A New Song

I just finished writing this about 20 minutes ago.

What do you think?

For Your Name

There is a name

That is higher than all other names

Greater than all human minds can explain

With peace that does pass all of our understanding

And grace for the world to be loved in full

Oh what joy there is

Embracing we are His

Now my soul can sing I live

You are the light that brings hope to my life

By the strength of your word I am led in the truth

Of the One who gave all of the life that He lived

So that we could have all that we need

There is a price that was paid

With the life that He gave

Rescued the world from all sin

Now we can boldly enter in

Oh what joy there is

Embracing we are His

Now my soul can sing I live

You are the light that brings hope to my life

By the strength of your word I am led in the truth

Of the One who gave all of the life that He lived

So that we could have all we need

You are the Way that I choose to follow

Guiding me on in Your love

You are the life that I choose to follow

And all that I am seeks to give You praise

You are the light that brings hope to my life

By the strength of your word I am led in the truth

Of the One who gave all of the life that He lived

So that we could have all 

Here is my heart for the King

Take it all everything

Oh the life that I bring as a pure offering

Holy and righteous by the blood that was shed for the world

So that we could all join in redeeming the earth

For Your name

Some Inspiration

From the book "The Furious Longing of God" by Brennan Manning:

"Paul wrote in Philippians, "He emptied Himself." He cried from His heart, nails in His hands, and poured out His blood that we might believe His love for us. Significantly, Jesus chose the giving tree, His cross, as the demonstrative sign of His absolutely furious love for men and women. In the words of one early church father: "the mightiest act of love ever to arise from a human soul."

How is it then that we've come to imagine that Christianity consists of primarily in what we do for God? How has this come to be the good news of Jesus? Is the kingdom that He proclaimed to be nothing more than a community of men and women who go to church on Sunday, take an annual spiritual retreat, read their Bibles every now and then, vigorously appose abortion, don't watch x-rated movies, never use vulgar language, smile a lot, hold doors open for people, root for the favorite team, and get along with everybody?

Is that why Jesus went through the bleak and bloody horror of Calvary? Is that why He emerged in shattering glory from the tomb? Is that why He poured out His Holy Spirit on the church? To make nicer men and women with better morals?

The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand new creations. Not to make people with better morals, but to create a community of prophets and professional lovers, men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who would live in eve greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all, the very heart and mystery of Christ, into the center of the flame that consumes, purifies, and sets everything aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love.

This, my friends, is what it really means to be a Christian. Our religion never begins with what we do for God. It always starts with what God has done for us, the great and wondrous things that God dreamed of and achieved for us in Christ Jesus."

Denial

"Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it." - Matthew 16:24-25

We can't truly follow Christ unless we are denying ourselves. 

In Galatians 2:20, the verse I shared in my last post, Paul, with all his heart, chooses Christ as the model that he is seeking to be like. He recognizes Christ's life as the perfect example of how he wants to live. He knows that in order to be anything like his Lord, he must deny his selfishness and seek to follow in the same steps, being even willing unto death. In doing so, he identifies himself completely with Christ. 

So we too, as followers of Christ, must join in the same actions of our Lord. We must deny ourselves and take up our cross and crucify our selfishness there. For without denying ourselves we forfeit the right for Christ to work through us. We have a sinful nature that only seeks ungodly things, so we must not give it control. For without denying our selfish strivances all we will be doing is just stacking up all these things that make us look spiritual, but all they've been is for our own benefit. All we've done is just built up our religiousness.

Often I lose focus and just go with what's easiest because sometimes it's really hard to deny myself. It's difficult to focus when I'm tired. But I must do what's hard and difficult. My soul's health is begging me to. When I deny my selfishness, I am closer to being truly human as God intended in the beginning and closer to being fully redeemed as I will be in the end.

Following Christ isn't easy sometimes because it involves me moving. It requires me choosing to inject actions of seeking Him into my every day.

It's what it means to be a real follower of Christ, to be seeking Him continually. For in seeking Christ I admit my dependence on Him, denying the lie that I can do any good on my own strength.

So to deny myself is to be in a growing relationship with Christ. It is to commune with Him on a daily basis, getting to know more and more of His heartbeat and learning to let our hearts beat more and more in tune with His. To deny myself is to pray the prayer Jesus told His disciples to pray: the "Lord's Prayer" in Matthew 6:9-15.

To deny ourselves is to admit that without His leading, we'll go the wrong direction.

