Heart of the Father

I saw a vision a few nights ago in the middle of the night. It was Jesus carrying a lamb around His neck. I read Luke 15.4-6 TPT.

^4–5“There once was a shepherd with a hundred lambs, but one of his lambs wandered away and was lost. So the shepherd left the ninety-nine lambs out in the open field and searched in the wilderness for that one lost lamb. He didn’t stop until he finally found it. With exuberant joy he raised it up and placed it on his shoulders, carrying it back with cheerful delight! ⁶Returning home, he called all his friends and neighbors together and said, ‘Let’s have a party! Come and celebrate with me the return of my lost lamb. It wandered away, but I found it and brought it home.’”

I felt like He was showing me that we need to prepare our hearts for those who are coming home to Him. For us to be ready to be like the Shepherd and be joy filled to carry them in our hearts. Bringing them back home and celebrating them.

“With exuberant joy he raised it up and placed it on his shoulders, carrying it back with cheerful delight! 6 Returning home, he called all his friends and neighbors together and said, ‘Let’s have a party! Come and celebrate with me the return of my lost lamb. It wandered away, but I found it and brought it home.’”

With exuberant joy. With cheerful delight.

Are we ready to join with Jesus in carrying those who are so different than us in our hearts and help them back home? To carry them with exuberant joy and cheerful delight? I feel like the Father is saying it’s time to prepare for this. As we start to emerge out of quarantine sometime in the hopeful, near future, I pray our hearts are able to see each heart as a child of His. That we can look past our differences and let our light of His love shine through our hearts to them. That the walls that may have been there before the pandemic would be broken. That we will make time to pray for people and carry them in our hearts with such joy! Sometimes we are to be that person that remains in one’s life to speak life and truth and be of support. There will be a day where many will be coming back home. Let’s be ones who are ready to find them and help them stay the course and carry them in prayer and encouragement. Then, have such celebration when they are back home with Him!

In doing this we also need to protect our hearts from jealousy. As like in the scripture of the prodigal son we can get jealous of those who come home and get so much from the Lord. Let’s allow the Father to remind us of who we are in Him and not allow our minds to entertain jealousy even now so that we will be prepared for those who will be returning to Him and be so overjoyed when they receive His love and blessings!

Father, prepare our hearts even now to see each person as your child. Each one a treasure no matter what they believe or how different they are to us. Open our eyes to see and know which ones we are to join with you in carrying. Let us intentionally turn our hearts to them and pour out His love in abundance. Let us be ones who have exuberant joy and cheerful delight to carry them with you. As they truly repent and turn their hearts to you let us be with them in our hearts and speak encouraging words and support them. Let us truly celebrate them coming home to you without jealousy. Dig deep into our hearts now and deal with any jealousy so our hearts can be ready. Thank you Father for your faithfulness!

Lately, I have been spending time in the book of John. I want to know about this man who was not only granted the privilege to walk with Jesus, but also given insight to see the times in which we are living as he was instructed to write the Book of Revelation. He gives us so much truth and a different view of Jesus’ life while upon the earth, as John describes himself as the one whom Jesus loves. It was not that Jesus loved John more than the other disciples, but it was that John saw himself as one that Jesus loves. Here again, I am stressing the importance of seeing as I spoke of yesterday.

When we know we are loved, we begin to open up our hearts. It is only when we know that we are loved that we feel that we can be ourselves. It is when we know we are truly loved we begin to let down the walls that we so often put around ourselves so that we will not be hurt again. It is in the place of knowing love that we find our true identity. As we begin to understand Jesus’ love for us, we will stop defining ourselves by our failures and shortcomings.

Just imagine a child who has been abandoned and taken from foster home to foster home…never really knowing he is loved or where he belongs. But once that one, that one who sees his worth, says I want to make you mine and adopts the child into his family, the child begins to hope again. This child is not loved for anything he can do for the family. He is loved just because he is. It is in this place of unconditional love that he begins to let go of his terrors of the past, his sense of abandonment, his fear for what lies ahead. He is secure in this newly found pure love for him. And so it is with us. There is no purer love thanthe Father has for us. “God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.” Ephesians 1:5

It is in knowing the love of Jesus that we are open to receive mysteries of the Kingdom. Our hearts become unlocked to see more of His beauty and glory. It is in the place of knowing His love that we can, by faith, begin to step out into our destiny, knowing that He is at the end of our race cheering us on and saying, “Come on, you can do it!”

“For I know the plans and thoughts that I have for you,’ says the Lord, ‘plans for peace and well-being and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.” Jeremiah 29:11.

Today, He is inviting you into a place deeper into His heart whether you have walked with Him for years or if you have never taken that step towards Him. His love is wooing you into the reality of knowing who you really are, who you were truly created to be and to partake of His unconditional love. He is waiting for you to lay aside all condemnation and come running to Him…with your hang-ups and all. You are loved. See yourself as the one Jesus loves.

“We love him, because he first loved us.” 1 John 4:19