Did not our hearts burn?

One of my favourite passages of scripture is in Luke 24. The Road to Emmaus.
Two men on a road discussing everything that hapenned with Jesus just being crucified. Everytime I read this next line, the hairs on my arms stand up.. "As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them".

As I sat to read and spend time with the Lord this afternoon, the words kept jumping out at me "come to me". It wasnt some half hearted call of small engagement. It was a beckoning of my soul for complete and surrendered reliance on Him.

How does that reliance actually look? I could not word it any better than Oswald Chambers; 
"We step right out with recognition of God in some things, then self consideration enters our lives and down we go.. the things surrounding you are real, but when you look at them you are immediately overwhelmed, and even unable to recognize Jesus... you will only recognize His voice more clearly through recklnessness - being willing to risk your all."

Many times upon the road of my walk with Jesus, I have failed, like the two men headed to Emmaus, to see and recognize my Saviour walking beside me. I can identify with their sense of dissapointment, loss, confusion. My preoccupation with how I think things ought to have gone. v.21 "but (I) had hoped"

I vividly remember a time my expectation of how God might show up, was so challenged. It was weeks before my exams were looming and I know nervous trepidation was filling me. Perhaps having it drilled into me that my whole life course was held on the hinge of my academic success, had something to do with it. But I had been praying and I just wanted the Lord to speak. One evening, my parents asked me to join them for dinner with a couple in ministry, who had a son a little younger than me, who was down syndrome. This wasnt how I wanted to spend a potential study evening, or make new friends either, but I decided to honour my parents. I politely engaged in conversation throughout the evening and towards the end of the evening, I got into a small conversation with this guy. Not knowing anything about my circumstances, he suddenly told me "I feel God wants to tell you..." and proceeded to speak into my life. What he said, was clearly from the Lord, and changed me forever. From that day on, I decided, to never pre-judge the means and measures which God would choose to speak to me. 

I still need to remind myself however. 

Because circumstances dont always look how I thought they might look. And the ways in which Jesus speaks to me, arent the ones I would expect. Sometimes the disruptions, the inconvenient phone calls, the broken routine, the small, mundane, tiring, unglamourous, perplexing, emptying moments, are the very means by which Jesus chooses to reveal Himself to me.. where heavenly victory is forged. And He calls me not to question what He is up to..  but to be recklessly abandoned to the knowing that He is God.

Like the two men on the road to Emmaus, when the Word and truth soaks into my being, and I align my heart with the truth, there is communion. v31. "Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him"
They asked each other: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”

Dont you just hunger to know that burning? That fresh knowing that He is RIGHT HERE! The revelation of His Word in your life, real. More real than than anything. More real than your understanding of what the present circumstances could possibly mean.

He wants that for us. But it requires of us that we are willing to more than just wander a little down the road and ponder what we see. Ecclesiasted 11: ⁴ He who watches the wind will not sow and he who looks at the clouds will not reap. ⁵ Just as you do not know the path of the wind and how bones are formed in the womb of the pregnant woman, so you do not know the activity of God who makes all things.

Dont look at the ground, or the signs of things around you, for a measure of how recklessly abandoned YOU should be to what God is speaking to you. Move forward, and know He is going to meet you. You will know He is there... your heart will burn within you.