Heart to heart with God

Heart to Heart with God

Brendan Mc Crossan

Heart to Heart with God

Brendan Mc Crossan One

Jeremiah-29-11-For I know the thoughts and plans that I have for you, says the Lord, thoughts and plans for welfare and peace and not for evil, to give you hope in your final outcome.12Then you will call upon Me, and you will come and pray to Me, and I will hear and heed you.13Then you will seek Me, inquire for, and require Me [as a vital necessity] and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.{Amplified Bible}

Most Christians know the first part of this verse from Jeremiah 29-11, “I know the plans I have for you,” is very familure to them. But the second part of that scripture is of equal importance or of even more importance as far as I am concerned, because when we seek the lord first, then everything else is added on. But you know it is only when we seek God and seek him sincerely will we find him. I know it is not easy to search for God when nothing happens and you get bored but I urge you begin to spend time seeking God by praising him for at least one hour a day. It probably will be as boring as watching paint dry, at the start but if you persist then you will begin to experience the presence of God coming over you as God comes to visit with you. To search for God means giving time to him alone, seeking him for who and what he is, not for what he can do for you.

The heart must yearn for God as if you were gasping for your last breath.

I heard a story of a monk, a famous saint who was very close to God. One day one of the junior monks walked beside him as they strolled by a small river, he asked the Saint, how much do I need to search for God to truly find him. the saint grabbed him by the arm and threw him into the river then jumped in and grabbed him and held his head under the water for a few minutes until the monk stopped struggling, then he pulled his head back out of the water, and the young monk gasping for breath asked him, why he did that? The saint replied; “when you search for God like you just searched for your last breath, then you will find him.”

What does seek mean, to look for, to try to find, to hunt for, to ask for, that is what seek means. The amplified bible which the previous scripture is taken from, explains in greater detail than most bibles what words mean, it amplifies certain words giving greater meaning to them explaining them for greater understanding.

Matthew 13-44-The kingdom of heaven is like something precious buried in a field, which a man found and hid again; then in his joy he goes and sells all he has and buys that field.

The kingdom of heaven is precious, the most precious thing you will ever have and the father who created the kingdom is greater than the kingdom and is to be sought after with more passion than even searching for the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew-13-45-Again the kingdom of heaven is like a man who is a dealer in search of fine and precious pearls, 46Who, on finding a single pearl of great price, went and sold all he had and bought it.

Two

Deuteronomy -4-29- But if from there you will seek (inquire for and require as necessity) the Lord your God, you will find Him if you [truly] seek Him with all your heart [and mind] and soul and life.

I sometimes wonder if I have lost my passion in searching for God, have I become lethargic. I used to spend hours seeking God and ministering to him, now I have it down to one hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon and try to praise throughout the day, but I feel the same enthusiasm is not there, because I have nowhere to go and minister to God aloud with song and guitar like I used to. This is one aspect of my life that I miss so much, I used to love singing out aloud to God shouting praises to him, now I can’t because I am conscious of the area I now live in and how quiet this area is, and the least sound is magnified. I have a shed out my back yard but I feel that I can’t shout out praise or pray in tongues aloud, everything in me feels suppressed, every morning as I go to my shed to worship the man next door comes out for coal and then spends time in his yard doing whatever he does and I am so conscious of him being there that I can’t sing. I don’t want the neighbours to hear me, years before I didn’t care who heard me, now I do.

I used to have a room above the chapel in Saint Marys church Creggan and I used to go there every day from one to two, and I shouted out my praise as loud as I could to God singing and ministering to him in tongues, and I had many, many visions and revelations. I still get bible revelations but no visions anymore; I know I am suppressed in my singing and ministering to God, and this disturbs me, it hinders me in worship. I long for a place where I could go to release my spirit again and worship the way I used to.

Recently I discovered that everyone could hear me in the church singing and praying in tongues, inside the church and outside, thank God at the time I didn’t know that. I thought that the walls were so thick in the church that the room was almost soundproof; the walls were two feet thick, but still apparently people heard me worship. Inside of me there is still a longing for God’s visitations and at times I can feel the actual presence of God beside me and around me, and this lifts my spirits for a few days. But there is nothing like searching for God with all my being like I am a drowning man gasping for air, just like the young monk I spoke about earlier. This is a situation I can change by an act of my will, I can go and praise God as loud as I want to because this is my home and I can do what I like in my own home or backyard. I hear neighbours playing foul songs as loud as they like and they don’t care how offensive those songs are to others, so why should I allow them to hinder me in loud worship of my God who deserves loud praise as his word says.

