My name is Mike Bickle, I am the Director of The International House Of Prayer in Kansas City. What we do at The International House Of Prayer is that we have 24-hour worship and prayer. Of course, a lot of you in the GOD TV family have joined us by our webstream, bringing live worship and prayer right to your home, right to your dorm room. We love it and we say, “Thank you,” to our GOD TV family again for helping us to host that around the world.
I wrote a book some years ago called Passion For Jesus. So, it is natural for people to ask, “How do you get passion for Jesus? You wrote a book on it, you have to at least know a little bit about it.” I say, “Well, I think one of the real keys for growing in passion for Jesus – it might surprise you – it is to understand His passion for you.” Passion for Jesus starts by understanding how He feels about us. When I understood that God didn’t just want me to serve Him and dutifully obey Him, but He wanted to relate to me that God delighted in the relationship with me.
This was a bizarre idea in my early days when I was told by others, “God actually delights in relating to you!” There is a good number of Bible verses on that. One that I think of right now is Isaiah 62:4. The Lord names us ‘Hephzibah’, ‘I delight in you.’ I go, “Well, Lord, how could you delight in weak, in broken people like us?” In the grace of God, we are strong, but in our natural humanity, we are weak and broken. It is because of the magnitude of His mercy and the tenderness of His heart.
He loves me – not because I am so amazing – because He is so amazing. He says, “This is what I am like.” The word of God says, “God is love.” That’s an amazing statement. God has infinite, self-replenishing love and tenderness towards His people. He is self-motivated within Himself. I don’t motivate Him to love me. He is motivated because of who He is. When I see that in my weakness and brokenness, I say, “Is this true?” It gives me the courage to run to Him, instead of running from, when I encounter my weakness – which I do all the time.
The idea that I can be weak and broken, I declare, I confess my sin, I am honest with God about it. I resist it. I come and I say, “Lord, here I am. My track record isn’t that great, but your track record is, and what your Son did on the cross is. I come in the confidence that you delight in me. You delight in showing mercy.” It says in Micah 7:18 that He delights to show mercy to us. When I begin to discover that and you discover that as we do this, we run to Him with confidence, even in our weakness.
Lord, I ask you for the Spirit of revelation of what your heart is like, how you think, and how you feel when you look at us, so that we would look at ourselves very differently and run with confidence to you. In Jesus’ name. Amen.