Awakening pure worship looks like risk, and cutting through the jungle of self promotion to find the clear path of service. The castles we build must house the purity and the boldness to do and say and sing the heart of God to an audience of One. We must worship Him in Spirit and in truth and prophetically call and release the grace within us back to Him. The scratch of the acoustic guitar string can ascend my spirit to rejoice in the heavenlies in His throne room. A voice that resonates in purity and power with no regard to polished perfection but a surrendered excellence to release the heart of the Father to a people is the goal of the purity we carry. He is jealous for us and to soar with us and see our inner freedom in Him expressed through the gift of voice that He has given us. We must remember that worship is for Him. In His kindness and gentleness, He sings back to us to further deepen His love for us. The building of an altar to see His manifest presence enter a room is the ultimate goal. We must build altars to Him in the secret place so when He reveals Himself through us in public, there is no spot or wrinkle in our souls to proclaim our own agenda or blueprint for personal glory. It’s all His. We give it back to Him through surrendered hearts after His heart and His alone. We are loved, we are seen, we are known by Him more intimately than we can know. Exploring the depths of His love and heart for us connects us like a magnet to His heart when we worship. We cannot despise the day of small beginnings and blaze a new path without first understanding that we are on His path. We pioneer our way into His heart by absorbing the nutrients of His word and letting it consume us. Letting Him consume us. keeping our head on His chest and His song in our hearts is paramount and fundamental to understanding His ways. Follow me as I follow Christ looks like ministering to the One we were sent to love. It is His created world that we get to pattern ourselves after to create with Him. To look at the chaos before us, and look upon His face to dream with Him for solutions. We are banks of information and experiences that all reflect that He is with us. He comprehends us so that we can comprehend Him. He asks and invites us into a dance of joy unspeakable. To be undignified before Him, and give Him back everything He gave us only to be given more. He loves. He is love. Nothing can separate us from His presence. It is through our obedience and continual surrender where we find joy at the bottom our well of sorrow. Our profappiness comes from knowing that no matter how oofta people get against us in rejection, pride, or any other way of trying to lay foundations of offense and judgement and punishment, He endured it all for us first. In His perfection and flawless plan for us to flourish and succeed in knowing His goodness, we get the benefit of knowing Him more deeply. We earn our limp through surrender, but only by His invitation and beckoning to the call to live as dead men. To live the invitation of entering into His death and suffering with the expected outcome of His reward. It’s like He built us a resting place in Him, a castle of His thoughts and His ways and if we follow. If we give up what we think is best and seek His, we gain Him. This world in us and through us manifests only because of Him. When we try to rub the lamp of control and heartless transactions because we figured out a formula, we must stop dead in our tracks and ponder that glory in our hearts and move on to the next glory. Glory is His weighty love for us manifested by Him. We don’t control His presence, we host Him. We get to give up our offenses to Him and realize that they are treasures in disguise. The hidden glory of creation is that from chaos comes new life. When we are faced with the evils of this world, it’s an opportunity to overcome them with His power and Spirit to guide us into the truth that it has already happened. We must be surrendered enough to see that we are walking a path that has been laid before the foundation of time. He designed us to carry His glory and His love and to release it back into the chaos. When we stand to forgive, and then give Him the gift of our pain, He says, “Oh yeah! I paid for this already! Here’s the receipt and here’s a bonus of my greater love and trust for you to not join the enemies camp of punishment and delay of forgiveness.” Learning His heart and His ways and being sensitive to His Spirit in each other helps us to steward His heart inside of us and through us to another. We learn to love by getting over ourselves and putting Him first. Period. We worship Him when we choose to believe Him and know He is good. He is our great high priest who gets His full reward when we know Him better than we know ourselves. And when that happens, we discover the prize of Him inside of us. We must steward this access to His heart with reverence and a consecration to continue to seek Him over all. To know Him, to truly know Him, we must be willing to walk away from sin and shame, and have the victorious mindset that He is Lord. We buy oil with our worship and put it in storage so that when the chaos comes, we have a reservoir of hope and joy to draw from. He anoints my head with the oil of gladness to trust Him with all my heart and to know He will never fail me. I will often fail Him, but He redeems me and makes me whole in Him because His great love for us is so vast that we cannot be silenced over His goodness and mercy. We get the benefit of our own doubt when we discover that He never doubted us for even a moment. The greater thing is His trust in us first. His love for us first. John the Beloved got to the tomb first and wanted us to know it because His intimacy with Him felt His absence and separation. Are we running to the last spot we knew Him to be to encounter His resurrection power to set us free from our own tombs of sacrifice and death to self for another? I ask you, because I ask myself the same thing. Are we running to the empty tomb of doubt and unbelief and holding on and stewarding our faith to see Him resurrected in our lives? Do we have the yes from the ephod of our priestly garments to let Him have His way in us even when we don’t and can’t understand because we can’t wrap our hearts and minds around what He is actually doing. Can we lay it all down again to hear Him call us friend? Can we surrender the fortune of self protection and control of our own future let Him lead us. What we create and build in this life is nothing if it doesn’t house Him. We become His living stones that cry out for Him in the deepest recesses of our hearts. And when we say yes, and let Him break our hearts of stone and self righteousness, only then can we see that it was His righteousness all along. It’s He who lives and breathes in us and we are a reflection and a one of a kind demonstration of His love and surrender to us. He doesn’t owe us anything. We are not entitled to any of it. He didn’t pour Himself out as a drink offering for us to reject His cup of salvation, but for us to drink from His well of bliss and believe Him at His word. We are His, and He is ours. We get to gaze upon His face and know to the depths of our soul that we are loved. We are seen. We are known by our Creator and nothing can ever separate us from His heart. Selah.