The Greatest Invitation

“We stand before a real Person who extends to us this invitation of the highest order. It is a call to fervency that flows from the fullness of love.  Just as His eyes pierced through the crowds of old, Jesus summons each single heart out of its lethargy into wholehearted givenness to God.  He beckons us to the only foreseeable future, the only plausible outlook, if we desire to live in the fullness of His highest for us.  He calls us to give Him everything.”  Dana Candler

Everyone loves an invitation.  A young woman loves when her boyfriend invites her to spend the rest of her life with him.  Children love when their friend invites them to a birthday party.  At Christmas everyone loves to be invited to a Christmas meal or gathering. 

The truth is that a vast number of people in the world feel unloved.  As I have already expressed in previous letters, life situations may have damaged our heart.  We, ourselves, may feel unloved or unnoticed but there is one who invites us into an intimate and powerful relationship beyond all of our wildest dreams.  He is wholehearted in love with us and loves us fully.  And He invites us into a loving relationship with Himself.

This is what you and I were made for - He wants us to accept this invitation fully and comprehensively without compromise.

In this special season, God is offering you an invitation.  It’s an invitation to you personally from God, the creator and sustainer of the universe.  He wants you to enter into His heart in prayer and intimacy.  It’s about abandonment to Him and accepting that invitation - not only at your salvation - but now today.  It’s about entering into the heart of God in prayer with your whole being.  It’s about a divine summoning to wholeheartedness.  He is inviting you to love Him in every dimension of life without reserve or regret.  He invites you to experience the deep things of His heart and the power of His life.  To enjoy active intimacy with Jesus includes understanding and feeling His heart (Ephesians 3:18-19). 

God wants you to accept His invitation to enter His heart and the things that matter most to Him.  He wants you to discover His burning desires and consuming yearnings in this next year.  He wants you to enter His heart in reverential awe and deeper intimacy.  He wants to set you on fire through communion with Himself. 

“The radiant image of the Father’s glory has come to light a fire in us, a burning love, a consuming yearning.  There is nothing lukewarm about the God of revelation.  Always radical and total, never does He reduce what He expects of us to fractions.  Our communion with Him is to become a blazing fire, a perpetual ecstasy.  These strong words will sound strange and exaggerated only to those who have not tasted that the Lord is good.  They may have studied and read, but they have not drunk deeply.”  Thomas Dubay 

God is inviting you into a deeper relationship.  He invites you into the purposes that He designed through all of eternity.  “But the plans of the Lord stand firm forever, the purposes of his heart through all generations” (Psalms 33:11).  This is not a small invitation.  It’s the greatest invitation that you will ever receive - It will affect everything in your life - It will empower you to live successfully in the end times.  

A wealthy young man decided to spend a winter on the beautiful island of Bermuda.  He had his fancy Mercedes convertible shipped there, but when he arrived he discovered that the speed limit was only 20 miles an hour.  For several weeks he drove around the island at merely 20 MPH in his powerful sports car.

One day he drove behind an old man on a small motorcycle.  He got so frustrated that he hit the gas pedal and raced past the old man at 40 MPH.  But suddenly the old man shot past him on his motorcycle.  So the young man hit the passing gear and went up to 55 MPH.  The old man shot past Him again.  So he angrily raced pass him again at a reckless speed for that island.  But the old man again shot past him.

The young man finally coasted to a stop at the side of the road.  The old man stopped too.  Absolutely amazed at the speed, the young man approached the old man and said, “What kind of power do you have in that bike?”  

He said, “It’s not the power in my motorcycle son.  My suspenders were caught on your bumper!”

God is inviting you to enter His heart in relationship.  He wants you to catch your suspenders on the bumper of His love - He wants you to learn to lean upon His strength and ability through prayer - He wants you to have a greater vision of His greatness - He wants to empower your life in a deeper way this coming year.  Many of us are leaning on our own abilities and lack strength and power in our life.  Perhaps you feel like the young man who was going only 20 MPH.  You know there is more but you can’t grab hold of it.  You don’t want a powerless and meaningless life.  You may ask,

“How can I catch the suspenders of my life onto the bumper of God’s love and power?”

It’s through His invitation to relationship.  He is bringing things back into order through the work and grace of Christ.  He is inviting you to partner with Him in order to see the release of His divine will on earth and the bringing of all things in heaven and on earth together under His headship.  This will be the summing up of all things in Christ.  This should create within you a sense of reverential awe.  You are invited into a relationship with the God of the universe who wants to bring you into His eternal and transcendent purposes.

Doesn’t this create within you a sense of destiny for this New Year?

Does this not give you a sense of hope?

“Lord, I thank You for Your personal invitation to me.  I thank You that you want to have a deeper relationship with me in this next year.  Thank You for working intricately in my life so that I am stable in the hard times.  I choose to have a life of thanksgiving.  I choose to be patient and content when You are bringing me deeper.  I want to grasp hold of Your wisdom in the hidden place.  I treasure these times in my heart because You are building internally in my life, and You are developing me in the spirit.  Transform and empower my life.

Lord, I want to be still in order to know You (Psalm 46:10a, Jeremiah 19:13-14).  Teach me how to shut out external activity.  Help me to grow in the art of meditating on Your Word and in my love relationship with You.  You have set my feet on a rock and have given me a firm place to stand.  You put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to my God (Psalm 40:1-3)  ‘One thing I have asked from the Lord, that I shall seek: That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to meditate in His temple’ (Psalm 27:4).  I thank You for this invitation to a deeper relationship with You.  I accept and cherish this invitation.  In Jesus’ name, amen.”

If you have never received this invitation, see http://www.intercessorsarise.org/Intercessors_Arise/Salvation.html and receive this free gift.

We pray that you had a blessed Christmas and that you will have a beautiful New Year.  

By Debbie Przybylski

Intercessors Arise

deb@intercessorsarise.org

http://www.intercessorsarise.org