Intimacy with God

Jul

2013

The Father Heart of God

Yesterday my oldest son was having car trouble and I was the first call he made. As I was driving to help him I got a revelation.

I have always said your revelation of the father heart of God increases when you get married. It increases again when you have children. Yesterday I realized it increases again when your kids move out of the house.

Since my oldest moved out he’s been very busy. Working full-time, doing the band thing, managing several relationship including a fiance. I’m not the top of his priority list and rightfully so. He’s growing into a fully self-sufficient adult.

So every time my phone rings and I see that its him I smile. It must be how the Father feels when we call on him.

As I was driving to help him out I realized I was grateful for the car trouble. I didn’t cause it but it initiated a contact with me from one of my sons who I love very much and miss him being around all the time.

As with any analogy it’s not perfect and can be taken too far. Just a little insight into a greater revelation of the father heart of God.

Sep

2009

Silence

When was the last time you sat in total silence?

The greatest struggle in my life is finding a quiet place to sit in total silence waiting for the still small voice of my Father.

I love our house the back of it faces the front range of the Rocky Mountains and often in the morning I will sit at my kitchen table gazing at the beauty of God’s creation. Katharine Lee Bates was on Pikes Peak when she wrote the lyrics to “America the Beautiful” and I am blessed to have Pikes Peak framed in my sliding glass doors . But we are also only 200 yards from I-25 and the noise that comes with it. I have learned to ignore it somewhat but it is a significant enemy to silence.

When Kim and I were first married we talked about having a house full of activity. A place where people would find refuge. A place where all our childrens friends would want to come. God has answered that prayer. Our home is full of activity with people coming and going. We love it but it presents a unique challenge when searching for a quiet place.

In Chuck Swindols book “Intimacy with the Almighty” he lists four disciplines essential for intimacy two of them are silence and solitude. Which to me are almost the same thing. In A.W. Tozer’s “The Purpose of Man” he lists seven keys to intimacy and the very first is quiet. Tozer says “I put quietness first bcause unless we can find a place without distraction, the rest is undermined.

Once we have made a practice of dwelling in a quiet place we are more easily able to dwell in the secret place. Brother Lawrence in “The Practice of the Presence of God” says “what offering is more acceptable to God than thus throughout the day to quit the things of outward sense, and to withdraw to worshp Him within the secret places of the soul?”. Unless we have practiced being in a quiet place it is very difficult to dwell in the secret places of the soul throughout the day. Cultivating intimacy and recognizing the voice of God only comes through time and proximity.

I know I’m not alone in my struggle to find a quiet place. We must fight for it, make it a high priority, or we will slowly drift away from that most precious dwelling place where we are changed from Glory to Glory, where we become “like Him”, where we find rest, where He is my strong tower.

David understood the importance of dwelling in the secret place. I believe it was this practice that made him a man after God’s own heart. It was a recurring theme throughout his life and his writing. Among others he wrote:

He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High, shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty (Psalm 91:1), One thing I have desired of the Lord, That will I seek: That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in His temple (Psalm 27:4).

My prayer for you, and for me, today is that we would get a fresh revelation of His love and passion for close intimate fellowship with us. Make it a priority to find a quiet place this weekend and then go there often.

Blessings as you walk in Him.

Jun

2009

Bored With Contemporary Worship

I ran across this post from TheWorshipCommunity.com and thought it was worth discussing,

Bored With Contemporary Worship:

Musicademy caused quite a stir when they published this thoughtful post recently.

We don’t want to say it. It sounds like we’re consumers, wanting more entertainment, and we know that’s not the problem. Worse, it might sound like we’re tired of God – when we know we’ve only just scratched the surface of the infinitely creative, dynamically relational being he is.

Hence the collective sigh of relief in the London School of Theology Deep Calls to Deep conference when the outgoing Director General of the Evangelical Alliance, the highly respected and deeply passionate Joel Edwards, used the ‘B’ word without apology or caveat. ‘We’re bored in worship’. You could almost see tense shoulders sag and bright eyes perk up. We’re allowed to say it Our worship has become boring’ It was like permission, not to whine or complain or place blame people do that enough about worship anyway, but to admit the weaknesses in our contemporary corporate worship lives and to begin to address authentic, fundamental and God honouring change.

