience what it means to be family with God. To be free of the limitations that our unbelief causes, we should choose to tarry (remain) in his presence. Tarrying helps us learn to abide. God is calling us into transformation. Transformation occurs as we are taught to think differently. He is calling us to shift away from seeing our lives through the failures of the past, and to start seeing ourselves in light of what Christ has done in us. There is so much more to who we are, and Holy Spirit will teach us who we are now. To tarry is the choice we make to allow God to start teaching us.
Luke 11:34 NKJV – The lamp of the body is the eye. Therefore, when your eye is good, your whole body also is full of light. But when your eye is bad, your body also is full of darkness.
Tarrying allows God to deal with how we see, the perspective we view our life through. You can hear the similarities to the veil described earlier. There are many things that God will change if we choose to tarry until he shifts us. This is the ask, seek, and knock that Jesus talked about. Any issue within your life that is getting in the way of freedom, any perspective that keeps you locked up, any uncertainty that prevents faith, will be answered if you choose to tarry for the answer. The old church called this “praying through”. God wants you full of light. He wants you to experience oneness with him. God wants you experience family life. He wants you to know his love until it overwhelms your ability to understand. He wants you overwhelmed with his love until you are filled completely with him. “to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Eph 3:19 NKJV)
John 14:16-21 NKJV – And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever- [17] …He dwells with you and will be in you. [19] …but you will see Me. Because I live, you will live also. [20] At that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you. [21] …And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.”
The Holy Spirit comes so that you can become one with God. It is through him that we experience all of God. Jesus asked the disciples to tarry for the Holy Spirit to come. There is so much that God pours out as we choose to wait for him to answer our request. Any change to our nature requires us to tarry because of our free will. We often ask God to help us with something that we struggle with, and then fail to see any change. The reason is that we failed to tarry before the Lord, waiting for his answer, giving him access to the deep parts of our heart. The baptism of the Spirit causes tremendous change to our nature, which is why it also requires tarrying. But every time we desire to see change to our nature, it will require tarrying.
Tarrying does more than cause change. It allows us to come to terms with the thing that has kept us bound. It also allows us to discover God’s love in real ways.
Failure in my twenties left me with a high sense of shame for nearly ten years. I felt like I had failed God. I feared that if I got too close to God, that he would tell me that he was done with me. I carried such a sense of failure.
Shortly after I turned thirty, the pastor of the church we were attending came to me and told me that God had asked him to make me the new youth pastor. I began to teach the teenagers that relationship with God was key and directed them to deeper surrender. The compromise in my own life started to make me feel like a hypocrite. I would spend time with God only long enough to get a message for the teens. I knew that my fear was irrational. Papa began to encourage me to fix this issue by telling me that if I was going to properly inspire the teens to take up my challenge, then I had to fix my relationship with God.
I decided that I would get alone with God and ask him specifically to address my fears. I gave him two hours twice a week. It didn’t take long, and God showed up and began to speak.
Holy Spirit gave me chapter and verse to look up. He sent me to the story of Peter being called as a disciple. After healing Peter’s mother-in-law, Jesus shows up the next day at the seaside near where Peter has been fishing all night. After preaching to the crowd, Jesus turns to Peter and asked to go out for a catch. Peter protested slightly because they had not caught anything all night, yet decided to give in. The number of fish that Peter caught after going back out was so much that his nets were at risk of breaking. He had to ask James and John to help him pull the nets in. Once they finally got the catch pulled in, he comes to Jesus and falls on his knees saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” – Luke 5:8.
Once I read this, I immediately asked God what he was wanting to say to me about this passage. Instead of answering me, he sent me to another passage. He told me to look us a chapter in 1Kings, again giving me chapter and verse.
In this story, Elijah has declared a famine over the nation. God had sent him to a brook and had ravens bringing him bread and meat. Once the brook dried up, God told him to go and tarry in Sidon and he would meet a widow who God had commanded to provide for him. Elijah ended up staying with the widow woman and her son in their spare bedroom. God multiplied the oil and flower while Elijah was there as long as the drought remained so that they could keep making bread.
At some point the son became sick and died, and then we have this verse. ‘So she said to Elijah, “What have I to do with you, O man of God? Have you come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to kill my son?”’ – 1 Kings 17:18. Then Elijah goes up and raises her son from the dead.
After reading this verse, I started to get emotional. I could tell that this had to be God because my memory is not good enough to come up with these stories on my own. The part that was confounding my logic was that I could clearly see that these stories were parallel. A man of God shows up and performs two miracles, and the circumstances around the second miracle cause a shame response. The same kind of shame I was feeling. Both of these people felt confronted with their failures.
I asked the Lord again, “What are you wanting to say to me?”
He responded, “You are just like Peter. You think that I will reject you for your sin. But I was chasing Peter, and I’m chasing you. And I’m not going to stop till I catch you.”
His words dissolved my fear, and I felt wanted by him in a way that I had never experienced before. I immediately melted and became a sobbing mess. I cried for so long. How could he love me this much? How could he? Yet I had his answer, and there was no denying it.
From that day, I have never again doubted that he was real. And I never again doubted that he both loved me and wanted me. This is the power of tarrying. I have made this a pattern in my life, and God had kept dissolving my different fears. Now, there is little I fear, and there is a deep steadiness and assurance that I carry. My heart stays at peace.
In fact, peace has become so normal for me that when I lose it, it becomes so jarring that I have to fix it immediately. I can’t tolerate bitterness or frustration of any kind. I just get so desperate for fix it because I’m used to living in perfect peace. I no longer wrestle with anger. I almost never get frustrated. I don’t like rejecting others at all. I love to build lasting relationships. My heart compels me to love everyone, and I long for them to experience the love of God like I have. Worship is easy and happens naturally. And my prayer life is focused on how I can honor the Lord more. This is what freedom feels like for me.
Have You Ignored Holy Spirit
Have you ignored Jesus when he promised to send you a teacher and personal tutor in the same fashion as himself? Have you ignored the Father when he promised to make his home with you through Holy Spirit? Did you ignore his promise through Jesus that he would not give you a snake or scorpion if you asked for the Holy Spirit?
Did you ignore Paul, when he challenged you in 2 Corinthians 3:18 to make Holy Spirit Lord in your life so that he can remove the veil that makes coming to God hard, and so that he can change your image to look like Jesus?
The Christian life becomes easy when you let Holy Spirit do what he was sent to do. So many Christians are struggling, but Jesus said, “My yoke is easy and my burden light.” Have you made it complicated and hard by trying to do it all yourself?
The Spirit of Holiness comes and becomes one with our spirit so that he can influence every aspect of who we now are – if we will let him influence us? He is gentle and kind. He is never pushy or demanding. He longs to make us salty salt that well influences the world around us. He wants to make us beacons of light set on a hill to illuminate the darkness.
He is a best friend. Better than every friend you have ever had. He desires to bring you into perfect wholeness and shout over you all the beautiful things in Father’s heart about you. He wants to see you live in the perfect image of Christ. Have you ignored him?
Isaiah 11:2-3 NKJV – The Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon Him, The Spirit of wisdom and understanding, The Spirit of counsel and might, The Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD. [3] His delight is in the fear of the LORD, And He shall not judge by the sight of His eyes, Nor decide by the hearing of His ears;