prayer coach

God enthrones Himself among the praises of His people (Psalm 22:3). The believers in the video below build a throne for the everlasting God within a mall in Beirut. In doing so they expressed their love of Jesus and His resurrection last Easter that brought beauty in a non-threatening way.

I encourage you to watch the video. Even though the song is sung in Greek and Arabic, their love for Jesus will boast your own worship this Easter. I have found the English translation and added it below.

Rough translation of what is being sung:

Christ is risen from the dead,
and by His death, He has trampled upon death,
and given life to those who are in tomb.

This day is the day that God has made,
let us be happy and rejoice in it.

Truly, He is risen!
Truly, He is risen!
Truly, He is risen!

“I am powerful, and what I believe changes the world!
So today I declare:
God is in a good mood.
He loves me all the time.
Nothing can separate me from His love.
Jesus’ blood paid for everything
I will tell nations of what He has done.
I am important.
How He made me is amazing.
I was designed for worship.
My mouth establishes praise to silence the enemy.
Everywhere I go becomes a perfect health zone.
And… with God
Nothing is impossible!”

Throughout the centuries the Church has been practicing corporate readings as a part of worship. Nowadays apart from corporate singing, this practice has waned.  Recenlty I found that my daughter has been reciting the above creed during her children’s church, and I couldn’t be happier. She is being trained to believe things about herself and God that is opposite to what I believed about myself as I grew up.

I grew up without much direction into who I was. I remember words that I was embarrassment and that I never do anything helpful. There were also circumstances that I didn’t know how to interpret, which spoke words that I was messed up, that I was unimportant, and that I was a burden. O, how imporant are the words that we say of ourselves. (My parents were not bad. I’ve made some poor choices in my words to my kids as well. The point is that words are powerful.)

God spoke creation into being. And having been made in His image our words create new realities. If we speak words that are in agreement with our enemy, then we create greater bondages for ourselves. I still have to work at releasing myself to enjoy things for fear that I may be an embarrassment to someone. I know successful people that are still trying to overcome statements of being stupid or being a failure. Our words create our realities.

image courtesy of Stephen Roach

For the past year, I have really been into Stephen Roach’s song, Room Enough to Dream. This song pulls at a core motivation in my life, which is that God can do immeasurably more than we can ask or think (Ephesians 3:20).

I don’t want to settle for basic Christianity. Jesus said He came that we might have life and life to the full (John 10:10). I want to live that. I want to enter into the lavish nature of my loving Father (1 John 3:1).

Steve Jobs once said that your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Let’s don’t waste our lives living beneath the life Jesus died to give us. Connect to the dreams God has placed in your heart. Connect to the whispers from heaven for you. Don’t settle for the day-to-day.

God is calling us out of our comfort zone into a life of complete surrender to the cross. – Steve Camp

Room Enough to Dream

Fields of Your presence
They are a spacious place
Room enough to dream
For the heart to play
I am setting out from the familiar ground
Too much more for me to see
To keep on hanging ‘round
And yesterday’s still mundane
Among the same old place
Our inheritance is much more than we’ve seen

Lord, You are our portion
But on this boundless quest
The only limit that you set
Is Your limitlessness
There is no too far
Only how will we go
I am stepping out into the unknown

This song is found Stephen’s album Closer to the Burning

• Prayer at its best is the expression of the total life, for all things else being equal, our prayers are only as powerful as our lives.
• God wants to be loved for Himself, but that is only part. He also wants us to know that when we have Him we have everything.
• The yearning to know what cannot be known, to comprehend the incomprehensible, to touch and taste the unapproachable, arises from the image of God in the nature of man. Deep calleth unto deep, and though polluted and landlocked by the mighty disaster theologians call the Fall, the soul senses its origin and longs to return to its source.
• [Intimacy w. God] can be such union as make miracles seem tame & [answers] appear short of wonderful in contrast.
• Every man is as holy as he really wants to be.
  
• Faith engages the person and promises of God and rests upon them with perfect assurance.
• Faith honors God by counting Him righteous and accepts His testimony against the very evidence of its own senses.
• Faith is at the root of all true worship, and without faith it is impossible to please God.
• For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he is his deep heart conceives God to be like.
• God is looking for those with whom He can do the impossible– what a pity that we plan only the things that we can do by ourselves.

image design modified from Michelangelo’s original

Worship music is one of the best ways to draw into the heart of God. In worship you find yourself expressing your desires for more of God. It is one of those times in life where you feel the love and gratitude you have for God welling up to the surface. This past Sunday at church, I was once again sensing my deep desire to live in complete love of my Heavenly Father. We were singing the chorus to Obsession by Delirious?, and suddenly I felt God was signing the same chorus to us with the same passion we were singing it.

