One thing I have come to realize on the Race, is that our worship songs are actually prayers. So do you mean it? Do you mean the words that you sing weekend after weekend? Do you mean things like,
Consume me from the inside out, Lord.”
“I am in love with You There is no cost
I am in love with You There is no loss
I am in love with You I want to take Your name
I am in love with You I want to cling to You Jesus
Just let me cling to You Jesus”
“Strip everything away, till all I have is you.
Undo the veil so all I see is you”
“I will waste my life I'll be tested and tried
With no regrets inside of me to find I'm at Your feet”
“Here I am, down on my knees again, surrendering all.
Surrendering all.”
“The pathway is broken and the signs are unclear and I don’t know the reasons why you brought me here. But just because you love me the way that you do I’m gonna walk through the valley, if you want me to.”
“You can have all this world, but give me Jesus.”
“I set my heart on a pilgrimage, through the valley of weeping I will go. I set my heart on a pilgrimage, until I am here before God in Zion.”
“You are my everything, all my hope is in you.”
“I need you to soften my heart and break me apart. I need you to open my eyes and see that your shaping my life. All I am, I surrender. Give me the faith to trust what you say, that your good and your love is great. I’m broken inside. I give you my life.”
“Set a fire down in my soul, that I can’t contain, that I can’t control. I want more of you God. I want more of you.”
I surrender.
I give you my life.
Your will above all else.
You are worthy of it all.
He is worthy of it all, all of our life and love and dreams and passion and trust and glory and honor. He is the pain and the joys and the trials and tribulations. He is worth it, but oh how often we forget this in the middle of trials and tribulations, and we forget we prayed these prayers. We prayed for him to be glorified above all else, because when we were singing it we are often looking at him. To gaze at Him and see Him as He is, there is not greater pleasure. That is when it is so easy to sing these things and mean them, because we see the truth. When we are in the desert or the valley, they become more difficult to really mean because we are blinded by our situations. But that doesn’t take away the truth of the words or the impact of them.
In my right state of thinking, I know that singing and praying these things is worth it, because His love is so great. Nothing compares to His love. But I am not naive, I know that these prayers hold a cost, my very life. These prayers will take me to places that sometimes I don’t want to be. Into discomfort for the sake of the Name, sometimes into persecution and trials. But then, I am just becoming blessed, because that is how the Kingdom works.
If only I could remember His goodness all the time. If only my memory wasn’t so terrible and I didn’t loose sight of His love, His beauty so easily. He is my great reward, in this life and the next. And until I see him face to face, I will continue to pray the risky prayers, sing the dangerous words, the ones that take me further away from comfort and mediocrity and into passion, fire and impact.
Lord, hasten the day of your return, when every tear will be wiped away and I rest in your embrace forever and ever. But until then, I will continue to sing.
