Week 12 - a life yielded

12 weeks since I started this blog. Who knew I had so much to say? Heh!

I thought that I should include a word of encouragement to the team this week... this is it:

I am pleased with the progress that we are making as a unit. So much has improved since I first started working here - the attitude to worship (perhaps because we've reduced the load on the teams), the preparation, the execution, and the expectancy about what God is doing and can do through us when we put our lives in his hand and allow him to use us as a conduit.

I especially want to thank the choir that have scheduled weekly practices and have done an exceptional job every single time since coming back in the fall of 2007

Encouragement like the one above is not meant to signal that the push to make things better is about to cease... the task of becoming a hotbed of worship and the experience of God's presence and power is still a work in progress - both in myself and in us as a team. The kind of worship that is so contagious that it spills outside the walls/confines of our local congregation into the streets and churches of ottawa is still a vision and not yet a reality. God has brought each one of us to this team for such a time as this to be a part of his plan and work at woodvale and so along with the encouragement is a charge to keep being faithful with the gifts, time, talent, and resources that God has given us in order that we may achieve greater levels of worship and communion with God and that through us, he may be glorified and worshipped like woodvale has never seen or experienced before.

There IS more than this!

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In the fall of 2004, I was visiting a small baptist church that I eventually worked at and I was quite struck by the sermon that sunday morning and it served as one of the pivotal moments in my life and walk with Jesus. My buddy Rick Eby spent some time talking about the life of Stephen - the first recorded Christian Martyr in Acts chapter 6 and 7.

Stephen was a man full of the Holy Spirit, full of faith, filled with God's grace and walking in the power and authority of his relationship with Jesus. The bible says that through him, there were unmistakable signs that God was among them and yet in spite of every incredible thing that happened in his life and the obvious evidence of God's hand on him, he was martyred. However, if you track the story of the early church, Stephen's martyrdom started the era of the persecution of Christians and their scattering from Jerusalem, but their scattering was a good thing because it meant that they took the Gospel out of Jerusalem and even out of Israel and eventually to the ends of the earth as Jesus had originally charged them. God used Stephen powerfully in life and even more powerfully through his death because Stephen was a man full of faith that was yielded completely to Him.

*I have become convinced that the reason the influence, control, and evidence of the work of the spirit varies from person to person among those that follow Jesus is because we have varying levels of "yieldedness" to Him.

*I have also come to learn more and more that for many Christians, it is not that we do not know or even believe at some level, it is just that we don't live in the reality of our knowledge and belief or act like we believe what we say we believe.

The gist of Rick's message was boiled down to one tough question:
Are you willing to yield your life to God for whatever purpose he chooses... even if it means losing your life?

The obvious threat of physical martyrdom does not exist in Ottawa, but definitely social martyrdom exists in our post-christian society. Social martyrdom is not as terrifying as physical martyrdom... but it can be just as paralyzing because we all struggle with feeling like would rather be dead than admit we know Jesus... much less, have a relationship with him.

So I guess the re-phrased Ottawa version of the question becomes:
Are you willing to yield your life to God for whatever purpose he chooses... even if it means social martyrdom?

As a worship team, it is easy for us to walk around saying that we have yielded our life to God's purposes because we operate most of our ministry within the sterilized, christian friendly environment of our churches and Christian subculture, but things take on a whole different perspective when we are challenged to establish congruence between the people we are outside of our churchy-church communities and the people that we morph into in a hostile post-christian society.

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I do everything I do here at woodvale with the strong belief and conviction that one day in the not too distant future, the work that God has already started in this church will reach boiling point... and it will start to overflow and affect the communities and churches in this city. But before God entrusts us with that great responsibility of being a part of the revival of his people and his church, our yieldedness will be tested.

I do not presume to speak the mind of God, but I have come to understand in increasing measure that God is not interested using me when I insist on being in the drivers seat of my life and that leads to numerous Jonah-type situations. If you do not know what I am talking about, read the book of Jonah (in the bible... heh!) and you'll get the analogy. Yielding my life to him means allowing him to take control of my life, take me where he wants me to go (even to COOOOOOLD canada disregarding my deep dislike for cold and snow... :) ) and allowing him to SPEND my life as he sees fit.

A life yielded to God

A life spent as God sees fit

A life poured out in service to God

Isn't that the heart of worship?