Give us a heart of compassion/For a world without vision

God put this song in my heart as I was praying for Malaysia yesterday. It just played on and on till I felt like God didn’t want me to waste any more words in prayer but just quiet down before Him and sing those words with faith and expectation.

Even when we were supposed to be praying for Singapore, my sis was saying, “Let’s just pray for Malaysia, we’re always praying the same things for Singapore”, but we did pray for Singapore and when we finally got to pray for Malaysia, we broke down as we poured out our hearts to God.

I don’t know how to put this but I don’t feel any anger or bitterness towards the people behind the attacks because those churches were just BUILDINGS. The real body of Christ CANNOT be confined to a building. Instead all I felt was compassion was them. I felt afraid for them for committing such a ridiculous act, I was afraid of the judgment that would fall upon their lives, I felt like I should somehow intercede for their souls the way Abraham interceded for Sodom, to pray that God would reveal Himself to them, to pray that their eyes would be opened to see that loving and fearing and respecting God is not just about calling Him by the right name, but in KNOWING Him as a person. When we know God as a person and have a real intimate relationship with Him, we know that even the absurdest man-made law cannot prevent God from moving when He wants to, and that even all the most beautiful names of God cannot quite convey His beauty and majesty. All we have would be a simultaneously quiet and fierce awe of Him in our hearts that can only be expressed with silence.

Anyway, as I was reflecting on all that has taken place, I felt like I could identify with Jesus’s words on the cross for the first time. And it was when I first repeated these words in my heart to God, “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they’re doing” that God started pouring out His heart for these people unto mine.

For a while I’ve been afraid to step into the things that God has prepared for me, but I now know that if I don’t, there will be no rest in my heart, because God will not rest until His people return to Him.

***

Lord pour out your spirit
On all the peoples of the the earth
Let your sons daughters
Speak your word of prophecy

Send us dreams and visions
Reveal the secrets of your heart
Lord our faith is rising
Let all heaven sound the coming of your day

CHORUS:
Theres gonna be a great awakening
Theres gonna be a great revival in our land
Theres gonna be a great awakening
And every one who calls on Jesus
They will be saved

***

And this is a brilliant paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 13 that Daniel wrote! More than being brilliant and filled with truth though, it is also full of heart – a heart that sincerely desires what God desires.

Our Final Priority (Paraphrase)
10 01 2010

If I have the language ever so perfectly and speak like a pundit, and have not the love that grips the heart, I am nothing. If I have decorations and diplomas and am proficient in up-to-date methods and have not the touch of understanding love, I am nothing. If I am able to worst my opponents in argument so as to make fools of them, and have not the wooing note, I am nothing.

If I have all faith and great ideals and magnificent plans and wonderful visions, and have not the love that sweats and bleeds and weeps and prays and pleads, I am nothing. [I LOVE THIS SENTENCE!] If I surrender all prospects, and leaving home and friends and comforts, give myself to the showy sacrifice of a missionary career, and turn sour and selfish amid the daily annoyances and personal slights of a missionary life, and though I give my body to be consumed in the heat and sweat and mildew of India, and have not the love that yields its rights, its coveted leisure, its pet plans, I am nothing, nothing. Virtue has ceased to go out of me.

If I can heal all manner of sickness and disease, but wound hearts and hurt feelings for want of love that is kind, I am nothing. If I write books and publish articles that set the world agape and fail to transcribe the word of the cross in the language of love, I am nothing. Worse, I may be competent, busy, fussy, punctilious, and well-equipped, but like the church at Laodicea—nauseating to Christ.

You are the Rock that never fails

Glory and Power be/To You the only one King

This is such a beautiful version of the song. Kari’s is still my favourite but Meredith Andrews does it beautifully too.

Oh wow #786237267

“Moses saw the oppression of his people and felt certain that he was the one to deliver them, and in the righteous indignation of his own spirit he started to right their wrongs. After he launched his first strike for God and for what was right, God allowed Moses to be driven into empty discouragement, sending him into the desert to feed sheep for forty years. At the end of that time, God appeared to Moses and said to him, ” ‘…bring My people…out of Egypt.’ But Moses said to God, ‘Who am I that I should go…?’ ” (Exodus 3:10-11). In the beginning Moses had realised that he was the one to deliver the people, but he had to be trained and disciplined by God first. He was right in his individual perspective, but he was not the person for the work until he had learned true fellowship and oneness with God.

We may have the vision of God and a very clear understanding of what God wants, and yet when we start to do it, there comes to us something equivalent to Moses’ forty years in the wilderness. It’s as if God had ignored the entire thing, and when we are thoroughly discouraged, God comes back and revives His call to us. And then we begin to tremble and say, “Who am I that I should go…?” We must learn that God’s great stride is summed up in these words – “I AM WHO I AM…has sent me to you” (Exodus 3:14). We must also learn that our individual effort for God shows nothing but disrespect for Him – our individuality is to be rendered radiant through a personal relationship with God, so that He may be “well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). We are focused on the right individual perspective of things; we have the vision and can say, “I know this is what God wants me to do.” But we have not yet learned to get into God’s stride. If you are going through a time of discouragement, there is a time of personal growth ahead.”

