Love
by Heidi Baker

We have spent the last three lessons talking about what God wants from us -- to love with all of our being. We can't get this love from our own resources, we have to allow God to enlarge our heart. First we draw near to God and love on Him, and He changes our hearts and fills them with His love. Then we can love the people around us -- the hurting and naked and blind and dying. We can love them when they don't say thank you. We can love them when they take advantage of us. We can keep on loving them until God's love begins to transform them and bring life to them.

Here's your test, Church. God wants to know, are you doing it? Jesus said to the wise man, "Which one of these had mercy?" All fruitfulness flows from intimacy. If you want to be fruitful for God's kingdom, you need to allow God to enlarge your heart and to pour His compassion and His love into you. You need to allow Him to transform you with His love until you are able to see the hurt and the dying and to love them with His love. It is not pretty. They might not even thank you for it. Will you pour yourself out anyhow? Or will you become discouraged and give up? Church, are you loving others as much as you love yourself? And are you loving God with all of your heart and your soul and all of your mind and all of your spirit? That is what God wants from you. Will you do it? Will you live it?

God has been speaking to me about how He wants to change and transform our hearts to better match His heart; to flow with His love and compassion. He wants to give each of us heart transplants, so that our hearts are filled with the love and grace and mercy of God, so that we would be a people who are different from the world.

We need to understand that the weapons of our warfare are love -- love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, mercy, long-suffering. The body of Christ in this world should look different, it should look entirely different. We must be holy, fruit-bearing trees that bear fruit in and out of season with healing in the leaves, healing in our hands.

Merciful King and Glorious Savior, make us different. Lord, when we walk inside a store, let them see Jesus shining through our eyes O God. Lord, when we walk into a bank, let them see Jesus in our faces, Lord. When we walk down the street, let them experience Your presence, Lord, that the sick are healed and the blind see and the deaf hear and the crippled walk and the dumb speak. Yes Lord let it be. O God, we want to be so different. We want to be so filled, O God.

People of God, how much do you want Him? Are you willing to ask Him for more? Could you just say, "God, I'm desperate for more of You. I'm desperate for more. I can't just be a little bit full. God, I need You to come and make me completely incapacitated by Your love until I can't hate anymore. I need to be changed by Your love until I can't be angry anymore; until I can't be bitter anymore; until I can't be tired anymore. I want You to come and get me God. Make me different, heal me, and fill me. Break me and pour me out O God upon a lost and dying world."

Watch out church, watch out church, I hear the Lord say He's going to capture His people. Watch out! Watch out! The Lord says He's about to capture some people. He's going to take you prisoner; as a love prisoner of the Most High God. And He says that He will capture you with love. He will capture you with His heart of love. And you will be incapacitated. You will be unable to think like you thought before. And you'll be unable to do what you did before. And you'll be unable to be the one that you were before. For God says that He is capturing, He is capturing His people.

And He will take some of the people around the world. And He is going to pour you out in dark places; in dark, desperate places. He's going to pour you out in miserable places and He's going to place His heart so largely in you that you won't be afraid to walk out these doors and make a difference on the streets, because God is going to empower people. And He says He's empowering people with a heart: I see it -- I see a picture of these little cars, these little engines, little cars with little engines. Don't feel offended because God's eyes of love are looking at you and He's saying, "I want to give you a bigger engine. I want to give you a bigger engine, and that engine, that motor, is love. I want to cause that little engine to be melted away and I want to give you a bigger engine, a bigger motor, that you might be stronger and more powerful than you were before. I want to take you farther than you've been before. And the place I want to take you is inside My heart. I want to take you inside My heart and around the world."

Thank You Jesus! I pray that this word You've placed within my heart, will burn in the hearts of every man, woman, and child who reads this lesson. Let it burn in their hearts, O God. I pray God as they're healed already, that they'll tell people of the glorious healing presence and mighty love of their Savior who healed them tonight and sent them forth on a path of righteousness for a dying world.

We come for You and no one else. And You alone are worthy, You alone are mighty, and You alone can capture our hearts and make us go to the ends of the earth.

Watch out. Some of you are going to be so captured by the love of Christ Jesus that you're going to lay your life down for the call, the holy high call of the Most High God, on your life. And the calls of God of people reading this lesson are various calls. But I see that the Lord is going to send many into the fields, white for harvest. He's going to send many into the fields white for harvest.

Luke 10:2 "The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest therefore to send workers into the harvest field. Go, go, I'm sending you like lambs amongst the wolves."

Lord, I pray that as You've healed the sick, as You've touched the hearts of people, Lord that you would come and start to break hearts now with Your Holy Spirit.

Just be open to Him. Some of you are going to be called into full-time service, and you're not expecting it. You didn't even know it. You didn't know that this was your call in life. God is going to begin to touch your heart and break it.

Another thing I hear the Lord saying is, "Eye salve, eye salve for the church. Eye salve for blurry-eyed vision." The Lord is giving eye salve to His church because so often we have not seen with clear vision the heart of the Lord.

What do we do as harvesters? What does it look like to be a harvester, to be a complete, total, love-slave of the Most High God? What does it look like? We're different, aren't we? We're a different kind of people -- the kind of people that don't act the same; we don't look the same; we don't walk the same. We're completely different than other people. God does some strange things with me. He tells me things like "get on a plane and fly 48 hours and go speak somewhere and then get back on the plane and go home." That doesn't look normal. There's nothing normal about it. It doesn't feel normal -- in fact, it's not even enjoyable. But because He has taken a little heart and made it bigger, I can do different things than I've done before.

God wants to do something different in us. He wants to make us different than we were before. Quite frankly, our hearts are too small. Our hearts are way too small for a great big dying world. We need the healing presence of the Most High God. We need to present our hearts to God and allow Him to enlarge them, to transform them, to fill them with His love. Are you willing to do that?