I know when I take my time out with God in the morning that he is there with me, I know, but don’t feel him, except now and again, but I know without a shadow of a doubt that he is with me now; I believe his word is true, “behold I am with you always.” And yes he is there with me but there is nothing to beat the feel of his touch, to feel his majestic presence actually surrounding me. I know by faith he is with me but it is beautiful when I feel him with me.

Isaiah 26- 9My soul yearns for You [O Lord] in the night, yes, my spirit within me seeks You earnestly; for [only] when Your judgments are in the earth will the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness (uprightness and right standing with God).

My soul yearns for you o Lord, yearns with a longing inside of me, it’s like there is something in me that is missing, and I pray in tongues through the night searching for my God because I need not only his touch but his help, to help me live as I should. Isn’t it funny as how you lay awake at night you think of all the ways you did not walk like Jesus that day and how unloving you can be, well I do, I don’t know about you. My spirit within me seeks you earnestly, and a longing is in my heart, a longing that there is something missing in me and it is his touch that I miss.

When I pray with people I receive his words of knowledge and I can feel his healing power on me and still I feel emptiness inside of me, a longing in my heart for Jesus. I don’t want Jesus to say to me, like he said to the church in Ephesus,

Revelation-2-4-yet there is one thing wrong; you don’t love me as at first; think of those times of your first love, {how different now} and turn back to me and work as you did before, or else I will come and remove your candlestick from its place among the churches. {The Way Bible}

When I read this scripture my heart felt so sad, do I not feel the same about my God anymore; have I changed, or maybe I have grown closer to him and don’t feel his presence but know it is there all the same, I know how much he loves me and I am assured of this but you always want to feel the closeness and personal touch of God, well at least I do.

Psalm-63-1- 1O GOD, You are my God, earnestly will I seek You; my inner self thirsts for You, my flesh longs and is faint for You, in a dry and weary land where no water is.2So I have looked upon You in the sanctuary to see Your power and Your glory.3Because Your loving-kindness is better than life, my lips shall praise You.

When we first get to know God the Father or should I say Jesus at our salvation or more likely at our baptism in the Holy Spirit we have a deep sense of his love for us and this carries us through for quite a while then things get on top of us and we lose some of the emotion we felt. Are we searching for God earnestly now today, are we thirsting for him like we did at the beginning or have we become stagnant and no longer searching, has our searching been so long that we never ever got to feel his love or touch and have become discouraged? I don’t know about you but searching for God is a work it is making ourselves take time out with him whether we find him or not, or feel like we found him or never found him. If you have searched for God sincerely then you have found him, it is in searching that we find and whether we feel his presence or don’t feel his presence we can be assured we found him. You will find me if you seek me in earnest, he promised.

Deuteronomy -4-29- But if from there you will seek (inquire for and require as necessity) the Lord your God, you will find Him if you [truly] seek Him with all your heart [and mind] and soul and life.

This scripture is a promise of God, to us; you will find me when you seek for me in earnest, as a necessity, you see it does say; you “will,” not might find me but ‘will’ ‘find me’ if you seek for me in earnest. Is our searching in earnest, or will we let things get in the way, like feelings and emotions in our search, will we give up when half way there, finding it too hard to keep going.

I know Christians who have been blessed tremendously because they don’t give up searching for God; day after day they keep on searching trying to find him. And even after you have found him you need to begin your search the next day again and the day after that and so on and so on day after day is our daily search. I read a poster one time that said; “To have found God is only the beginning of your search.’’ I never understood that poster until years later, now I know that I have to keep searching for God every day, every hour every minute and even after finding him I have to begin my search all over again. Is this unfair? No! Do we not search for love every day with our husband or wife; if after you married you stopped searching for your partners love and caress how long would the relationship last? I am sixty four years old and I still search for my wife Rose’s love every day.

A relationship is a daily work, we have to work at it to keep it alive and when we stop working at it, it dies or fades away and usually divorce follows, because the intimate relationship between us died, and it is no different with God. Love is not a one way thing it is a two way thing between two people or between God and you. He never stops loving us why should we stop loving him? He is the one who created us to be filled with his love every day, he wants to shower out his daily love on us without fail, and he wants to be loved in return. We need to work at our human relationships daily, and with God it is no different, we must work at our relationship daily also. We need to see to our partners’ needs and our partner needs to see to ours that’s love in action. God created us to be loved and to return his love and we can’t do that unless we search for him to love. You may be in a cosy relationship with God for all I know, but even the cosiest of relationship needs some extra effort at times. We take our partners for granted so easily and they do the same with us and we take God for granted so often yet he never takes us for granted, he still loves us whether we return his love or not, he never divorces us or casts us away from him, instead he stands waiting on us to return to him.

