A Yearning Heart's Journey

One of the most important battles I find myself fighting is which narrative I let my painful experiences tell about God’s attitude towards me.

You're in that place again: A new idea or thought is on your heart and you’re wondering whether or not it’s from God. Here are several indicators that will help you discern whether a wish, dream or idea is from the Lord.

And I want to...

“Love is most precious when it’s most costly.” There is a remnant among the people of the earth who joined their lives to the symphony of this phrase. Love desires to pour itself out wholly and unconditionally and shines all the more brightly in the midst of adverse circumstances. No demand is higher than this, no demand more beautiful.

Hidden between the lines of the Word of God lies the most invigorating, most romantic, and truest love story the universe will ever witness. It's the most fascinating account, unrivaled even by the most sophisticated fairytale romance the human mind could ever conceive. It’s a mystery that so readily reveals itself to the eyes of those who restlessly seek and deeply yearn to make sense of the days they sojourn on the face of the earth. It’s the story of the Father, the Son, and a Bride. And it’s a story in which you and I are protagonists.

At our house of prayer, we long to create a place in our city that goes on 24/7 by filling all 168 hours of every week with raw, passionate and creative worship and prayer. Every now and then I get asked, why we do what we do. Why 24/7 prayer and worship? What drives us is that it impacts God's heart, what sustains it is that it impacts our hearts, and what excites us is that it impacts our region.

There's an interesting spectrum of reactions to observe when someone says that God is jealous. Some are a little thrown off that a word with at least some negative connotations gets attributes to God. Others are just clueless, never having heard anything about it or thought about it yet. And then there are those whose eyes widen with excitement and whose hearts go out in affection to God because it the term resonates deeply within them.

In our days there's a cry going forth from the heart of Jesus: Do you love Me as I truly am? Do you love ALL that I am? Do you want ALL of Me? And will you stand with Me when it's all coming down?

Loneliness in intimacy? That seems like a contradiction. How is it possible? How can intimacy with the Lord make you feel lonely? I mean the pain when you go deeper in the Lord and you suddenly realize that barely anyone around you can relate to what you've seen and experienced. I mean the loneliness you feel when you go deeper in the Lord but realize that no one else comes along. I mean the sadness when no one understands the things that move you most.

On my life journey into the endless depths of the heart of God it's easy for me to get preoccupied with my pursuit of God and lose sight of that which fuels my love for Him: His love for me. While being preoccupied with our pursuit of Him isn't bad but a glorious reality, facing the weakness of our pursuit of Him can be a source for discouragement if we lose sight of the other side of the coin: that He is also in pursuit of us.

While I give myself to seeking the face of God and learning to love Him more, I find myself in constant need to remind myself that He is also seeking for me. I love Him because He first loved me (1 John 4:19). I pursue Him because He is constantly pursuing me. My heart burns for Him because His heart burns for me.

Grace seems to be one of the most talked-about topics in the church nowadays. With almost uncountable positions that all differ from one another it's also one of the most debated topics in the church – and that not without reason. Disagreements and misconceptions about grace have been an issue since the early days of Christianity. Already the apostle Paul felt the need to constantly set wrong things right.

Just like in the New Testament, the two biggest misconceptions about grace today are that people either try to earn it or neglect the importance of responding to it. People either overemphasize their part while underestimating God's part or the other way around. It is crucial that we have a biblical understanding of grace because misunderstood grace will make us live either a tortured (when trying to earn His grace) or a meaningless life (when not cooperating with His grace) before God.

In this article I point out seven of the most important biblical facts about grace that together form a solid foundation and give us a biblical paradigm for a right understanding of what grace is and what it's not.

One of the most glorious sights is a Bible stained and battered by decades of heavy usage. But how do you mark and underline your Bible in a way that makes sense and is useful? Here I try to give some helpful advice.

Seeking God at night is a very powerful biblical principle that can revolutionize our relationship with God by loving Him in an extravagant way. In the Scriptures there were many people who consecrated their nights for the pursuit of the Holy One (Samuel, David and other psalmists, Anna the prophetess, Jesus, Paul, ...). And it was in those hours that many powerful God-encounters took place.

These are thoughts that have been moving me for some months in a very special way. The more I meditate about it, the more I believe that this topic is a very crucial key for our relationship with God and our whole existence. I believe it's just the very beginning of a truth that has the power to radically transform our life and I feel like I've not even reached the outer courts of it. I hope and pray that your heart will be enlightened by the Spirit of wisdom and revelation as you read these lines.

All of us have experienced seasons of inner, spiritual dryness in which things get harder, God feels far away and nothing we do seems to change anything. It's crucial that we understand the meaning, purpose and necessary response of those seasons in order to not miss what God wants to release to us through them.

One of the biggest problems that keep us from spending time with God is that we often have no clue what to do. That's why we quickly get distracted, bored and often don't even start doing something with Him. But there are so many different things you can do with Him. Having a list of what to do broadens our perspective, helps us stay focused and brings creativity into our time with Him. This fights boredom and distraction. As you start using this list for your inspiration, you might find that your daily time with Him is not long enough to really do everything you want to.

One way to significantly increase your time and pleasure with the written Word of God is to start praying it instead of merely reading it. Instead of reading it for information or to fulfill our bible reading plan assignments, we actually take it as God's personal word to us and use it to feed and guide our conversation with Jesus. We take the Word and pray it back to Him. Simply taken, it means having a conversation with God using His Word. This is called "pray-reading the Word", a technique I learned from Mike Bickle (IHOP-KC).

We spend about one third of our life sleeping. This time is mostly without significance – unless we give it one. In this short article I want to show what the Word of God says about dreams and give a short introduction on how to view our dreams as places of encounters with God and opportunities for Him to speak and reveal His love to us. This truth can radically impact your night-life.