BLESSINGS
BLESSINGS
Good
morning everybody. Shabbat Shalom! Wow, this has been a busy week for me. On Thursday
a bunch of us got together at the church to put together 288 food baskets for
the needy. So the gym is full of bags of food. On Saturday at 09:00 the
community people will que up starting at about 8:00 and it will be a very long
line of people waiting for the doors to open. We let them in at a rate of about
35 or so at a time… serve a hot meal in the dining area… play worship songs as
they eat… visit with them and pray for anyone needing prayer and then they go
out to the gym and receive a wagon load of food. We have young people help them out to their
cars… engaging in conversation inviting them to church, praying with them, or
whatever the need may be.
We
always have a tent or canopy set up outside where we can connect people with
social services or job opportunities or other help. Our church puts one of
these on every month and on Thursday a full sized 18 wheeler backs up to the gym
packed full of pallets of food from the second harvest program. It is really an
amazing event and many people from the community join in along with five or six
prisoners from the local prison. We all have a jolly good time and hopefully do
some good as well.
Oh yes,
and on Wednesday I conducted my 3rd class on the Feast Days of the
Lord so the first part of my week was filled with study and writing for that
class.
Meanwhile,
on Friday (Yesterday) we started producing a worship CD with my very talented
and God fearing friend Abishai from Zambia. Abishai has a heart for worship and
has written and produced, I think he said 17 CDs. Many of them are in the African
language and they are absolutely amazing. With these worship songs that he
writes, he is blessing the people of Africa as well as America. Abishai plays keyboards for our worship team
at church and his abilities seem limitless. So we are having great fun putting
together this worship CD made up of songs I have written during personal
worship. I will soon share the miraculous story of his life.
When this
worship CD is finished, it will be published on You Tube and we will also put
it on my Blog site. I say “we” because Abishai has the technical knowhow to do
such things. He is a talented man of God. If you would like to hear His
anointed music you can go to You Tube and write in Abishai TMG
So
anyway, in my feverish rush to get everything ready for recording I have missed
a couple of days of writing.
In the
beginning Bonnie and I did not know precisely why God brought us to Tennessee. All
He told us is that we were to come out to be grandparents to our grandchildren.
That, of course is plenty good reason to move, but we sensed that there would
be more. We simply came because He told us to. It wasn’t easy, in fact it was a
very difficult trip and if it wasn’t for my son Zach and his wife Jamie, and my
grandsons Seth and Titus and Jamie’s parents we would have been in big trouble.
I have said this before but on the day the truck arrived with our furniture, Bonnie
was in the hospital with a Gall Bladder attack and having it removed. What an
ordeal. Not only that, but the big truck could not get up our steep driveway and
so we had to unload at Zach’s house and then take everything out to our house
in a smaller U-Haul truck… so they really went overboard in helping us because
most of the loads, they carried out to our house they did while Bonnie and I
were in the hospital. Wow! talk about a blessing.
God’s
blessings don’t always come wrapped in comfortable packages, nor do His callings
on your life always lead you through green pastures and beside still waters.
Sometimes you have to walk through the valley of the shadow of death and sometimes
the most obvious blessing is found in the fact that you actually survived.
Every
extraordinary thing that we do in life is usually done against the raging tide
of a flooded river… punctuated by times of empty silence where you look around
and ask, “Where’s God?”
God’s
peace is found in the midst of the storm. His love, in the encouraging words of
a friend… His opportunities in unexpected places… His guidance often carries us
over rough and rocky ground.
To be
ready for such things one has to listen to the still small voice of the Lord. For
instance: About two weeks ago the Lord prompted me to type out all of the words
to my worship CD and to write in all of the chords. This music had been sitting
on the shelf for quite some time and yet the Lord told me to get it all on
paper. Here we are, not two weeks later and suddenly an unexpected door of
opportunity opened up and now Abishai and I are recording these very songs in
his studio. Unbelievable!
God
knows things that we don’t know. Sometimes we obey His voice not even knowing
for sure why we are doing so. It is often later on that we discover what God has
done and when we discover it; that becomes one of His blessings. He is teaching
us how to hear His voice. He is teaching us to respond to His promptings even
when we have no idea why or how or when a thing will come to pass.
When a
person finally does the extraordinary thing, people will happily wish that they
could do something like that, but they often have no idea the years of blood
and sweat and disappointment and renewed courage and struggle and faith it took
to see a thing through to God’s timing.
God
serves no wine before its time and sometimes He inspires a project, say like a
worship CD, but then He puts it on hold, waiting for the writer of the songs to
come into spiritual maturity so that he will not abuse the anointing with pride
or careless self- interest. It is easy to say that we do everything as to the
Lord, but our words can fall on hard times. Success can be our greatest friend
or our worst enemy.
God’s work
with His chosen people Israel started with circumcision and ended with
circumcision. Just before they entered the Promised Land, all of those who had
been born in the wilderness were also circumcised. Likewise Jesus cleansed the temple
at the beginning of His ministry and again at the end of His ministry. What is
that telling us? The Holy Spirit circumcised us when we are born again with a
circumcision of the heart. He cleansed our temple of defilement. He called us
out of a pagan world to serve the living God. He cut us off from the world.
Now at
the end of time, as we stand here on the brink of eternity, Jesus is once again
circumcising our hearts and cleansing our temples. He is also going to cleanse
the church of its unholy trafficking, its money changing… its use of God’s
gifts for gain. Jesus is about to thoroughly purge His threshing floor so as to
change our motives for why we do anything. Is our security in money or in God?
Are we really actually doing what we do as unto the Lord, or is that just a
churchy sounding phrase we use to fake our humility?
You can
tell when something is real when there is no money involved. That is why both
Abishai and I put it out there to bless others without charge. After all, do we
really believe that God will take care of us, or was that just a slogan we
picked up along the way?
We need
to learn a whole new way of looking at life in these last days. We must care
not one wit for fame or fortune, or notoriety. We must guard our hearts against
pride for pride is the great destroyer… the key to all sin…and so we must be
circumcised… cut off from human motivation so that we can enter into the flow
of God’s anointing, His grace and His providence.
As
worshippers we put our entire heart and soul and being into worship. We abandon
ourselves unto God. We do our best to perform well because we are performing
for an audience of one…the King.
But
when the day is over, we fall on our knees and thank Him for His blessings and
we remind ourselves that we have been crucified with Christ, nevertheless we
live, yet not us, but Christ lives in us and the life that we now live in the
flesh we live by faith in the Son of God who loved us and gave His life for us.
Gal. 2:20
Have
you ever seen a proud flower? I didn’t think so… and yet it shines forth in
perfection and beauty… but its face is always toward the sun and it drinks in the
rain and it keeps its roots firmly planted in the ground. So also must be the worshipper.
Everything of value comes forth from God as a blessing.
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