Let’s take stock now, are we searching for God every day, seeing to his needs like he sees to our needs. His needs are simple; he needs to be loved because he is God and nothing else. Our needs are more complicated we have multiple needs every day, as every day presents a new challenge for us, and he meets those needs always.

Three

Sing to Him, sing praises to Him

This scripture is one I love, because I can minister to God in song because I play the guitar accompanying myself as I worship him in song. I love talking with my friend Adrian about the things of God and what God is doing and what he has done over the course of a day or two or a few days.

I think about the wonderful miracles he has done through me and praise him for them all, and I love sharing them with others trying to encourage them to step out and pray with others. That’s why I write these little books trying to share God’s love with you who read them.

I need his strength every day because some days I find it hard to motivate myself and I talk with him and sing to him and ask that he helps me and that his Holy Spirit guides me in his ways. I am always yearning to see him face to face or to experience meeting Jesus and talking with him, now whilst I am alive not when I am dead. The previous scripture says remember the wonderful things God done for you so here are some I remember;

I have had some of these wonderful experiences, I have visited heaven briefly, I have looked into the eye of God as I stood on the edge of eternity and I have been transported from one place to another in the blink of an eye, three times now, and I have witnessed his Spirit do wonderful miracles through me including healing a woman who was dying in America and I prayed with her over the phone and he healed her; she was paralysed, she was going blind, couldn’t speak, and was expected to die from multiple lesions in her brain, and in one brief moment he healed her and she is walking talking and seeing and still alive and her specialist and pastor looked at her in amazement and wonder next day, because both expected her to die any day soon, and she is talking when she couldn’t speak, she is seeing, she is walking around and was at a wedding recently, and plays darts again with her husband, this is the God I need to keep searching for every day of my life.

This is the God I need to remind myself can do anything because nothing is impossible with him, this is the God of the miraculous. I have witnessed him heal a woman with a disease that affected her arms, they waved about wildly and she had practically no control over them at all, her hands shook violently, and when he told me to say, ‘stretch out your hands,’ her hands were instantly healed, not a flicker of movement in fact they were no shaking in them at all, and she burst out crying thanking God for healing her.

This is the God I need to remind myself is for me and not against me. This is the God who says, ‘remember his deeds done through me,’ not bragging but remembering. This same God healed a little boy from the worst case of eczema I ever saw, he was covered in blood and pus all over his little body, and the lord healed him and the next day he got worse and they put him in hospital and bandaged him up and put cream on him because there is no cure for eczema and next morning the doctor who bandaged him came to see him and to change his bandages and when he removed his bandages he discovered that this little boy had brand new skin, not a blemish was on him, the doctor told his mother it was a miracle and only God could have done this.

This is the God I seek with all my heart remembering what he has done for and through me, he is the one to whom I give all the glory because all I can do is pray and he answers prayer and heals. Glory in his Holy name forever and forever.

Psalm 105-3- 3Glory in His holy name; let the hearts of those rejoice who seek and require the Lord [as their indispensable necessity].4Seek, inquire of and for the Lord, and crave Him and His strength (His might and inflexibility to temptation); seek and require His face and His presence [continually] evermore.5 [Earnestly] remember the marvellous deeds that He has done, His miracles and wonders, the judgments and sentences which He pronounced [upon His enemies, as in Egypt]

Glory in his name and as we glory in his name our hearts rejoice as we draw near to him. I love this scripture also, because it says to crave him and his strength; too often have I leaned on my strength and have fallen to temptation and sinned and been forgiven. Have you ever had a craving for something nice, like a bar of chocolate or a bit of cake or a holiday, something that you would love right this very moment?

