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

For all relationships to exist at a deeper level than just an association of connection, onto a friendship and then onto a relationship, it requires the ever development of ‘trust’, ’til the most exposing – a heart-to-heart trust.

When there is merely an association of connection, i.e. a business relationship where nothing personal is involved, written and witnessed commitment in a contract is required to uphold the accountability and security.

The next level up, is friendship where only limited personal involvement is entered into, for there is the beginnings of deeper inner exposure between two parts that displays a more casual dependence on each other, beginning to be based on experiencing an inner trust of commitment.

For example, when men went to war, they started off with a shallow and thin layer of trust. A trust that was more a ‘hope’ that the other soldier would perform to ensure safety and victory. But after a hard battle, when the grit and courage of others performance was witnessed because it was desperately needed, deep heart-to-heart bonds were established that endured for the rest of their lives.

as a relationship moves to more of a heart-to-heart trust, because more and more of a person’s life is in the hands of another, physically, emotionally and spiritually, then a foundation of trust becomes the critical foundation on which the connection and dependence is needed.

This trust is not only on the physical performance of a person, but also requires the display of emotional stability, but most importantly of all, the deep experience spritual goodness of righteous integrity, that there is no unseen or unrevealed evil or wickedness that will endanger.

Prior to The Fall, where Satan led them to believe that there was a dark side to the lover of their soul, they immediately shut their heart down and even justified their right to be angry at Him and therefore no longer bound to obey Him. How many times have we withdrawn our own hearts from someone that is close and dear to us, over one, in reality, small experience of disappointment?

We are very susceptible to the slightest discovery of evil present in the other heart, because trust based on the wounded and vulnerable hears in our fallen world is very fragile. The more we live from an expectation of trust, the more senseitive we need to be to protecting our wounded, fragile and vulnerable hearts and being.

So God takes dedicated time, gifting us with the “Gift of Trust”, based on His consistent experience of goodness and righteousness, teaching and enabling us to trust Him and therefore allowing Him to open our hearts to Him without fear.