“Who then is able to stand against Me? Who has a claim against Me that I must pay? Everything under heaven belongs to Me.” – Job 41:11
“Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.” – Revelation 4:11
There is none greater than You! You alone own the heavens and everything under it. Your throne cannot be challenged, Your authority cannot be undone, for You alone are God. You will always have the victory in any battle, You will always have the final Word.
All of life is from You and for You. I have breath because You breathed life into me, and it is by Your will alone that I take my next breath. Life is found in no one else but You.
And no one other than You is worthy of my praise. All glory. All honor. All power. It is all owed to You alone, for You alone created heaven and earth and all that is within them.
My life is in You and belongs to You. Because of You I have been forgiven and redeemed. Because of You I have been made new, and am now free of all condemnation, free of the chains of sin and death that once had me bound. Because of You, I have eternal life.
Today, I will give thanks, You owed me nothing, but You have given me everything. How great Thou art!
Again, God is specific with timing. The ark came to rest on the 17th day of the 7th month. In the 601st year (of Noah’s life), 2nd month, 27th day of the month, the earth was finally dry again. Noah and his family had been in the ark for about a year. I can only imagine the smell.
God knows the timing of every single thing in your life. If you are wondering when, or how long, then I invite you to rest. Stop wrestling with the timing of it. Whatever it is, it will not be one minute late, or go on one minute too long.
Noah and his family didn’t know how long they would be in there. I assume they had friends and neighbors who perished in the flood. Their home and all that was known to them was gone, and they had no idea what life would look like outside of the Ark. Maybe they were grieving. Maybe they were scared. Whatever they were dealing with, it was no vacation.
Sometimes being rescued is hard. Life as we know it changes and it can be painful, and it always comes with a loss. In fact, we all have, or have heard, testimonies of life going downhill fast once we surrendered our lives to Jesus. If you are in the hard part of the rescue, stay put. Dry ground is coming.
“Then Noah built an altar to the Lord.”
Altars. Places of sacrifice. Worship. Devotion. Repentance. Thanksgiving. They represent our lives before God. The sacrifice on Noah’s altar was a costly one, given that there were only so many animals left on the earth. And that thought quickly became this one –
There are things that come with us in our rescue so that they can become our sacrifice on dry ground.
So, here come the questions, more for me than for you, but I think we could all stand to answer them: What came with you when Jesus declared you saved? Have you built an altar for your pride yet (independence, selfishness, anger, etc.)?
Can you look back at the difficult seasons and find the altars you built to worship God?
That cancer thing tho, right? Beastly is what it is. I bet you know someone who’s fighting it. We could stand on a busy street and point in any direction and find someone who is doing battle with the cancer Goliath on some level. Maybe that someone is you. Can I say it sucks? I think I can (my blog and all). And I’ve had cancer, so lemme just tell you that sucks is the right word. I was lucky. My cancer was found very early and a hysterectomy took it down. No chemo, no radiation. But the battle was still there, because fear was still there. And ain’t that just a fight and half when the diagnosis comes? Yeah, it is.
Right now, I have a friend who is in the thick of battle with a very aggressive breast cancer. She’s a Jesus loving gem of a girl. Wife. Mother to 3 very young kids.
Everyone’s fighting stance looks different. But one thing is certain – worship is a vital position for us to take during any battle. Worship is an incredible weapon, and I can attest to its power to bring fear to its knees and make faith the biggest giant in the room.
Heidi posted something to the Caring Bridge site that I think will bless you, even if you aren’t in a cancer war at the moment (because everyone is fighting some kind of battle, right?). I got her permission to reprint it here for you:
Surrounded
Journal entry by Heidi Wenzel — Mar 5, 2019
“Another round of chemo tomorrow. It always has me getting ready. Gearing up. Ready to face another round of battle. But our family has a particular way that we fight our battles. And Jon and I have tried to cultivate a particular family culture in our home. Through good times and bad. If not every day, at least every week. We worship. At home. With the kids. We put the music on loud and we sing and we dance and we run and we twirl and we bow with our faces to the hardwood floor and we leap and we clap and we worship the King of Kings.
