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.

Lord, why do I need a degree?

I don’t understand.

Please show me, explain to me.

I was reading this book by William Lane Craig and he has a million degrees and just…sometimes hanging out with my dad who never went to Bible college, and listening to the revelations that God gives him and the kind of quiet and powerful influence he has in people’s lives…it seriously makes me think I am wasting my life in university. [Which is, needless to say, ABSOLUTELY NOT what God wants me to be thinking!]

Once my sis said something about me going on to do a Phd and I was like, “Why should I waste so much of my life for something like that?”

And even though reading this book convinces me of the NEED for Christian intellectuals to place themselves in influential areas of society, especially as university professors, and also the urgent need for the Church to reintegrate intellectual depth into their “programmes” and understanding of God and teachings, I just…I guess I am just lazy to learn through the “school” way.

God, please give me the kind of revelation that I know I can never get from books. Give me a revelation of who You are, who Jesus is, what it means to be living for You. And help me to be content with where You have placed me, to try to see Your perspective in everything that I do, to understand that You don’t make me do anything to “waste my life away”, and that what I am learning now will have great impact on what I WILL be doing in the future. Lord, give me the strength to go after the things that I believe in, help me to stay rooted in Your Word, let me always be open to the things that will enable me to give MY BEST to You and my country in the future. I thank You Lord that You have Malaysia on Your heart and are raising up many amazing Godly young people who will effect great change in this country and who will stand up for Your truth FEARLESSLY. We thank you that You have placed us in places we never imagined that we could go to, places that have opened our eyes and given us a fresh perspective in our views on Malaysia, places that have empowered us to be compassionate enough for our country and its people, places that help us seek with clearer eyes and heavier hearts YOUR vision for Malaysia. And we thank you for every other privilege that You have put into our hands and we just pray that we will steward all these gifts faithfully and that You’ll bring peace to the cities that You have placed us in (Jeremiah 29:7), that we may learn and know how to bring peace to our own nation. Help us to grow into Your callings for us and help us also to see Your great purpose in the things that You have called us to do.