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 3^rd 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.