And we believe. We believe that our worship impacts the King, the kingdom, and our very own circumstances. We believe that it blesses our hearts, changes our perspective, and powerfully affects our circumstances. And in this particular season we believe our praise and worship defeats cancer. Would you dare to worship with us? Believe that our worship could conquer this enemy. This cancer. This would not even be close to the first time that the worshipping is a catalyst for the conquering. One of my favorite Old Testament stories is found in 2 Chronicles 20 about a king named Jehoshaphat and a battle with vast armies from neighboring countries. A battle. A battle won by praise and shouts, not by weapons and strength. A battle that this leader was wise enough to recognize was not his, but the Lord’s.
It’s so worth reading the account for yourself, but here’s the summary. King Jehoshaphat receives a report that multiple armies are on their way to conquer them. The first thing this king does is call a fast and all the people inquire of the Lord as to what they should do. All of the people. One of my favorite verses of the story vs. 13, “All the men of Judah, with their wives and children and little ones. Stood there before the Lord.” That’s right, the little ones too. Our little ones are with us, looking to the Lord, seeing how He will answer, what He will do. Anyway, a prophet stands up and declares to the whole assembly,“Do not be afraid or discouraged because of this vast army. For the battle is not yours, but God’s.” (Verse 15) He says the Lord is going to deliver them, they don’t have to be afraid, they just need to stand firm and watch the Lord gain the victory for them! So then the king goes on and does something so incredible. So significant. So counterintuitive. He prepares his forces by sending out the worshippers as the front line. First. He calls to his people to have faith, and acts out his own faith by not sending out the greatest fighters or the biggest weapons, but rather believing what God has said and sending out the singers. The worshippers. “Jehoshaphat appointed men to sing to the Lord and to praise him for the splendor of his holiness as they went out AT THE HEAD of the army saying: ‘Give thanks to the Lord, for his love endures forever.” And just as the Lord had said, the people of Judah watched the Lord give them the victory. God himself set ambushes on the armies and they literally ended up killing and destroying each other rather than Judah. Worship and victory.
Would you be so bold as to worship with us? Not just pray, but worship with us. Worship in the midst of a cancer diagnosis. Worship through a hard season of chemo. Worship as the army surrounds and invades. Worship as the waters rise and the fire surrounds. Worship as even the waves crash over us. Would you worship with us? It’s what we are doing. It’s what we have chosen to do. Give him our praise. Give him our worship. “
If you want to read their story, pray for them, or just follow along on their journey – here is the link to Heidi’s Caring Bridge site:
It started a couple of years ago, actually. This feeling would creep up whenever the talk turned to more of God. More of His presence. Something about that didn’t sound right to my spirit, but I didn’t know why.
Not too long ago, a well-known preacher (one of my favorites, in fact), spoke about this very thing, this hunger for more of God’s presence. I understood the point he was trying to make, but that creeping uneasiness was now full-on stalking me. Still, the very next time I was in prayer, I told God I just wanted to be in His presence, told Him I wanted more. So He said something back to me.
Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? – 1Corinthians 3:16
Presence. Dwelling in me.
“I am crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”—Galatians 2:20
Where is there more than that? Where will I find more presence than Jesus living in me? Just what is this hunger for more?
Why are we hungering for something we have dwelling within us? I think if we’re going to be hungry, raise our hands and fall on our knees and cry out ‘more Lord’, we should know why, shouldn’t we?
Maybe not. Maybe there is no rhyme, no reason. Maybe God follows the rule to ‘always leave them wanting more’. Maybe we want all of Him and all of Him doesn’t fit inside jars of clay. Maybe we all just instinctively know that there must be more.
Maybe we need a different question. Maybe God asked me a question that won’t leave me be. Maybe you need to hear it too.
How are you stewarding the presence you already have?
