As our Lord romances us deeper into allowing Him to establish His intimacy within our hearts, the greater the call is for Him to connect with us in greater purity and holiness.

Without this deepening exposure of Himself towards us in such fondness, softness, tenderness and patience, products of the gifts of trust and humbleness as it encourages and enables our hearts to be opened, it must be supported with Yeshua gifting the Gift of Honour. Our fragile and vulnerable trust is maintained and balanced by helping us to discover deeper aspects of his beauty and goodness that leads to a deeper connection with and increase of needed safety, security and stability.

Intimacy, therefore, must be an ever increasing process of gaining a richer knowledge of how much His heart is treasuring and valuing us, so that with increasing exposure between His and our heart, there is increasing experiences of safety. Safe, secure and stable intimacy is essential for us to experience the joy of his heart in ours, to celebrate a “love dance of life”.

Live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.  Eph 5:2 NIV

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in Him.  1Jo 4:16 NIV

The importance of His Gift of Honour, as Yeshua enables us, is that this is the experience that keeps alive the “First Love” with joy.

Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love.  Rev 2:4 NIV

Our “First Love” is that sweet joy of complete and safe abandonment to the beauty of the Saviour – Yeshua. The joy of relief from being rescued from under the uncertainty and worry of immaturity, because we were living from an incomplete and untrustworthy foundation of morality – Satan’s bitterness and evil.

When our entrance into salvation is limited to just an intellectual and legal process, our hearts are not positioned into being able to respond to and accept the essential gifts of love, for a relationship of true heart-to-heart intimacy. That is why we lost our first love and the flame diminishes and dies. The grief in Yeshua’s heart is expressed in this statement “… yet I hold this against you”. In essence all we are willing or able to do is tolerate and manage the connection at a ‘one dimensional level’, whereas Yeshua yearns for it to be a multi-dimensional experience.

The importance for Yeshua to gift us continuously the Gift of Honour, is so He keeps the relationship growing – for a relationship to exist must involve ever deepening intimacy, or else the connect returns to that of a merely a friendship, that is able to keep the level of trust pegged at the same level.

for the depth of intimacy to keep growing, honour must be gifted and then received. It doesn’t matter how much the giver gifts honour, if the intended recipient doesnt’ open their hearts up to it, the relationship will lost its first dynamic and grow cold and become just a friendship, or even less.

The Gifts of Honour must be received so that the other heart is experienced in deeper ways, which keeps the first love allive and growing:

For he received honour and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”  2Pe 1:17 NIV