I have craved for things more often than I craved for God sometimes and that is a sadness that I have to admit I did do. I set God aside to do something I wanted to do and instead of even asking God did he want me to do something I did it anyway seeking my own cravings and it usually failed or didn’t materialise. I craved a healing ministry for most of my adult life and you would think that is a great thing to earnestly desire and crave for; but it was for me and not for God’s glory I craved it. I wanted a ministry where people would know me and want me and that was so wrong, it was pride in me that craved attention. Yet God used me and healed many but he used me for his glory I got nothing out of it, not even the satisfaction of having miracles happen through me. I know God knew how much I longed to glorify him but there was also a part of me craving some glory also. I sought the work of the lord as they say and not the lord of the work. But I was young, and now I am old and I no longer desire more than anything to see miracles happen because I pray with or for people; I desire and crave that Jesus be glorified now not me and to see the sick healed.

I have learned to seek first the things of God for his glory not mine as he does his will in me, and heals or performs a miracle for someone, glory to his name. I do something now I never did in my life before; I write books on scripture teaching others what the Spirit of God is teaching me, and I earnestly desire that people would learn from what I write, and do as the Holy Spirit teaches me and teaches them, I know not who reads my books so there is no glory in them for me, but God gets all the glory he intended to get through them and I don’t know who puts what I wrote into practice and glorifies God through what they learned. They are all for his glory and his glory alone. I seek God for himself and not for what he can do for me.

When you seek God for himself you are blessed with happiness. When we crave God for who he is and not for what he can do we will find him and walk in his ways.

I wrote this book about twelve years ago and I lost it and have never found it again and so I re-write this book now but with a greater understanding of who I seek and crave for, the scriptures are probably the same ones I used twelve years ago because the word of God never changes but now I see them from a different perspective, a blessed holiness is on them. I have grown in love with the word of God with a deeper love than I ever had because now I have been given revelation on a greater scale over the years and especially this last year.

I know what the word means and who the word is, when I hold the word of God in my hands I hold the living word who is Jesus and the Father and Spirit of God in my human hands because the word of God is alive, it is not some book written in the past it is alive and vibrant full of living power and wisdom, and it is an honour to hold the word in my hand and speak it with my mouth and have in my heart, so when I seek God I seek him in his word as well as seek him spiritually, and I will find him as scripture tells me.

Psalm 119-2- 2Blessed (happy, fortunate, to be envied) are they who keep His testimonies, and who seek, inquireforand of Himand craveHimwith thewholeheart.3Yes, they do no unrighteousness [no wilful wandering from His precepts]; they walk in His ways.

I am blessed every day of my life, I am blessed because I seek God in his word, I seek him seeking guidance, and seeking his perfect will, especially in what I write about. I don’t want to give my viewpoint on scripture, which will never bless anyone and is only from my own intelligence which benefits no one because with all my intelligence I can be so wrong, but when led by the Spirit of God I am rarely wrong. I don’t wilfully wander away from the truth of the word. There are many times I have sat and written a full book and when I re-read the book I saw that it was from my thinking and not the Holy Spirits wisdom, I deleted the whole book, I can get carried away with a certain subject and write all I know on that subject and it looks good, but it is no spiritual use because the Holy Spirit didn’t inspire it, and if he didn’t inspire it, it will never bless anyone. So I hit the delete button on my computer and removed it from my book list, all my work was for nothing but for my ego, and that serves no one any good.

Four

This is probably the hardest part for me seeking God, the spirit of wisdom, the getting up early in the morning. I am not a very good early riser especially in the winter on those freezing wet windy days. In summer I am up bright and early but in winter I find it hard to get up at six, to seek the spirit of wisdom, to seek wisdom for to give me guidance during the day. There are some days I can manage to rise and shine as the song says and then go back to bed after taking time out with the lord. I know the benefits I receive when I do those early mornings, but it is so hard during the winter with dreary wet cloudy mornings urging me to come back to bed earlier than I intended. I try and do the things God says to find him.

I minister to him in song most mornings, not worshiping but ministering to him my songs from my heart and then there are mornings when I struggle to sing but still do, and as I said previously said it is harder now with my new neighbour out his backyard doing whatever and knowing he hears me and I get suppressed trying to keep it down and I am so wrong. I hear

him whistling to himself so maybe I should just get on with ministering to the lord loudly and not be concerned who hears me, as long as the lord hears me.

Today I returned to my shed and spent an hour singing to the lord at the top of my lungs and I didn’t care if he heard me or not or if the men working on the building site behind me heard me also. God is more important than what people think of me. I had been deceived into allowing suppression get to me and stop me from worshipping aloud to my God, and it is in writing this little book that I have had my eyes opened again, and gone back to ministering to my God and yours.

Ah, time to get up early again. Amen

Proverbs-8-17-I love those who love me and those who seek me early and diligently shall find me