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Archive for May, 2011

Passion, purpose, and the habit of His presence

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

Lets cut to the chase - are you hungry for more of God? And by hungry I mean really hungry - really really desperate? Do you wake up in the morning excited by the thought of spending time with God? Do you force yourself to stay up late so that you can pray some more? In short - are you passionate for Him?

Passion seems to be one of the foremost character traits God wants us to show Him, it seems to be a quality He looks for in the people He uses to carry out His purposes and plans. It seems to be something that He scours the earth to find, and something He loves to give to us when we ask for it.

For example, take David: the “man after God’s heart”. Despite everything wrong that David did in his life: murder, adultery, lying, stealing, God still described Him as a man after His heart.

Have you ever stopped to think about what that means?

To me, this doesn’t mean David was someone who HAD God’s heart (where the word after means followed), but it means he was someone who WANTED God’s heart (where the word after means chased). David was a man who chased after the heart of God - someone who wanted the things God wanted, who asked for the things God wanted, in short he was passionate for God and the things of God.

And because of this, God built His redemption plan around David. Get that? David’s passion for God turned God’s heart towards him so much that He built the salvation of the entire cosmos around him.

That is the power of passion.

And if passion can catch God’s attention, isn’t it something we should be asking for? Isn’t it something we should be longing for?

A while ago I tried to make it my conscious prayer to ask for more of God. So that meant every time I caught myself thinking about anything, I would use the chance to ask Him for more of Him. Every time I found myself at a loose end, or in between tasks, I would ask for more of Him. As I started to pray that, I found myself becoming more passionate. The more I asked for God, the more I wanted Him. It didn’t happen overnight, and its still going on, but by simply asking for God I found myself wanting more and more of Him, I found myself becoming more and more passionate about Him.

But passion by itself can be misguided. It needs to be directed to the right place. We need to be passionate for the right things.

A while, ago I sounded out the idea of a mission statement for the church. At the time, it was a way of directing my passion to the right place. Of giving me something to pray towards, of something to expect. I ended up with this: the purpose of the church is:

“To defeat sin and death, and liberate the whole cosmos”.

I’ve found lots of new ways of expressing this in the last few months, but the core of it still remains - I want God to come and liberate the cosmos, starting with the place where I find myself, here in Ireland, in 2011, specifically in Belfast. I want Him to bring life in all its fulness, I want Him to overcome the works of the enemy in our land, I want His love, grace and mercy to flow out and bring a harvest of people into His family. I want the sick to be healed, demons to be cast out, the dead to rise and signs and wonders to happen all around us. I want places of poverty and dejection to become places of joy and hope and belief. I want the fulness of His Kingdom to come here and now.

LORD, I have heard of your fame; I stand in awe of your deeds, O LORD. Renew them in our day, in our time make them known; in wrath remember mercy. - Habakkuk 3:2

My purpose is that God moves here and now. Not in some distant past. Not in some time to come. Here and now. In this day, among this people, using people like you and me to make it happen. And you know what - that is not just my purpose, its our purpose, it is our destiny.

And because of the rising passion inside me, its easy to pray that this purpose will happen. In fact, I need to pray. I want want to see things change, no I need to see things change. I’m no longer satisfied with the status quo. Its not good enough any more.

It seems when our passion aligns itself with God’s purpose, the hope of seeing His Kingdom come to earth grows.

But passion and purpose alone are still not enough, there is one missing ingredient that we need - habit.

Call it rhythm, call it discipline, call it whatever you want, but we need to get in the habit of being in God’s presence. We need to get comfortable being with Him, and we need to get used to hearing Him speak. We need to get past the discomfort of wondering how to respond to Him, and become perfectly at peace being with Him and surrounded by Him.

You see - His presence changes us and changes our circumstances.

God’s like that. Just being around Him makes us better humans. So we need to make a habit out of being around Him, we need to make it a regular milestone in our lives. And I’m not talking about just singing a couple of worship songs and ticking the box, I’m taking about really pressing into Him, really seeking Him and not relenting until we find Him.

We need more of His presence.

We need meeting with Him to become a habit, not a freak occurrence.

The world needs us to meet with Him, so that we can reflect Him better to the world.

We need to petition Him day and night to come and show us His glory, to come and move in His power.

