As you probably know, I was an idiot when I left the USA and
decided not to bring my guitar with me on this trip. After about 8 hours of being away from home, I began to
realize how badly I wanted to have a guitar with me this year. I looked for a while during our stay in
Tirgu Mures, Romania and finally found a store that sold guitars that were at
least decent quality. I purchased
my Stagg.
God has just done insane things in my heart through worship
since then. Getting to just play
my heart out and sing out praises, questions, hurts, and joys to Him has been
so life-changing for me on this trip so far. Worship time is when God has given me some of my biggest
revelations about who He is or how He loves me.
All during our time in Romania, God was just speaking to me
about how intensely SATISFYING His goodness always is. God really showed me that His goodness
can ALWAYS satisfy my soul.
This message has bled over into months two and three. However, in month two, Jesus began to
speak another revelation to me through our worship times. He showed me that His desire when He
tells me that He loves me is for me to be at a place where I can speak back to
Him that I KNOW that my Jesus loves me.
He wants me to be able to KNOW that I am loved.
Near the end of month two, God gave me this idea to start
tattooing the front of my guitar with these truths that He was giving me during
worship. So I went ahead and added
these two truths from months 1 and 2 to the face of my guitar.
I want to talk about the two tattoos that Jesus has given me
to add to my guitar during month three here in Nepal.
Many of the things that God shows me through worship end up
having a song associated with them whether that means that God gives me a song
of my own to write surrounding the promise or whether there is a song that
someone else has written that the truth comes through. God gave me a song of my own about
being satisfied by His goodness while He used a song by John Mark McMillan
called “How He Loves” to clarify the second truth that He gave me.
The first thing that He began speaking to me during this
month in Nepal was something He just slowly started giving to me during times
that I spent in worship. As I
would be worshipping, He would just give me pieces of this new song. Then, one day the song just came out
fully while I was spending time with Him.
I haven’t decided yet if I am going to try to record the song real fast
later today and attach it to this post or not but either way, the heart of the
song is that “Worship is a beautiful DUET of love.” The main line in the song is “You are the song that I
sing.” The meaning of this line as
I was understanding it was just that, when I am spending time in worship (aka
my whole life) the song that is coming out of my life is one that is glorifying
to God. Whatever I am singing, I
want it to be a song that expresses to Jesus how amazing He is and how much He
means to me. Thus, HE is the song
that I am singing. All my heart
wants to sing out is just WHO HE IS because who He is captures why I love Him
and captures His splendor. The
line “you are the song that I sing” captures the spirit of CAPTIVATION that I
have in my heart for Him. I am
completely captivated by who He is and what He has done for me.
One day though, I was singing this line over and over and
all of a sudden, Jesus just changed the line a bit. As I sang “you are the song that I sing. You are the song
that I sing. You are the song that
I sing.”, Jesus took it and changed my words. All of a sudden He gave me a revelation and I started
singing out “I am the song that YOU sing!” He was showing me that as I worship Him and sing out His
beauty and sing out how utterly captivated I am by Him, He was constantly
singing back to me how obsessed with ME HE IS and how utterly captivated He is
with ME! I am the song that comes
out of His heart! How insane is
that!? Seriously my heart and my
mind got blown as Jesus continued to give me words to the song. I started singing “this beautiful DUET
of love; this wonderful intertwining of melodies. I sing out my deepest love and CONSUMED, you sing a lover’s
song back to me.”
Guys, Jesus is consumed with love for me. His love for me doesn’t end and when I
worship Him and tell Him how much He loves me, His response is to sing back a
song of His love for me. Epic.
The second truth that God has given me this month has not
been an easy one. It has taken
some processing and has been something that I’ve really had to ask God some
questions about to make sure that my heart is in the right place. Sometimes Jesus likes to bring truth to
me slowly and sometimes He likes to just lay it out there for me and let me
work my way through it. This was
definitely one of those where He laid it out there for me and let me process
through it.
One day during worship, we were singing the song “I Exalt
Thee” which is just an amazing, old song about exalting God above everything in
all the earth. It is, plain and
simple, a song of worship. As I
was singing the lines “Thou oh Lord art high above the earth. Thou art exalted…”,
He just hit me with it. I heard
Him speaking to me that this is why He loves me. He loves me because it brings HIM glory.
This really messed with me. If this had been a person telling me that he loved me
because it gave him some glory, I would have immediately wanted to reject that
love. Through my human lens, God
loving me simply because it brought HIM more glory sounded like the kind of
love that I have no desire for.
But I knew that there was something more that God wanted to show me. Some new perspective that He wanted me
to wrestle for.
So God and I wrestled for a few days. I was just trying to understand how I
could still want to receive a love that was given solely for the glory of the
giver. I wouldn’t say that this
was a bad time of wrestling with God; it was just a necessary time of
wrestling. I absolutely still
believed that I wanted to receive the love of Jesus in my life but I just knew
that there was something here that Jesus wanted me to understand so that He
could take our relationship to another level.
During this same time, I was completely falling in love with
the Gospel. You can see the story
of that at the next blog I’m posting (or maybe the last blog I posted…who knows?). I have been telling myself the story of
the Gospel every day for a period of time now and every time, Jesus seems to
change it just a little bit. It is
SUCH a fluid and perfect and solid story.
One morning as I told it to myself, I recounted it
essentially like this:
“Before the earth began, God was there. He created the earth and He created man
for the sole purpose of glorifying Himself. He created man to be a mirror of His glory and He loved man
for how perfectly we reflected Him.
However, when man sinned, we no longer were able to reflect the glory of
God. God wanted so badly to be
able to see His glory reflected in us and wanted to badly for us to BE ABLE to
reflect His magnificence, that He sent His son Jesus to come to earth and pay
the penalty for our sin so that we could be made whole again and could once
again, reflect the glory of God.”
So there I am, walking back from the squatty-potty as I am
speaking this story out loud to myself.
Now sure, there are so many other facets to the story and, as God has
been showing me, there are so many different messages contained in the Gospel,
but this version just popped out of my mouth and, considering what I was
wrestling with God about, it kind of blew my mind.
I wasn’t taking the story back far enough in my head. I wasn’t remembering that God didn’t
even have to create me in the first place. I was forgetting that God created me in the first place with
the purpose of my bringing Him glory.
That is literally the summation of why I exist. How can there be even an ounce of
resentment in my heart for the love that I receive from God for fulfilling the
exact purpose for which I was created?!
Jesus has been rocking my world with this lately. I know that it probably seems like
something that I should have already understood but God is showing me what a
difference it is to KNOW something and to have REVELATION about something. I have probably KNOWN this stuff for a
long time. Sure, I knew that I was
created to glorify God and I knew that He deserved glory for the love that He
poured out on me. But it wasn’t until
Jesus gave me revelation about the purpose of why I have been created and why I
am loved that a passion was planted inside of me. I have a passion for glorifying the name of Jesus that
wasn’t present in my life before.
There is a fire inside of me that wants to fulfill the purpose for which
the God that I love created me! I
want to be a man who somehow reflects the glory of God in everything that I do
to the point that my entire life is sold out to giving glory to God.
The reality is that He legitimately does deserve all the
glory. And now I have a passion to
give it to Him. I love it so much
and I love that Jesus began this whole process with worship.
Worship is where it’s at my friends. There is something about putting
yourself in a posture of worship (figuratively or literally) that just invites
the Lord to start pouring out on you.
Worship is such a place of humility and there is no stronghold in our
lives that can stand against a true humility that recognizes the greatness of
God and our desperate need for Him.
Get your worship on is all I’m sayin. Love you guys.