If we would just look, we would see that He is fully there and ready, waiting for us to acknowledge Him and to embrace His love that seeks to teach and guide us in our day.

"No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money" - Matthew 6:24

If we're really called to love Jesus Christ above everything else, as He said in Matthew 10:37-38, we must choose who we're going to please. I think Jesus is saying that we can only hold our highest devotion for one thing. He is God and deserves our utmost. The Christian life is about full devotion. The Bible says that we should be fully devoted to things, like our family and friends, but our utmost devotion is to be held for the King of Kings. We are to regard the most love for Him.

I think Jesus' lesson in Matthew is totally Him looking out for our best interest. His commands aren't to keep us from enjoyment or fullfilment. His commands are for our enjoyment and fulfillment! When He says that the most important commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind; this isn't just something that is required of us as followers of Christ. It's not because God need's all those things from us. It's because God knows that our wholeness is dependent on our giving all of ourselves over to Him. He knows that we need as much of Him as possible if we are to stand strong and progress in our faith.

"We have a God who is jealous of other gods not because they threaten Him, but because they threaten us." - Dr. Bob Laurent

The shape and beat of one's heart is determined by the allegiance which rules it. Whatever one's utmost loyalty is to, that's what they will in some way resemble.

May we embrace His command to deny ourselves, for it is solely out of His immeasurable love for us that we might live a fulfilling life.

The Voices In My Head

"What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?" - Matthew 16:26

I know most of the time we usually view this verse as: You can gain the whole world, its knowledge and wealth, but it can't buy your way into heaven. You will lose your soul if you're only seeking what the world can give you. Which I fully agree with. But also, how detrimental can it be, in the context of gaining the whole world, even for one who's chosen Jesus Christ, to get caught up in seeking man's praise instead of God's. If you're only doing Christian things because you want people to think you are holy, instead of being in response to God's goodness, then you've lost a pretty big part of what it actually means to be a Christian. Like I said in my last post "Religion & Relationship", there's a difference between living a religion and living a relationship. You could have the whole Bible memorized, but what's the use if it's just head knowledge. What's the point if you haven't moved what made sense in your head into your heart and acted upon it? To only know facts about God is not really knowing Him at all. Christianity is never just lived on the outside, it's lived from the inside out.

You may have gained tons of Christian-looking things, but when it comes down to it, you came about them in the wrong way.

We deplete the strength of our souls when building on sand a faith of outward appearance.

"For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God." - Romans 2:28-29
On your own, you cannot change the shape of your heart. The Heart Creator is the only One who can shape the heart. You might be able to say the right words and do the right things when everyone is looking, but they mean nothing. Change on the outside is pointless without change on the inside first. Real change on the outside only comes from change on the inside.

When we fear man above God, we only strive to look holy. Our holiness is hollow.

But when we fear God above man, we seek to find our image, our purpose, our self worth in Him. We live from the heart and our holiness is legitimate. We live out of what Christ has called us and changed us to be. We can continue to embrace the life, that by His death, He offers us.

So may our lives not be ones of seeking man's approval, seeking to look holy in their eyes, building a false Christianity. For we will fall short and end up losing ourselves in the process.

May we seek to find our identity in Christ, the One who has called us by name, who sees us as His sons and daughters. May we seek affirmation from the One who's counts highest above all else, the One who has died to set us free from the captivity of thinking that we need to be more than we are, that we're not good enough. Jesus Christ loves us for who we are right now. We were made righteous by the shed blood of our Savior. "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." - 2nd Corinthians 5:21

We are who He says we are far beyond what man thinks. His voice matters most. When a person hears the affirmation of God, their lives change.

So may we learn to quiet ourselves so that we can cut through the distracting voices that are so loud, the distractions that tell us that we aren't meeting society's standards, that we don't have enough and aren't good enough. This is the lie from hell that deceives our hearts, pulling us into the hopelessness of trying to please man. Living this way only leaves us broken.

We are His creation! So let us fully embrace the truth that the Creator of love, the One who spoke the earth into existence, the One who created us to be in relationship with Him, loves us with all He's got. We won't need anything else because we'll be able to rest in a peace that passes all understanding knowing that the God of the universe is holding us so very close to His chest, never letting us go.