My soul feels sucker-punched. And since we’re wanting more, there’s more.
What are you doing, in the presence of God?
What are you saying, in the presence of God?
What are you watching, in the presence of God?
What are you thinking about, in the presence of God?
How are you loving, in the presence of God?
How are you serving, in the presence of God?
How are you living, with Christ in you, the hope of glory?
Everywhere we go, we bring the presence of God with us. How are we stewarding that presence? Who around us is hurting? Who is struggling? Who needs encouragement? Who needs to see light in the darkness? Who needs to witness the goodness of God in a corrupt world? Who needs to see the integrity of Jesus, the faithfulness of Jesus, the willingness of Jesus to draw near when others pull away?
Then there’s this. Are we entering the room with ourselves in mind, looking for our own needs to get met, wanting, needing attention? Do we come in complaining, discontent, or distracted? I’m talking about the grocery store. The gas station. Our jobs, our churches. I’m talking about our homes.
Or this. How powerless are we living? How addicted are we? How much weakness do we claim? How defeated do we feel? How less than, unworthy, unwanted, unvalued do we believe we are?
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with hungering for more of God. There is a very real ache in the Beloved, a longing, a yearning, for Jesus. But I think we may have become preoccupied with believing the answer is found here, usually in a really good worship service/revival meeting/conference. But let’s just be honest about this thing.
We go to all the worship services and are genuinely moved to worship. We attend the conferences and leave with our treasures, our takeaways, our nuggets to ponder. We attend all the things, go where we think His presence is going to be ‘poured out’. And often, we do encounter Him through conviction, through worship, through a revelation of truth.
But it doesn’t make it go away, does it? We still long for Him. We still want more. We’re still hungry for His presence.
Because this isn’t heaven.
Until we see Him face to face, something in us will continually long for more of Him.
But I think God may be asking us why we want more when we don’t really know what to do with what we already have within us.
I think He’s asking what we’re doing here, in the presence of God.
“Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.” Mark 12:41-44
Oh woman, did you even know that your two cents mattered?
Once again Jesus has all but stopped my heart with who He is. He sat down to watch and then with His crazy, upside down kind of love He showed her off to His disciples. Showed off the one who gave the least, while others were giving the most. God made much of a poor woman and her pennies.
We all feel poor with no more than pennies, really.
(But if grace were pennies we could buy the world.)
And here is what I want to know. When she opened her hand and let her pennies fall, did she know it mattered?
And it led me to the real question hidden in my heart.
And so for days this widow with her pennies has been following me around until I finally saw what He wanted me to see. I saw Him sit down to watch, and I saw that it was the giving of all she had that moved His heart.
And I knew my heart had been asking the wrong question. It is not ‘do I matter?’.
What matters to You?
It is the giving of everything, everything I have to live on. That matters to Him. That moves Him. When all I have is two pennies of hope at the moment, I can give it away and move the heart of God.
Because I get poor in hope sometimes, don’t you?
I can be so very poverty stricken in patience, in love. “…but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.”
Every drop we pour out from our places of poverty matters to Him.
Every word written in the middle of the night because all we have are these words. Words that leave us vulnerable and exposed, and when we are done it feels like all we’ve given is two cents, buried under the wealth that others have given. But because it was all we had and we offered it up, it mattered to Him.
(I have to believe the words matter to Him, or they don’t matter at all.)
I may not move you. And if I matter to you, believe me I am grateful. But I have to wrestle that need to the ground and pin it tight.
Because what matters to Him has to matter more. Moving His heart must consume me more than moving yours.
Her pennies made no difference in anyone’s life, but they were all she had so she gave them up and it moved Jesus.
And it reminds me of another woman.
“A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.
…Then He turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss,but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown.” Luke 7:37-48
Tears and perfume. Her love and her worship. It made no difference to anyone there, but it was all she had to give, so she gave it, and it moved His heart.
More than I want to matter, I want to move His heart.
