WORSHIP

Wake up

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?

Groan and say “I’m tired”, hit snooze and roll over, or some other sloth like motion? I’ve come to understand that if the first thing I do is worship then I’ve set my day off on the right road. 

Waking up earlier then we would like to on a daily basis has a way of wearing down our resolve unless previous to waking up we’ve already made a decision about how we will show up. For me the decision to wake up with worship on my lips starts with how I end my day.

I’m not as consistent as I would like to be in fact if no one but me ever reads this I will have done enough just telling myself this truth again in this form. 

I love this one fantastic song called awaken the dawn by Delirious. The chorus goes

“We sing the songs that awaken the dawn God of creation we praise you. You are the Lord, the savior of all. God of creation, we praise you.”

As a father of 4 beautiful children how I worship in the beginning of my day especially on days when I’m home when they wake up makes a huge difference in how everyone’s day begins. 

A practical way to make this happen is to go to bed with worship on your mind is to play some music before going to sleep or read your Bible. Personally I’ve found that listening to my Bibles audio option on a timer is a great way to fall asleep. 

Choose to wake up with worship on your lips by whatever means possible and you will make your day that much better and a day started well had a 100% chance of continuing well. 

Open up

Days just start better when you wake up with worship on your lips but it’s empowered by what you open up first. 

Facebook, Email, The Bible, Instagram. 

(Why do you think they call it your feed?)

All these things are telling me something about life but only one is giving me life, all these things are feeding me telling me who I am and how to be the worshiper only one is helping me be the worshiper I wanna be moving forward. 

Worship was best decribed to me as giving worth to something. The thing that I give the most worth to aka my time via attention is the thing I worship most. What am I opening myself up to most not just in the beginning of the day but as I move forward into it. 

What am I worshiping? 

This whole opening up really moves on as we enter new phases of the day. When I was single I would read the Bible in the morning while I ate my breakfast I was pretty committed to this time because it was so simple. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was just going to be sitting there anyway, so building into my life that special time set aside for opening up God's word every morning laid a foundation of worship for me as I gave my time to this simple action of opening my Bible. 

I encourage you to find a consistent time everyday to open up God's word and get it from your hands into your heart because what’s in your heart is what’s on your lips if it’s worship on your lips you want worship must be in your heart and the word must be in your hands. 

Reaching out 

Worship isn’t a stationary activity, opening up your Bible while you sip your coffee or eat your breakfast is great, it’s important to create that habit but there must be a reaching out both physical and spiritual. 

There are times when I’m on my way somewhere when I’m listening to a song that I just have to reach up my hands in worship. The commute to work can be one of those times of reaching out I believe it’s a great time as you drive down the road to decide what direction your day will go. 

If you have ever been around kids there inevitably comes a time when they will reach out to a parent or other adult looking to be held it’s a sign of trust and surrender and it’s that heart that Jesus was talking about when he told us that we needed to become like little children. As you drive down the literal road choose to worship by reaching out. 

I encourage you to put worship at the center of your day by reaching out in surrender, knowing that as you go forward you won’t have all the answers but trusting that the one who is worthy of all worship is waiting to hold you and lift you up to blessing and victory in the day ahead. 

Speak it

They say confession is good for the soul and I would agree that a confession of who you are and who Jesus is right there in your time with him is good for your soul. It's a great expression of worship and it can happen anywhere. 

Speaking worship, coming into alignment with the Holy Spirit about who you are and who God is to me is a very intimate thing but it’s not always needing to be private. I have enjoyed writing on my mirror in the past, confessions of what I believe and what I feel God is speaking to me. 

My billboard of life is my phone so I’ve taken to making my Lock Screen a statement of worship. As of right now it has a picture of a cross with the words “I am who He says I am” below it. 

I think worship is something that we must make mobile, no pun intended. 

Speaking it can also include singing. 

When was the last time you sang your worship to God. Singing a song is great and I believe it’s worship but is it yours or is it someone else’s worship that you're speaking? 

I encourage you to speak your personal worship to God. I wrote a psalm once it may not have been as good as David’s but it was my heart poured out spoken to God. 

Speak your worship to your Heavenly Father today. In an honest prayer, a heartfelt song, a confession of faith, or even reading statements of who God says you are as found in the Bible. 

There are many ways to speak your worship, choose one, choose a few but just do something everyday. 

Hear it

We have been given two ears and one mouth. Someone said it’s because God wanted us to listen twice as much as we talk.

To worship we must hear, not just anything but the voice of our shepherd. Two ears can mean divided attention as we listen to the voice of the Shepherd and the voice distraction. Whoever or whatever that may be. 

This is where the start of the day leads to victory when the day is in full gear and the voices are coming in fast and loud the reason to have awoken with worship to have opened up the day in his word and to have reached out to him and spoken your worship to him in your quiet time is to hear him when the voices that surround you seem louder then his. 

