Stirred Up

Isaiah lamented this, among many things:

“There is no one who calls on Your name,

who stirs himself up to take hold of You”

So it’s worth asking: have we stirred ourselves up to take hold of God?

Do we want to?

We’re already stirred up, truly. Either by holy agitation or anxious distraction, pain, all of it. The whole world is stirring. Because Jesus and His white horse are standing, and He is eager.

Isaiah tells us God will "stir up His zeal like a man of war" (42:13). Heaven is watching, anticipating. And the world is groaning and stirred up because it is responding to the eagerness of Jesus. It’s also responding to a rising hatred, the fury of God’s enemy who is losing time and knows it.

It’s not a matter of being stirred, but being stirred to what?

One of my favorite things about Jesus is that He initiates. We’re not stirring ourselves out of thin air, invoking a passion we've made up. His advances, His invitations, His words, beckon a response – a stirring up to take hold of what He offers. We have to desire God to receive more of Him.

I often misunderstand what Jesus wants, and therein lies much of the exhaustion, the disinterest in “stirring myself up”. We ask God to use us, but is He after our usefulness? Consistent with His character, He’s after something of much higher risk.

Jesus tells us in John 17 that for the world to believe God sent Him His followers must experience oneness together and with Him. That is what speaks. To witness this cuts to the world’s biggest agony, exposing what haunts it.

The world understands being used.

But holy oneness? That remains only in dreams.

Jesus is not after usefulness from you, He is after oneness with you.

If we will receive it.

So it’s worth asking: are we stirring ourselves up to take hold of Jesus?

Is this our desire?

If so this becomes our greatest comfort:

God is not passive, He’s eager.

“There is no one who calls on Your name,

who stirs himself up to take hold of You”

Isaiah 64:7

"The LORD [Yahovah] shall go forth

like a mighty man; He shall stir up

His zeal like a man of war."

Isaiah 42:13

“I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word;

that they 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 You sent Me.”

John 17:20-21