Removing Locks from my Heart...

This past week truly has been amazing! In my last post I was talking about the wilderness. I have been in the wilderness, for sure. I made the decision to face the wilderness and stop trying to run away from it and was pleasantly surprised! There are still things that I need to deal with (as always) but I feel like at one level or another, I have started to break through a major wall in my life... a wall called doubt. I doubt my ability, my calling, the gifts the Lord has given me. I doubt whether or not Jesus wants to work in and through me and whether he even can. I doubt in so many things and if it's not one thing, it's the other. I'm always doubting and second guessing. I need to stop it! More particularly when it comes to worship. Worship is something that has always captivated me, pulled on my heart, but it is something that I have to fight hard for. I know that God wants to use it in a powerful way in my life, so consequently the enemy is bent on stealing it from me... and if he can't do that, he'll try to get me to misuse it. I feel like God has begun to recenter me in the area. Praise God! Jay's friend Mark Thorton came to speak to CLC this week. He said a few things that I believe was really the Lord speaking to me for the time that I'm in right now:

• My job as a worshiper (or worship leader) is not to usher others into the presence of God, but to open the eyes of others so that they can encounter his presence.
• The presence of the Lord is the subject of reality. The glory of the Lord is the object of reality.
• Don't be guilty of not entering in because of other people.
• Opportunities of a lifetime must be seized in the lifetime of the opportunity.
• I have as much of God as I want.
• The source is always more important than the resource.
• It's more important that Jesus receives my praise than it is for me to give praise.

He asked us these questions:

• Should God's presence be my whole pursuit?
• What is preventing me from encountering God?
• When I say I want more of God, does my life reflect that desire?
• Am at a point where if God never does anything else for me, I will still serve him and give him everything I am?
• What am I excepting from the enemy?

These questions and many others from the Holy Spirit have been mulling around in my brain this whole week as I really look inwardly and ask for change. The first half of CLC I think was kind of a desert season for most of us, but as the first week of our second semester has rolled on through, I really believe that God wants to take us all to a new place, individually and as a group.

"But whatever former things I had that might have been gains to me, I have come to consider as [one combined] loss for Christ's sake. Yes, furthermore, I count everything as loss compared to the possession of the priceless privilege (the overwhelming preciousness, the surpassing worth, and supreme advantage) of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord and of progressively becoming more deeply and intimately acquainted with Him [of perceiving and recognizing and understanding Him more fully and clearly]. For His sake I have lost everything and consider it all to be mere rubbish, in order that I may win (gain) Christ (the Anointed One), And that I may [actually] be found and known as in Him, not having any [self-achieved] righteousness that can be called my own, based on my obedience to the Law's demands (ritualistic uprightness and supposed right standing with God thus acquired), but possessing that [genuine righteousness] which comes through faith in Christ (the Anointed One), the [truly] right standing with God, which comes from God by [saving] faith. [For my determined purpose is] that I may know Him [that I may progressively become more deeply and intimately acquainted with Him, perceiving and recognizing and understanding the wonders of His Person more strongly and more clearly], and that I may in that same way come to know the power outflowing from His resurrection [which it exerts over believers], and that I may so share His sufferings as to be continually transformed [in spirit into His likeness even] to His death, [in the hope] That if possible I may attain to the [spiritual and moral] resurrection [that lifts me] out from among the dead [even while in the body]. Not that I have now attained [this ideal], or have already been made perfect, but I press on to lay hold of (grasp) and make my own, that for which Christ Jesus (the Messiah) has laid hold of me and made me His own. I do not consider, brethren, that I have captured and made it my own [yet]; but one thing I do [it is my one aspiration]: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the [supreme and heavenly] prize to which God in Christ Jesus is calling us upward."

Philippians 4:7-14 (AMP)

Climbing Walls,

Elyxis