Sometimes that’s all we have to give, isn’t it? Our love and our worship, coming out of imperfect, messy lives. Lives that matter to Him. Lives that make a difference because He is with us in the offering of our poverty. Whether we see it or not, feel it or not, our lives do matter. We matter. The enemy may tell us otherwise, but he is lying and he knows it. Because he was there that day.
He knows Jesus didn’t die for something that didn’t matter.
I am prone to forgetting so I want to memorialize my very first mission trip. I want to put my memories in writing for my grandchildren and their children, but also for me. Because remembering is sweet.
(Ignore the dates on the photos. They were all taken in March, 2007.)
Sudan – Part 3
The final days of my trip to Sudan were spent in Bor, the birthplace of the second Sudanese civil war. We were there to host a retreat for church leaders and the local church. We stayed at the church “compound”, made up of numerous huts.
My first sights of the compound can really only be described through the pictures.
A child at play
She captured me, but I could never get her to not be afraid of me
A tired mom and her kids
The women looked so tired, and they were very shy. But they served us so graciously, and when we were leaving, they seemed genuinely sad to see us go, and kept thanking us for coming.
We were there for two days. The first day started with everyone gathering in the church for worship, and then the teaching we had prepared to encourage them.
The church at Bor
Inside the church, gathering for the retreat
Yes, it was hot inside the church, but not as bad as you would think.
The look on this woman’s face says so much to me. Life is hard for her, and she has endured much. It is etched into her. One of the most difficult things for me to realize was that, though they are part of the Body of Christ, they rarely received encouragement from the rest of the Body.
And I thought of how accessible it is to me. How much I take for granted the fact that at any given time I can go to my computer and have dozens of people praying for me if need be. How much encouragement I receive just from the Christians in social media. I thought of how I never feel alone, or forgotten by the rest of the Body of Christ. But they do. They told us more than once that it meant so much to them to have us come because it let them know someone else cared about them, that they had not been completely forgotten.
The worship band and his drum
The worship has to be one of my favorite parts of the trip. I did not understand their songs, but I knew Who they were singing about, Who they were worshiping.
It was beautiful to watch, beautiful to be a part of these brothers and sisters as they bowed before God.
On the second day, after the teachings, we all went outside. The temperature that day was 103 degrees (F). For three hours we all stood outside, taking communion together and praying. What were we praying? That God would forgive the bloodshed of war, and heal their nation. They felt it was time to take back the land for the purposes of God. The civil war that began right there in Bor, lasted 22 years and cost the lives of millions of people, and displaced millions more.
But they loved their country, just like I love mine. And this confronts my pride head on. Because I, like the majority of Americans, have believed my country to be the greatest on earth. In my own arrogant patriotism, I believed that, if given the chance, anyone would want to live here. But on that day, I witnessed a people who didn’t want to live somewhere else. They loved their country, and they wanted to see it healed. I saw men and women spend three hours in prayer, intense prayer, in intense heat, because they believed God could redeem their nation. I saw them weep in the dirt over the sins of war and the lives that had been lost. I saw them do the only thing they knew to do for a nation that had been ravaged, both physically and spiritually. They fervently prayed. I want to be like them when I grow up.
Pastor Dave led us off
The sound of her weeping and praying filled the air
Taking back the land
What a privilege for me
And in the end, God is worshiped
That night, we all sat around a fire. Well, our team sat around a fire with the men of the church. The women stayed with the children. At some point, I saw them preparing mats outside, and then they, the women and children, all laid down to go to sleep.
But before that, we had an impromptu worship service, as all of a sudden one of the men began clapping and singing, and soon others had joined in. It was a joyous sound and soon they were dancing and laughing and singing praises. I remember sitting there watching and listening and thanking God for this gift. It was beautiful.
The next day, we began the long journey home. Back to Uganda, then to England, and finally landing in Chicago. The very next day I was driving to Kansas to my mother’s funeral.
