When you are rendered helpless, brought to a place physically and emotionally where you have no choice but to look into the face of love and surrender. You are then embraced by a love that is so gentle and so powerful, so complete that it penetrates and mingles with your spirit, and the very breath of life that is causing you to live and move.
I was in the emergency room at Chester County Hospital waiting to get the results of my cat scan. Long story short, I needed my appendix removed or it was curtains! My wife and two friends of ours were there (one being our Pastor). My Pastor was standing to my right, I was looking around my room and when I looked up at him his eyes appeared to have turned this luminous shade of green (his eyes are blue). Like the color you see when looking at an aerial photo of a tropical Island.
This love just came pouring through him. The Lord made it clear to me that it was He, Jesus, the High King over Heaven and Earth that had made His presence known. The next moment I realized that nothing mattered to me, there was nothing about my situation that bore the least bit of significance to me. There was no fear. It was the first time in my life when the absence of fear was complete.
Nothing can contain His love. It is complete; it needs no excuse or justification and is abundant beyond measure in every dimension imaginable. Jesus demanded no reaction from me. What I could or could not understand was not important. His presence said everything. I felt a deep and eternal reverence, adoration and worship toward Him that required no act of my will. My spirit just embraced Him and honored Him.
His total covering, His complete love, His absolute unfathomable power was in me, through me, over me and surrounding me. Jesus made sure that I understood that he was in control of all the events of my life. Nothing, not the smallest detail escaped His gaze.
For the first time since I received Jesus as savior (35 years ago) He made himself tangible to me in away I had never before experienced. I was helpless and in deep need and He came and ministered to me. Jesus revealed how completely dependant I am on Him, how nothing that could accomplish His will in my life could work together unless He caused it to.
His Love is enormous, it is all consuming. The struggles I face in my walk with Him, faith or the lack of it, the fears and anxieties that plague my spirit from time to time were all consumed in His love. They all just evaporated.
The greatest struggle we face everyday is surrendering to the love of Jesus and our greatest victories are won in the time of our deepest need. When the strength to carry the fight has dried up and blown away and the only words we have left in the arsenal of our will are the words “Jesus help me” and we surrender to His intervention, and let Him decide what the victory Looks like. This is where the battle is won!
Jesus wanted to do more than just a physical healing in me that day. He wanted to give me something deeper. Something above and beyond all I could ask or think. This was not “a taste of his presence”, it was Jesus He came and pulled back the Vail of my darkened understanding revealing what His righteousness is really like, how real His righteousness is in me and how much He loved me. Jesus showed me where my life is hidden.
