Rewind to Palm Sunday

These are some thoughts shared with our congregation on Sunday about the first Palm Sunday when Jesus road into town on a donkey in Jerusalem.  I was trying to put together worship songs and had been praying about making the morning special and then BAM! I finished playing one of the songs and was transitioning to the next and these thoughts came to mind.  I knew it was God’s voice illuminating these thoughts to share Sunday morning.  These thoughts touched me and so I’ll share them with you today too.

“I wonder what he saw when he looked in their eyes that day.

“Do you think that when he felt the excitement of the crowd he thought of the crowd he would see at the end of the week too?  Do you think when He heard people shouting blessings and “Hosanna!”  That he heard a different crowd shouting “Crucify him!”?

“And when they looked in his eyes what do you think they saw? (pause)  When he looked in their eyes I think he saw his mission, his purpose, his reason for it all.  I think when they looked in his eyes they saw goodness, they saw God, they saw Love.”

Praise God for His amazing love and sacrifice.

I love you, God!

words

I started thinking last night more about words and their creative power.  God spoke the world into existence.  Jesus was the Word become flesh.  It’s our prayers that bring about change, our communication, our words with God.  I was reading in Ezekiel this morning about the valley of dry bones being brought back to life.  God spoke to Ezekiel and asked Ezekiel to repeat what God said and when Ezekiel spoke God’s words the bones came together, flesh and tendons formed and then the breath of life came into the bodies!!!  Through the spoken word.

Our words have the same power, to bring death or give life.  God can create and bring life through our words.  I want to be a Word of Life bringer.

Anxiety, a gift.

I had a fantastic idea shared with me today.  God gives us the gift of anxiety as the Holy Spirit’s nudge and reminder to pray.  This just hit me as one of the most practical ways of looking at and dealing with anxiety.  I heard this four hours ago and already I’ve used it.  I think this could be a remarkable tool in my life.  Transforming worry into prayer.  Transforming worry into a reminder to pray for that specific situation!  What a wonderful idea!  Instead of spending my time in worthless fret I can spend my time building and conquering things with God!  This is incredible!  You try it to and let me know how it goes.

 

13.2

Last week when visiting NCU with my brother I got to go to their chapel service.  Mark Batterson, the speaker for that morning, shared something that caught me off guard.  In Isaiah God says that as high as the heavens are from the earth so are His ways from our ways, His thoughts from our thoughts.  Mark Batterson shared that our universe is currently thought to be 13.2 billion light years long.

This is stunning, sobering, humbling and faith building to me.  I’ve been praying to better understand the fear of the Lord and this helps me to understand in a stop me mid-thought way.  His thoughts are 13.2 billion light years bigger than mine.  He’s got a greater scope than I can possibly imagine.

My grandest thought doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of God’s thoughts.  If it’s not His thought that He’s given to me, it falls 13.2 billion light years short.  In my times of defeat and frustration I am humbled and my faith strengthened as I look at God’s wisdom compared to mine.  For the last week whenever I’ve come up against something seemingly frightening or too big I’ve remembered God, who called me and continues to put my days together, thinks 13.2 billion light years bigger than I do and my trust and hope is in Him.

God, forgive me for the times I’ve reduced you to human levels, the times I’ve thought of you as just a really smart human.  Forgive me for the times I underestimate you.  God help me to do this less and less and have faith in you more and more.

So just remember 13.2.

NCU

Sunday night I watched as my little brother took his first steps.  Yes, my mother and I watched as that 6’3” 18 year old boy, armed with only an overnight bag and winter coat broke into the world of walking on a college campus!!!  It was awesome!  The next day my brother, Craig, let me tag along with him on his campus tour of North Central University in Minneapolis, MN!

 

What a great school!  NCU has a beautiful, unique campus in the heart of the city and wonderful people!  I loved the atmosphere and community I felt in the hallways and skyways and classrooms and offices.  I got to go to their Monday chapel.  It was exhilarating to worship with so many college students and faculty and pastors visiting the campus.  The guest speaker was a pastor from DC who’s ministry and communication is gripping.  I felt such connection there.  I loved my school (Rock on Palm Beach Atlantic!), but NCU has a special familial quality, a familiarity that I greatly appreciate.  Yep, the warm fuzzies about a place I’d never really been before.  Yes, it was great.

Interface, lifestyle of worship

This past weekend Highland Church had the great blessing of hosting Interface, an amazing band from Ft. Myers, FL.  This team is not only amazing because their music is of high caliber and quality, but because their lives exude worship to the Lord.  From the moment they introduced themselves to me, I could feel the love of God that fills their hearts.  Their words, actions and attitudes reflect the love of Christ and let everyone know their worship to the Lord is genuine and continuous on and off stage.

 

What a great example of worshiping God.  The musical worship Interface creates grows out of the rest of their lives.  That’s what God wants from each of us, isn’t it?  He doesn’t want to only receive worship through our singing and clapping and raising hands on a Sunday morning, but to receive worship from our everyday interactions.  He wants us to be worshipping Him by showing His love to the world around us through our words, actions and attitudes.  When we truly live our worship to Him, our Sunday mornings become the celebration and culmination of the rest of the worship that’s been going on for the week.  That’s what I was able to see with Interface.  They lived worship to God and their musical worship on Sunday grew out of the lifestyle of worship they have.  Who do you know that lives the example of a lifestyle of worship?  How can we become better at worshipping through our words, actions and attitudes, our lifestyles?

 

It’s my prayer that we will be able to live that lifestyle of worship.  That our worship together on Sundays will become something extraordinary because it will grow out of the worship we’ve been living all week.

 

Something to keep thinking about.  If you guys have any thoughts on this please share them with me.  I want to be able to understand this concept of a lifestyle of worship even more.  Let’s think about this and live it out together.

 

Remedy

I’m sitting here at my desk trying to hold back tears right now.  Do you know the reason?  I am listening to the new David Crowder*Band cd and my heart is so full of admiration and adoration of the great Lord and Savior we serve, of His incredible beauty, grace and the privilege it is to serve Him and be used by Him to help our world out of the sickness of sin even while we still struggle against it ourselves.  What amazing grace.  God is good and I am so pleased that He has blessed individuals with the ability to take the most profound truth and knowledge and experiences and put them into art in novels like Ted Dekker’s The Circle Trilogy or into music like David Crowder*Band with Remedy.  Wow, this is beautiful.  I love you Jesus!