Saturday, June 30, 2012

New Songs, Coming From The Fire

Kenny and Rebekah On Our Date

Well, this is kind of a spontaneous blog tonight, but I wanted to say that the last three years of my life with Christ has led to one heck of a proverbial moment of truth in my life.  I seemed to have been tested by the Lord, taken through His consuming fire, burned up into ashes, and rebuilt with His mercy and love.  All I can say is, "God, I will trust in You with all my heart, and I will NOT lean on my own understandings again.  I am going to run to You and ask what You think about any and all of my ways, and You WILL make straight my paths."  The past 6 months of my life have been one death of vanity after another.  God has been stripping me of so much reaction to a culture of the ways of man.  Comparison, once again, snuck in, and silently sat down in my heart.  In my life, when I make a resting place for the spirit of comparison, the slowly increasing weight of the pressure for legitimacy ultimately breaks my back.  When that happens, I cannot do anything more, except cry out for mercy.  I get to a place where, if His presence is oxygen, I am choking on fumes, and suddenly, I am desperate all over again.  This is what has happened in the past 6 months.

As God revealed how horizontal my heart has been, and how He wanted back in the vertical position He designed it to be in, my heart began to cry out in a posture of HUNGER!!  I was desperate for the inner court home I snuck away from for the outer court praise of man.  He showed me that I had ever so gently replaced the authentic intimacy with Him in the inner court He gave me with a need for legitimacy founded in the opinions of man, only found in the "outer court".  I repented, I rededicated my life to Jesus, as my Lord, and He said something so beautiful to me, "Ok, son.  Let's start over."  Immediately, the little boy inside me just crazy excited about my Dad rose up inside me.  Immediately, His presence, which has been so difficult for me to discern for the past several months, wrapped around me like a blanket.  I became a little kid all over again, without any weight the world has to offer, without ambitions that would effort to define me, without shackles of living for my legacy to prove my legitimacy, without it ALL!!  I just rediscovered Jesus as all the vision I need.  All the vision He has in me, and for me, and through me, is in Him, who is my vision.

From this place of death, surrender, repentance, rediscovery, and simplicity, I have been writing songs.  Not to write songs, but to simply sing from where I am as He is who is before me.  The songs that are coming originate from a place of fear and reverence, of His wonderful love, the joy of my obedience, and such a deep awareness of our merciful God.  Father is revealing such deep understandings of His love for me, and it is lifting my eyes back off the ground, and repositioning them straight to His throne.  The result has been a heart of worship from the simple place of a child.

Songs from this season:

1.  Set My Heart On Fire
2.  Mercy Found Me
3.  I Have Found The One
4.  Name Above All Names
5.  My Reward
6.  We Lift Your Name
7.  We Are Loved