[Verse 1]
I am Thine, O Lord, I have heard Thy voice,
And it told Thy love to me;
But I long to rise in the arms of faith
And be closer drawn to Thee.
[Chorus]
Draw me nearer, nearer blessèd Lord,
To the cross where Thou hast died.
Draw me nearer, nearer, nearer blessèd Lord,
To Thy precious, bleeding side.
Our walk with God is a lifelong journey that is meant to be a maturing process as we become more and more like Christ. At each point in the journey, we’re to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Do we desire to be filled by the Spirit?
Don’t drink too much wine, for many evils lie along that path; be filled instead with the Holy Spirit and controlled by him.(Ephesians 5:18, TLB)
However, we’re filled to the degree that there’s space and after that level of filling, we will be ‘pruned’ to make more space. This is the continuous process for those who want to be filled. That’s the process of becoming like Christ – being conformed to the image and growing to the fullness of the stature of Christ. (Ephesians 4:13)
How does that actually play out?
While we all love the ‘mountain-top’ experience where life is great and all is going as we want it to go, the ‘valley’ experiences are actually the times when we are pushed to give up or grow up. I would say then that this period of recession is a good time for us to assess if we are serving the Lord or serving money.
Money as an entity is neither good nor bad. It is the heart of the person handling the money that is either good or bad and will cause the money to be used for good or bad purposes.
As a person in my 40’s, I’m at the age where my peers wake up one day and have a light bulb moment: “I have become my mother (or father, for guys).” This revelation for the most part is not usually accompanied with delight but rather with dismay. Why is this? It’s because we recognize negative character traits in us that we saw in our parent growing up…..traits which we despised and which caused us to declare we’d never be like them.
One would imagine I’m writing to rant about the ‘non-musicality’ and noisiness of songs we sing these days but when it comes to that, my present attitude is, ‘To each his own.’
No, my concern here is when our songs of worship ascend to God’s ears like noise. I stumbled on this verse of scripture and that set off my train of thought:
Take away from Me the noise of your songs, for I will not listen to the melody of your harps. (Amos 5:23, AMPC)
If we are honest with ourselves, we walk around with shoulders straight and heads lifted when we think we have a certain degree of material acquisition – we have money in the bank, a nice house and car (or two or three), children in expensive schools, nice clothes and accessories (and lots of them), etc. In the absence of these, we walk around with shoulders slumped and feel less than those who have these things.
My dear brethren, how can we define out lives by these temporal things? How can the value of your person be tied into the value of your material possessions or academic qualifications? Our heavenly Father thought we were of immense value when He sent His only begotten Son, Jesus, to die on the shameful cross for us. He placed that much value on us and bought us at a great cost – the blood of His Son. We are of great value in the sight of God with or without material possessions.
As I ran this morning, I encountered several others running/jogging but two caught my attention, perhaps because we were going in the same direction.
A guy in red showed up beside me, doing a fast run up the bridge. I admired his speed but wondered if he would be able to maintain it going up the steep end of the bridge. I wasn’t surprised when he stopped running and began to walk. Next thing, he started running again. Then walked. I realized this was his pattern. I wondered if he was a short distance runner…..a sprinter.
A key hindrance to our worship of God is our misunderstanding about the purpose of our creation. If all things were created for God’s pleasure and purpose, I think we need a mindset change regarding our lives and all their components.
We tend to live our lives like we are the owners of ourselves when the truth is that we are not ours…..and the sooner we acknowledge this truth, the better for us.
In marriage, a couple can get so caught up with the business of daily living and responsibilities that they lose the ‘fire’ (passion) in their marriage and living together becomes routine. Likewise, I find that it’s quite easy to get stuck in that place as a Christian where our walk with God becomes an exercise in rule-keeping and becomes very dry and boring. Granted, we do have rules and guidelines that are essential for our well-being and our outworking of the salvation of our souls but the question I ask myself is this – ‘Is God all about our keeping His rules?’
In Nigeria, we have people who have declared loyalty to one personality such that they would rather Nigeria fails than that the leader they didn’t vote for succeeds (being that his success is Nigeria’s success). This is the spillover of the attitude of Christians who follow human beings doggedly rather than follow Christ such that they are blind to the fallibility of their ‘leader’ and swallow everything they hear hook, line and sinker without going to verify for themselves with the help of the Holy Spirit, our Teacher, if indeed the scriptures say what they were told.
So I ask myself, ‘Are we to follow men or to follow Jesus’?