- Oswald Chambers

This piece addresses so many things that I’m going through right now. I love how I can just read something that was written few hundred years ago and feel that God meant it to be written for me. And I really think that maybe that is the power of words, and that’s what’s special about this gift. It doesn’t come with the immediacy of performing arts, you don’t get people lining up to admire you and tell you how beautiful your voice/acting is, because words take time to sink in, and they just kinda sit there quietly on their own – they don’t do anything to draw your attention to it, they wait for you to discover them. But when you DO discover them, they STAY with you, they lodge themselves in your heart, they walk with you through things, their truth keeps ringing in your ears…I guess that’s why Jesus is The Word.

You Are Good – Jeff Deyo

Hey God,

You know how it is with some people when their life has been so saturated with Your goodness and greatness that they just get SO USED to it and forget to stand in awe of You? That they sit in continual expectation of it and Your mercy and grace becomes so much a part of their life that they are never AWARE of its presence, that they never stop to think about it and feel EXCITED or grateful for it?

Lord, let that NEVER happen to me. Let me never get over just how amazing and glorious and wonderful and generous and magnificent You are. Let me be continually surprised and awed by Your love and favour, let me always find reason to praise and worship You, let me be always hungry for more and more of Your presence. Let me be more in love with You.

Kari Jobe – Come to Me

Listen to the new Jesus Culture album

here for free. Seriously, Kim Walker is so amazing and anointed.

I haven’t finished the album yet but “Holy” and “You are Faithful” are sooooo good. Still don’t think anyone can top Kari Jobe’s version of “Revelation Song” but Kim’s rendition isn’t too bad either. I also love “Oh Lord, You’re Beautiful”, it sounds just like a beautiful hymn!

Listen to Kristene Mueller too, she’s more of the Brooke Fraser type though.

***

You keep bringing me sacrifices
To ease your mind
But it’s your heart that I want

- Mercy, Kristene Mueller

You Alone Were Broken On the Altar of Love

Starfield, Son of God

Cool extracts from William Lane Craig’s Hard Questions, Real Answers:

One reason that the problem of evil seems to intractable is that people tend naturally to assume that if God exists, then His purpose for human life is happiness in this life. God’s role is to provide a comfortable environment for His human pets. But on the Christian view, this is false. We are not God’s pets, and the goal of human life is not happiness per se, but the knowledge of God – which in the end will bring true and everlasting human fulfillment. Many evils occur in life which may be utterly pointless with respect to the goal of producing human happiness; but they may not be pointless with respect to producing a deeper knowledge of God. Dostoyevsky, who stated the problem of evil so forcefully, saw this point and sought to answer the problem in his novels through the portrayal of characters who through suffering increase in godliness and holiness. Innocent human suffering provides an occasion for deeper dependency and trust in God, on the part of either the sufferer or those around him. Of course, whether God’s purpose is achieved through our suffering will depend on our response. Do we respond with anger and bitterness toward God, or do we turn to Him in faith for strength to endure?

[...]

Paradoxically, then, even though the problem of evil is the greatest objection to the existence of God, at the end of the day God is the only solution to the problem of evil. If God does not exist, then we are lost without hope in a life filled with gratuitous and unredeemed suffering. God is the final answer to the problem of evil, for He redeems us from evil and takes us into the everlasting joy of an incommensurable good: fellowship with Him.

And Alvin Plantinga:

As the Christian sees things, God does not stand idly by, coolly observing the suffering of His creatures. He enters into and shares our suffering. He endures the anguish of seeing His son, the second person of the Trinity, consigned to the bitterly cruel and shameful death of the cross. Some theologians claim that God cannot suffer. I believe they are wrong. God’s capacity of suffering, I believe, is proportional to His greatness; it exceeds our capacity for suffering in the same measure as His capacity for knowledge exceeds ours. Christ was prepared to endure the agonies of hell itself; and God, the Lord of the universe, was prepared to endure the suffering consequent upon His son’s humiliation and death. He was prepared to accept this suffering in order to overcome sin, and death, and the evils that afflict our world, and to confer on us a life more glorious than we can imagine. So we don’t know why God permits evil; we do know, however, that He was prepared to suffer on our behalf, to accept suffering of which we can form no conception.

Not my will, but Yours be done

“To ask for God’s will is an expression of humility and submission to God. It is to acknowledge that He knows better than we do, and that we want His will even more than we want our request.” – William Lane Craig

I’m sorry God, I will not ask You to give me this particular desire of my heart anymore. Even though I find it hard to relinquish it, I know that if I persist in asking for it, I am only telling You that I treasure a silly little experience more than I do Your will for my life. I know that You have made it clear before that it is not Your will for me to do this, so I will not ask for it again. Lord, please help me to tear my heart away from it, because at times I feel as if I cannot and it hurts too much to see so many other people getting a chance to do what I’ve always dreamed of doing and KNOWING that it is not part of Your will for me. I have realised tonight though, that You do know better than I do, and that You always have a way of choosing things for me perfectly. I may cry my eyes out over it, or have to listen to many more sermons from my dad about Jacob and how God always has a way of fulfilling His promises even if it doesn’t happen in the way that I want/expect it to, and struggle over and over again with it, but I know in my heart that one day I will see how right You were. So please help me abandon all the foolish ideas that I’ve been entertaining. Let me reserve my folly only for You and only in the way that You want me to use it – to confound the wisdom of this world.

Lord, help me to be content in ALL my circumstances the way that Paul learnt to be content in his. Help me to strive to give my best in everything that I do, even if I feel as if I CANNOT care for my courses this semester. Always, in all things, my sole purpose is to glorify Your name, so it matters not whether I get to do courses I want to do, or what OTHER universities are offering. I’ll just do what I have to do, make the most out of my situation and circumstances and learn from them.