First a praise:
God your timing is wonderful, your plan is excellent, you answer prayer faithfully and powerfully! Thank you for showing yourself to my family these last few weeks.
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I haven’t blogged much recently and the reason is because God’s been talking to my heart and teaching me things through multiple sources. I’ll try to share and be brief.
Missions is not the purpose of the Church.
Worship is.
Missions needs to have a focussed aim on glorifying God. The Church needs to have a strong understanding of what worshipping God is and then do it. As part of the Church I have spent 2 weeks learning the many ways to worship God. (please understand I do not mean singing but the true meaning of worship. These last few weeks we daily found a new way to worship God in action.)
I finally have put my finger on what has been on my heart, and here it is:
the easiest status check I know of one’s committment to worship is to ask yourself this question - “Why do you want to go to heaven?”
Honestly my first response was “because it’ll be paradise.” Not a bad answer but I realized as I contemplated it, that it was a purely selfish answer. (we can debate the good vs. bad of selfishness in another forum). Another answer came to mind “because it’s better than the other place.” Still I find that completely geared towards my own personal comfort.
Psalm 84, a psalm I’ve read nearly daily for a year now, has jsut popped out in yet another way to me:
1What a beautiful home, GOD of the Angel Armies! I’ve always longed to live in a place like this,
2Always dreamed of a room in your house,
where I could sing for joy to God–alive!
It strikes me that in heaven we’re going to be worshipping God forever. Why would we want to go to heaven if we don’t enjoy worshipping God? Why would we want to spend our eternity worshiping God if we haven’t fallen totally in love with Him, totally in awe of Him, totally filled by His presence?
Because it’ll be nice there? Because we’ll be without sin? Because we won’t have ’stress’?
I’m convinced that my life, my attitude, my inner self that no one else sees needs to be completely committed to denying my sinful self, and making choices that put God on the throne.
It’s hard, and it’ll get harder. I fail at it miserably.
I believe that until I can honestly answer the status question with “because I want to spent eternity worshiping God” that my character here on earth still needs to be worked on.
I can say today, that during my best moments, like I had in the last 2 weeks, that is my answer. But I slip up. I act in ways that do not tell others that God is God, but instead that I am God… or rather that I am the king of my own life.
I do not believe that I can change my heart manually, and so I pray that the spirit of God would influence my heart, and would strengthen me during my weak times.
That’s where I am at. Working with the Spirit to transform my life until every thought and action is one of proper worship instead of self-serving.
Our life, our ministry, and our aim as a family is to worship God through word and action and to diminish our own selves in such a way that when people look at us, they see God's glory reflected. We need your prayers to accomplish this feat, and rest assured we will also be praying for you.
