Activate The Life-Giving Waters Of Jesus With Tears
We cannot fully comprehend God’s ways, but we can know God’s way.
First Corinthians 2:11 says, “For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them?” Romans 11:34 poses the limitation of our thoughts with a question: “Who has known the mind of the Lord?” These two verses tell us that only our spirit can fathom our thoughts, but that our spirit can only approximate the thoughts of God.
Our brain cannot reason God, but our spiritual connection through Jesus Christ can empathize with God. The difference between reasoning someone’s thinking and empathizing with someone’s thinking is that when we reason a person’s thoughts, we intellectually process how they feel in relationship to how we might feel in a similar situation. When we empathize with someone’s thinking, we think as they think with no need to liken it to anything familiar to us.
When we empathize with God, we feel as He feels. There is a synchronicity between God’s mind and our spirit that generates an ability to know God’s way without fully understanding it. Allow me to share my conversation with Jesus as we walked together, which illustrates this phenomenon:
“Do you remember when as a child you fell into the strawberry patch and your hand was pierced by the metal that was used to separate the strawberry plants from the surrounding grass?” asked Jesus.
“Yes, Lord, as an impression but not vividly like now,” I responded.
“My beloved, I collected your tears in a bottle.” Jesus waved His hand toward the streams that flowed from Him. “Your tears are within these waters you see.”
In Heaven, what we may think of as metaphorical or figurative is actually real; however, Christ’s literal words came through my impressions as God’s expressions. What I saw was not metaphorical, Jesus truly did enjoin His tears with mine in the flow of life that appeared before my eyes.
“You know me like no one else,” I said.
“I know everything, My beloved,” Jesus said, “but you see with the eyes of your own understanding, and I see you through My eyes. You thought that you cried from the pain, but you were crying out to Me.”
“The fear, Lord. You never fear…did You feel my pain?”
“My beloved, I felt your need for Me. When I walked upon the earth, I felt your pain. Here, I feel My children’s need for Me.”
“Revelation #17: Pain, loneliness, grief, and all kinds of sadness are rooted in our separation from God. God feels that separation and yearns to be together.”
At that moment I remember thinking how much Jesus missed me when I was apart from Him. I knew then that my emptiness always was a longing for God, and Him for me. We longed for each other. That is the empathy God feels for us.
God’s Ultimate Desire Is to Be Together With Us
Soon, or in the hereafter, you will understand God’s design for this world. God created our world, and then He created us. He made all of it for one important reason—fellowship. We were created in God’s image to be in koinonia relationship with God. The word koinonia in the Bible is translated in four ways:
Fellowship (twelve times)
Sharing (three times)
Participation (two times)
Contribution (two times)
Foremost, God wants to experience an intimate fellowship with His children. Second, He wants His children to share in everything God experiences in Heaven and earth. Third, He wants to participate in everything we do and think, and He wants to contribute to our life as we dedicate our life to God.
Godly empathy is total immersion, one with another. Same thoughts, same experiences, same reality, same feelings. The only difference or separation between God and His children is that God is God, and we are His children. As children, we cannot entirely fathom our Father’s ways.
Think of it this way: A parent knows tremendously more than his or her toddler. A parent knows that crossing the street in oncoming traffic is bad. But the young toddler is ignorant of what might happen. A parent knows the child and wants to be with the child, but the child doesn’t always understand the need to obey the parent in everything. A loving parent feels lonely after parting with the toddler, either for the long term or for a day, but that toddler fears being away because he/she knows that no one loves him/her more than the parent.
Are you catching my drift as to how God feels? Everything good is magnified in the extreme with God, including His infinite wisdom and power. After all, God is Love—Love flows from Jesus. But, if that child matures in the world long enough to determine that he or she wants to go it alone without God, there is not much the parent can do at that point except to discipline the child to stay away from danger. Any parent of an adolescent knows that is not an easy job, and certainly our rebellion against God produces similar feelings for God when we run away from Him.
God is like the loving parent who stays up all night thinking about his teenager’s first spin alone in the car, praying that his teen does not get hit by a demonic driver. Friend, this world is our first spin in the car—the first and only time we can drive ourselves in this world. In Heaven, we will joyfully give the controls over to God.
Mourning for the Lost
We do not need to understand God to know Him. We were created with His spiritual DNA. Some choose to run off and never look back. Mentally and spiritually, they divorce themselves from God. That saddens God. He mourns for the lost. I cannot fully express the lamentation that God feels for those who reject Him except to say that it must be like giving birth and realizing that the child is stillborn. All that promise, that life, is finally born into God’s world in Heaven only to be discovered with no life.
I have known mothers and fathers who grieved the loss of an infant. When my son lived in his mother’s womb, the obstetrician concluded from the ultrasound and blood tests that he suffered from spina bifida. In all likelihood he would be born either disabled, or stillborn. Renee and I cried out to God, “Save our child!”
God heard our earnest prayers and healed Ryan in the womb. We still possess the ultrasounds from the before and after, showing a clear gap in the spine initially, and the fully formed spine after prayer. God heals. He always heals either on earth or in Heaven. The true sadness occurs for those who die in the womb—in this world. They kept on speeding through this world without returning to God, their loving Parent. They decided to divorce themselves from the One who loved them more than anyone else.
If you want to know how God feels for you, think back on the river of life I saw in Heaven. Remember how God saved my tears in a bottle and then poured my tears—my cares, my concerns—into God’s living streams teeming with abundant life. Your tears are also saved in Heaven within the life-giving water of Jesus Christ. He has joined your tears with Christ’s atoning waters to turn your sadness into joy.
Only God can absolutely empathize with our sufferings. David recorded his own revelation of God’s empathy: “You keep track of all of my sorrows. You have collected all of my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book” (Psalm 56:8 New Living Translation).
The following three verses explain God’s river of life that contains your tears:
Revelation 22:1: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb.”
John 7:38-39: “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them. By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.”
Ezekiel 47:9 (English Standard Version): “And wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish. For this water goes there, that the waters of the sea may become fresh; so everything will live where the river goes.”
God knows your pain. No one else comes close. The good news is that Jesus pours your tears into the abundant river of life. He redeems what was lost in return for a far greater gain. When my eyes first beheld Christ’s river of life flowing from Him, I realized that God’s love spreads forth giving life to everything it touches. I felt it. You will as well.