Putting this trip into words and photos has been good, as I let God speak what He wanted to speak to me through my memories. It has also been sad, as I look at some of the faces and remember their painful stories. But mostly, it has reminded me that God’s world is big and I am small and He is the same on one side of the earth as He is on the other. His Spirit is at work in His people, and in the nations and right here in me.
One last look…
We had brought bottles of bubbles with us for the children, much to their delight
He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.” (Genesis 22:5)
Abraham was about to go “over there” to sacrifice his promised, beloved son, Isaac, in obedience to God, and he called it worship.
But where’s your boombox, Abraham?
I believe we (the Church) have redefined worship. To many, if not most of us, the word “worship” is synonymous with “music”. In fact, you rarely hear those two words separately anymore in the Church. We have worship songs, worship music, worship bands, worship services. We even have worship encounters.
But do we have worship?
As I searched the scriptures, I came to a startling conclusion: music was not used for worship in the Bible, it was used for praise. But we have so joined those two separate and distinct acts, that they are now defined by the type of music being played. If it’s a fast, upbeat “make you wanna dance and shout” song, then we are praising. If it’s a slow, contemplative, “make you sway and/or cry” song, we’re worshiping. Sunday services generally begin with “Praise and Worship”, and are even specifically formatted with a little “praise” at the beginning, some “worship” in the middle, and some really good “praise” at the end.
Am I right?
“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”
In both Hebrew and Greek, the word means to bow, to prostrate oneself in homage to God, and in both the old testament and the new testament, worship involved sacrifice. In the old, they offered sacrificed animals. In the new, we offer sacrificed lives. Neither has anything to do with music.
Worship cannot be defined by a few hours on a Sunday morning of people singing, swaying and dancing to the latest worship songs. It can’t be defined by how well we were able to “enter in” based on how the band played and how the sound system was working that day.
Worship belongs to God, not to us. When we make it something we do for us, it is no longer true worship, it is self-worship.
Worship is not an experience or a response to a song. Worship is obedience to God’s command.
With all of that said…I LOVE the music in the Body of Christ! I love the gifts that God has given to the songwriters, musicians, and singers, enabling us to make a joyful noise, to praise Him, to exalt Him. And the win/win is that when we do that, we feel good, and we experience His presence because He inhabits the praises of His people.
Church, use the gifts of music that God has placed in you. Praise God, exalt God, make a joyful noise. Even make a slow, beautiful noise that makes me cry and put my face to the floor. But don’t continue to call music “worship”, and don’t keep defining worship as an “experience” with God.
So here is the realignment, for me: Do not reduce worship to the realm of music. Do not seek to worship God because you need to feel something. Learn to worship Him with your life. In the quiet spaces, in the difficult times and the good times, in the wilderness or on the mountain…worship God with a sacrificed, obedient life.
“Offer your bodies (the complete man) as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.”
If I continually seek after the next great song so that I can “experience” worship, but give little attention to my own obedience, to my own heart condition, then I am not a worshiper, I am just someone who likes good music.
Church, if you pour all your resources, time and efforts into creating the ultimate “worship experience” on Sundays (or any other day), but you are not teaching your congregation to live sacrificed, obedient, holy lives…then you are not a worshiping church, you are simply a church that has really good music.
Challenge (I’ve done this and, admittedly, it’s not easy, but it will shift something in you):
For one week, worship without music. In your quiet time with God, when you would normally pull up your playlist to start things off — don’t. No “worship music” for one week. Instead, ask Him how you can obey Him that day, and then do it. Ask Him if there is something you are holding onto that needs to be sacrificed as an act of obedience. Then make the sacrifice. Worship God.
Why are we hungering for something we have dwelling within us? I think if we’re going to be hungry, raise our hands and fall on our knees and cry out ‘more Lord’, we should know why, shouldn’t we?
Or this. How powerless are we living? How addicted are we? How much weakness do we claim? How defeated do we feel? How less than, unworthy, unwanted, unvalued do we believe we are?
Karla Jo Wasion 