Is that right? Absolutely! We love because God first loved us (1 John 4:19). Therefore, we cannot have a expression of love for God that is greater than any He has for us. There are so many comforting thoughts in this. We can never out-love God. We do not have to convince Him to love us. He will never reject our approach to Him (James 4:8). We can have complete confidence with God because He is incredibly in love with you.

Stop what you are doing for a couple minutes and take this in. Think about how much He loves you. He loves your heart, your laugh, your eyes. He loves hearing your voice, even if you are not talking to Him. You make Him laugh. He delights in you. The more you allow that to sink in, the more you will want to pray and spend time with Him.

One of people’s favorite characteristics of the Psalms is the raw honesty. In it you can find the highs and lows of human emotions to match however you are feeling. What I love about these writings is how the Psalmist allows his feeling to draw him to God and never away.

Psalm 13 was the place this first stood out to me. When you read the first 4 verses, you see David bemoaning his situation. How long, LORD? Did you hide from me? Have you forgotten me? Don’t you care that my enemy is beating me? You quickly feel David’s honest approach to God. He had no problem getting in touch with his feelings.

Then in my Bible, I have to turn the page to get to the next two verses. But I trust you. My heart is happy with you. I will sing for you are good to me.

The first time I read this, I had to check to make sure I did not skip a page. What happened? Where did this sudden change come from? Did God answer? Was everything better?

It seems that nothing changed, except David chose to trust God instead of his situation. Sure I feel crappy, but I know that God is good.

So often this is what we need to do. We need to choose that God is good over all our circumstances, so we can rejoice in His goodness even when things seem bad. There is a line in the song Love Comes Down by Brian Johnson, which says, “I sing out to remind my soul. I am Yours.” The world is trying to steal our attention from God, and we need to remind ourselves that God is trustworthy, that He is good, that He is exactly what we need. Review the goodness of God in your life. Don’t forget. God is good.

Yesterday Bethel Church of Redding, Ca released there latest worship CD, Be Lifted High. So far, I have liked it very much. One of the songs on there, Furious by Jeremy Riddle reminded me again of something that keeps coming to me during worship: God’s love for us is the love He wants from us. Look at the chorus from this song.

His love is deep, His love is wide
and it covers us
His love is fierce, His love is strong
It is furious.
His love is sweet, His love is wild
And its waking hearts to life

So often we sing of God’s passionate heart for us. We need to see that this is the same heart He wants in us for Himself. God is looking for people who pursue Him with the same intensity that He pursues us. God’s deep longing for more of our hearts is the same passion God wants us to have of Him.

So often we ask God to show us a glimpse of Himself. Let us see your face. Let us see more of your glory, goodness, love, what have you. God wants to give us these things. But, He also wants to be wanted and known. We don’t need to twist God’s heart to show Himself; it is a natural response to our offering ourselves to Him.

You want to know God, then give God more of you. Love is always two-sided. You want to reveal yourself to the one you love and you want to know more of the one you love. God will freely respond on His side. Will our response be as freely given?

image courtesy of Passion 268 Blog

Why is it so necessary for us as creatures to exalt, magnify, and worship our God? So often I hear it is to get a proper perspective. We are nothing without God. We must decrease and God must increase. Is this really true? Are we really nothing without God?

I don’t believe it. What would God want with creatures that were worthless and could offer Him nothing?

God loves us because He has put something in us that delights Him. To believe that we are nothing without God would lead you to believe that non-Christians have nothing of value to offer the world. Do we really believe that non-Christians have given nothing of value to the world?

We exalt God because it gives God room to exalt us.

We are called a royal priesthood and are seated in the heavenly realms in places of honor and authority. God is looking to advance us in His kingdom, but He will keep us from attaining a position higher than our view of Himself. As we raise the bar of how we view God, we are also raising the bar of how we can view ourselves.

We have long had a incorrect view of humility. Humility is not thinking less of ourselves, but having a proper view of ourselves. And, a proper view is thinking of ourselves as God thinks of us. We are His friends and lovers. He is leading us into a place where He can have complete trust in us to be a perfect representation of Him on earth. When people see us; they see God.

If we are walking around thinking low of ourselves, people will not see a friend of God – they will see a slave. We do not exalt God to create distance between us but actually to draw us closer.