His full quote expresses it best:

“There is something about the charismatic movement which brought something new and fresh. It came out of something new God was doing.

I am thirsty for something new again. I have to confess to you that mostly on a Sunday morning I am bored And I wonder if one of the reasons why people are not singing is because they too are bored.

It may be a good thing to discover what you would write down if you spent two months noting what songs are sung on a Sunday morning. I cannot believe that so much of our repertoire has become so narrow. So predictable. That the formation of what we do on a Sunday is so utterly predictable. And I think to myself, how come the God who has formed the constellations and put the stars in place and has a new idea every second, doesn’t have something new for us for a Sunday morning? I wonder whether he might not be vaguely bored too.”

And so a conversation is stirring between worship leaders, pastors, songwriters, congregations, and radical thought the communities we are trying to reach, about how we might innovate our worship. No one person, movement or website has all the answers, but we’re pretty sure the questions begin with how we get out of this predictable, narrow, reality-dodging, inward looking spiral towards a creative, indigenous, multi-sensory, outward-looking expression of worship.

via Bored With Contemporary Worship : TheWorshipCommunity.Com.

The original post has some thoughts regarding the problem and solutions but I didn’t want to post them here. I wanted to hear what you have to say about the subject.

Are you bored with Contemporary worship? Do you long for something new and fresh? or are you very content with the way it is?

Jun

2009

To Find Him Where He Can Be Found.

God speaks to me sometimes by sending the same message in different ways over a period of time and then I have what I call a coalescing moment where it all comes together.

I just had one of those when I received a my daily email from the Copelands and from a friend on Facebook from Zimbabwe. We have never met and I don’t know why he found me and asked me to be his friend. He has 6 friends and I am the only one not from Zumbabwe.

Since launching into ministry in January I have had an interesting ride. I am living the dream but have been plagued with fear and doubt shortly after making the decision. Building the kingdom has been in my heart for over 10 years. At a workshop for worship with Job Vijil I knew this is what I was born to do. God has always been faithful so why the worry?

I say He is my strength and my shield, my ever present help in time of need. I’m standing on the Word but I haven’t spoken in in weeks. Instead I have been speaking death. A couple weeks ago my amazing wife scolded me strongly for the way I’m talking and she is exactly right. She is such a blessing to me. The Word of God is the final word but I must put it to work by speaking it out.

I am reminded of a short prayer by Hans Ur von Balthasar I apologize if I’ve posted this before:

Harassed by life, exhausted, we look about us for somewhere to be quiet, to be genuine, a place of refreshment. We yearn to restore our spirits in God, to simply let go in him and gain new strength to go on living.

But we fail to look for him where he is waiting for us, where he is to be found; in his Son, who is his Word. Or else seek for God because there are a thousand things we want to ask him, and imagine that we cannot go on living unless they are answered. We inundate him with problems, with demands for information, for clues, for an easier path, forgetting that in his Word he has given us the solution to every problem and all the details we are capable of grasping in this life.

We fail to listen where God speaks; where God’s Word rang out in the world once for all, sufficient for all ages, inexhaustible. Or else we think that God’s Word has been heard on earth for so long that by now it is almost used up. That it is about time for some new word, as if we had the right to demand one. We fail to see that it is we ourselves who are used up and alienated, whereas the Word resounds with the same vitality and freshness as ever; it is just as near to us as it always was.

Hans Ur von Balthasar, Prayer. Trans. Graham Harrison (San Fancisco: Ignatius Press, 1986)

Today I committ to being in His Word and daily seeking Him in the secret place for His direction. I encourage you to do the same.

Blessings as you walk with Him.

Intimacy with God

The Father Heart of God

Silence

Bored With Contemporary Worship

To Find Him Where He Can Be Found.

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