We need to show Him that we are desperate and hopeless without Him.

Tags: habit, passion, purpose
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The art of perseverance (or how not to give in)

Sunday, May 1st, 2011

Do you remember the days of youthful excitement and enthusiasm; when you felt like you and God were a superhero dream team that could do anything and everything together? Remember when you had dreams the size of mountains, and absolutely nothing seemed impossible; when you were going to be a history maker, a world changer?

But somewhere along the line that passion began to fade, and the dreams started to die. For a while you held on to hope, you fought to stay excited, but then life began to take its toll. After all there’s bills to pay, work to be done, people to see and TV to watch. And I don’t even have children - goodness knows how you cope when there’s clothes to wash, homework to be done, games to play and mouths to feed.

With the world around us constantly trying to get our attention, waging war against us and our time, its hard to find space for the God who created it all. Never mind trying to stay excited and passionate about the things He’s done when the next thing demanding our time needs done right this minute.

Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called
1 Timothy 6:12

I think I’m at an age now where I need to hear these words; where I need to make a stand and make the choice to not give in. It would be so easy for me to let life take over, to let how the world tells me to live my life take over, but I know I am designed for greater things. I will fight because I know that my Father loves me, and because I know what my Father wants of me.

I feel like I’m going through a moment of relearning and reawakening to the things God has for me, to the plans and dreams He has spoken over my life. His love for me has moved from being a theological but slightly unbelievable concept to a every moment of every day reality. I’m rediscovering who I am through Him and in Him. I’m fighting for more of him, I’m desperate to see more of Him, my honest desire is for more of Him. I hope I have the maturity and experience to know that more of Him is not going to look how I thought it would 10 years ago, but I still dream of His Kingdom coming, I still long for His glory to fall. Those aren’t distant unattainable concepts, they aren’t things of the past, they are the present reality of a people who seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness. They are ours for the taking.

Blessed are those whose strength is in you, who have set their heart on pilgrimage
Psalm 84:5

I’m in it for the long haul. This isn’t a 1 year project, a 5 year project, or even a lifetime one. Moves of God can take place over generations. Reawakening and rekindling a body of people takes time. I’ve set my heart on pilgrimage, trying to strike a balance between patience and expectation, trying to be faithful in the small things and the big things. Making sure I rejoice in the small victories and the big ones.

Let me give you an example, when we first moved to the Shankill spending any time with God was difficult, very very difficult. The realities of the place and the apparent lack of God’s presence made me feel like I was knocking my head off a brick wall. 3 years later, its changed - I’ve a real sense of freedom, an ease almost of spending time with Him. It took work and perseverance, but its a small but extremely significant victory in my life.

Its so easy to spend our time looking at what God isn’t doing that we don’t acknowledge and rejoice in the things He is doing. Pilgrimage means just that - marking out the milestones on our journey, reminding ourselves and reminding God of what He has done and what He said He would do. The Bible is full of people reminding God and God reminding people - He loves to tell a story, and He loves to hear our stories. Its a part of the cycle of life with Him.

I’ve taken some time recently to look back and I can honestly say I’m amazed by what has happened in the last couple of years, never mind the last five or six. God has been so faithful, so incredibly faithful.

This has turned into some confessional-biopic piece that I never intended! I’m only talking about me because I hope it resonates with you, because I hope it inspires you, because I hope it calls you on.

We need to persevere. We need to not give in or give up. We need to keep dreaming big with the full expectation that he will complete the work he begun. He is so far from finished, in fact he’s only just warming up. We need to ask for and call down the kingdom of heaven to here on earth, and everything that comes with that. We need to call for His glory. We need to believe in the impossible.

A verse that I keep coming back to (and have done for years) is Malachi 3.10:

Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the LORD Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.

Persevere.
Give Him it all.
Don’t hold back.
Don’t give in.
Give your full offering.
Give your full tithe.

He wants to open the heavens, He wants to give us everything we dream of.

And so much more.

So remind yourself of the dreams you had - whether you are living them out or whether you still hold them close. Remind God of what He said He would do. Remind yourself of what He said He would do. Believe that it can happen. Ask Him to make it happen. If you have no other words, then pray the only thing I seem to be able to pray right now:

God. We wait for You to come and show Your Glory here today.
Alleluia. Come.

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