Galatians 2:20 - "Christ's life is my example. I identify myself completely with Him. indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important than I appear righteousness before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to even impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not "mine", but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. I am not going to go back on that"

Religion & Relationship

Being a legitimate follower of Christ can be an extremely hard thing to do when you've convinced yourself that knowing things about God is the same thing as actually knowing God.

Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad thing to know things about God. It's a really good thing actually. But if we are "trying" to purify our souls only by growing in our understanding "about" God, then something must change.

Trying implies the action of earning on our part, and we must learn the truth that salvation is by faith alone and that all the trying in the world could never purify our souls. Recognizing Jesus Christ as the only One who takes away the sins of the world and embracing Him as our Savior and Lord is how our souls are purified. Letting Him be what we can't be and do what we were never meant to do, and accepting His free gift of salvation that covers us and cleanses us making us white as snow is how we are made holy. If we want to really know God instead of just knowing about God, we must have a relationship with Him.

My belief is that Christianity is never meant to be lived as a Christian religion but as a Christian relationship. The difference being, that Christian religion is often non-personal and all about everything you have to do. And the latter, which is rooted in intamacy and is all about what He did for you.

What He did for us was completely selfless.

That's true relationship...putting others above yourself.

"Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves." - Romans 12:10

So to have a relationship with Him we must hang out on a regular basis. We must converse with Him often. How can you get to know someone if you never talk to them?

You could know every detail about who I am- my name, my favorite music style, my family members, my favorite food, where I like to hang out, my age, what makes me happy, and on and on. You could know every detail about me, but you still don't actually know me.

The more we study the Scriptures the more we see that it's full of stories about a God who desires to be close with us. We see that we were created for the purpose of being in relationship with the Creator and joining Him in His plan of love.

Before it was called Christianity, Christ followers were part of "the Way". It's because it was something they gave their lives in their entirety over to. It became a new way to live. Like the band Switchfoot sings "There's a new way to be human". Christian religion is something we do when it works best for us. Real Christianity is a life style, nothing less.

He gives us the choice to let Him completely immerse every aspect of our daily lives.

Will you let Him?

May we seek to grow deeper and deeper in relationship with our heavenly Father as we also grow in the understanding of who He is and what He's done for us.

Hillsong London

Hillsong London is coming to GCC!

Get your tickets soon cause they are going fast!

Go to www.gccwired.com and click on their link for ticket details.

When: Tuesday, April 21st, 7pm
Where: Granger Campus of GCC
Who: YOU and Hillsong London 

New Song Lyrics

FOREVER

Teach me Lord, your love to see

That I'd pursue You endlessly

Give me understanding to follow You

Let me not build my life on sand

But on Your path we walk hand in hand

Oh and I will learn to wait on You

And I will sing to the One in my heart

And You will bring everything You are

And I will rest in unchanging grace

For Yours is the honor, the glory and praise, forever

Give me life in Your holy word

Raise Your servant so You may be heard

Speak oh Lord as I incline my ear

Lord I long for what is good

To follow You oh as I should

For to live in You is my delight

And I will sing to the One in my heart

And You will bring everything You are

And I will rest in unchanging grace

For Yours is the honor, the glory and praise, forever

Forever and ever Your kingdom will reign

With all of creation Your power proclaims

The fame and the glory surrounding Your name 

As nations assemble to sing Your refrain

Forever and ever Your kingdom will reign

With all of creation Your power proclaims

The fame and the glory surrounding Your name 

As nations assemble to sing of how great You are 

And I will sing to the One in my heart

And You will bring everything You are

And I will rest in unchanging grace

For Yours is the honor, the glory and praise, forever

Sue Monk Kidd's Prayer

Tonight I pray this prayer of Sue Monk Kidd's as my own.

"God, I don't want to live falsely, in self-imposed prisons and fixed, comfortable patterns that confine my soul and diminish the truth in me. So much of me has gone underground. I want to let my soul out. I want to be free to risk what's true, to be myself. Set free the daring in me-the willingness to go within, to see the self-lies. I'll try to run away, but don't let me. Don't let me stifle myself with prudence that binds the creative revisioning of life and the journey toward wholeness.

I'm scared, God. Make me brave. Lead me into the enormous spaces of becoming. Help me cease the small, tedious work of maintaining and protecting so that I can break the masks that obscure Your face shining in the night of my own soul. Help me to green my soul and risk becoming the person You created me to be.

Tomorrow I may regret these words, but tonight I speak them, for I know that You're somewhere inside them, that You love me and won't leave me alone in their echo."