Recently I was sitting in the living room and during a quiet moment, I heard a single sentence whispered into my spirit: “There is depth in the heart of the Father.”
As I pondered on this over the next few days, one thought kept resurfacing – how do we get there? How do we reach that place of such intimacy with Him that we are truly submerged into the depths of His heart?
I found the answer in Psalm 23:6.
“Surely goodness & lovingkindness will follow me all the days of my life …”
To gain a fuller understanding of what the psalmist is saying here, let’s take a quick look at three words in the original Hebrew:
Goodness: towb – welfare, prosperity, happiness, good things, bounty
Lovingkindness: checed – goodness, kindness, faithfulness, favor, mercy
Follow: radaph – to pursue, to chase, to run after
The picture here is of the goodness & favor of the Lord chasing after us in a relentless pursuit to capture our hearts and affections.
Before I met my husband, I had spent a few years healing after a bad marriage. One of the things my heart longed for was to be pursued by a man who saw true value in me and was willing to chase after my heart. This was something I never spoke out loud to anyone, not even in prayer. I never wrote it down in a prayer journal or breathed the words out loud. It was strictly internal between the Father and me.
When David began to show an interest in me, I put him off for about a year. I was still healing and enjoying rediscovering who I was on my own. Eventually, the Lord began to turn my heart toward him, and one night, he looked me in the eyes and said, “Young lady, you are being pursued.” It was one of the few moments in my life that I was truly speechless. The Lord had placed in David’s mouth the very words that I had been longing to hear. And pursue he did – until I caught him!
In the same way that a woman’s heart longs to be pursued by a man who will value and truly love her, our hearts long to be pursued by God. And like a man who sees a priceless treasure in a woman who has captured his attention seeks to pursue her affection, God pursues us in the same way … and He does just that. He chases after us – until we catch Him. He sets His goodness & favor on our path to run after us and chase us down. And we are chased right into His heart.
Psalm 139:7-11 assures us that there is no where we can hide from Him.
“It’s impossible to disappear from you or to ask the darkness to hide me,
for your presence is everywhere, bringing light into my night.” (v. 11)
This chase takes a momentary pause when the pursued stops and turns around to face the pursuer. Now begins the face-to-face encounter, the one-on-one interaction with the lover of our souls. We look into His eyes and He into ours. We see each other. We see into each other. This is intimacy.
As we stand there face to face with the One, now His goodness and faithfulness come around behind us, chasing us deeper into Him, pushing us forward into deeper places in His heart. Thus begins a heavenly game of tag where He chases us and touches us with His goodness, then we run after Him and touch Him with our worship and devotion. It so it continues. We pursue Him as He pursues us and all the while we are running deeper into His heart.
There is depth in the heart of the Father.