Worship is about hearing not just when we’re surrounded by other believers and the music is loud but when the temptation to let his still small voice be drown out comes. Worship is an act of obedience to the Word of God that is hidden in your heart when your ears are filled with the sounds of calamity and chaos. 

When the voice of God seems distant and small reach into your heart to the things that you have hidden there then worship from a place of strength knowing that the one who resides in your heart will guide you. Worship in spirit and in truth today my friend. 

Intercession

Worship is warfare. There is a battle for your thoughts and it started the moment you woke up that’s why you opened up his word and reached out, spoke your worship and listened to his still small voice but worship is also something we are invited into by Jesus. 

Worship is intercession because it’s Jesus singing over us. He’s the one who is worshiping God on our behalf when we just can. It’s worship as the Holy Spirit speaks the language of heaven through our mouth and worship pours out on our behalf from a source that we cannot control or contain. 

Intercession is worship as we model this act of singing over others when we walk through the doors of our workplace and bless those we meet maybe it’s a customer or a co worker perhaps you are the first there and you can pray over each office in the power of the spirit bringing your worship to heaven and in this way lift the needs of those we know to heaven as our praise rises like incense to heaven. 

As you encounter hurting people even if they have a relationship with Jesus, be an intercessor for them and worship today. That delivery driver that irritating co worker the boss. Bring their names before the throne as your worship and intercede on their behalf as Jesus taught us to do.  

The peace of Jesus goes where you walk. 

Presence

Ultimately worship comes from being in the presents of God. That starts when we wake and hopefully continues till we encounter others and bring our worship to the throne room for us and them. 

I heard a story about Andrew Murray a 19th Century pastor and evangelist who was seen stopped on the road for a few moments by someone who know his when asked about it later he said he stopped because he had lost his awareness of Gods presents and wanted to get it back. True or not that story has stuck with me for over 20 years. 

I want to live in the awareness of Gods presents. We are always in his presents because God is omnipresent, a fancy way to say God is everywhere all the time. But being aware of it will help me to have worship on my lips as I wake and walk along through the day. It will cause me to open my eyes and my heart and pour his word into them. The awareness of his presence will make reaching out natural and desired and speaking my worship the default setting and the desire of my heart. 

Living in the awareness of his presents will open my ears to him not just as a voice in the crowd but as the background soundtrack to my life and that will lead me to bring my worship into my interactions with others and my praise to heaven as a sweet smelling incense. 

I have decided to follow Jesus and he is seated in the presence of God so that is where I must go and that is where I must say not to the dismissal of the world around me but to be a blessing to the world around me. 

Friends we have been invited not into a religion where we perform in hopes of appeasing a deity but we have been invited in to relationship and the pathway is worship. Jesus has already opened all the doors we just need to walk through them. 

Today if you didn’t wake up with worship on your lips so it now and walk the road to his presents. 

I love you friend and Jesus loves you. 

PRAISE

Participate 

The Lord inhabits the praises of his people so when we praise we are participating and Jesus is participating and therefore we are connecting and that’s what relationship is made of. 

Praise is a great way to connect with God. If you’ve ever been to a church service they always start with singing be it hymns or the Christian version of a concert, songs are like a plow to the heart they break open the ground so that the seed of God's word can find a place to sprout. 

I can’t help but quote the great philosopher Buddy The Elf when he says “The best way to spread Christmas cheer is to sing a song for all to hear”. Singing invites people to participate in something outside themselves, but what makes singing and praise different is the focus, the reason. 

Singing makes me feel better a good song can lift my spirit, change my attitude and bring a smile to my face but praise is deeper praise is all those things but then it turns the result from feeling better to knowing better. Emotions are unreliable and they can lead us to making really stupid choices simply because they don’t have a mind of their own they are compleatly at the whim of circumstance. Praise is a decision to participate in a relationship with Jesus no matter how we feel no matter what is happening and that choice leads you away from circumstance and into the will of God for your day and your life. 

So sing a song of praise today not so that you can control your attitude but so that you can participate in a relationship with Jesus and from that who knows where the will of God will lead you and what you will do from there. Praise is the doorway to the blessed life. 

Rattle and Raise 

If we stay silent the rocks themselves will cry out in praise, welcoming the king into our midst. 

Ezekiel was told to tell a valley of dry bones to become an army and sometimes I feel like I’m the one laying in the valley waiting for something to happen if you're like me then…

Hear the word of the Lord. 

“I will cause breath to enter you, and you will live.

I will put ligaments on you, place muscles on you, and cover you with skin.

I will put breath in you, and you will live.”

It’s time to live. I mean really live we aren’t dry bones we have the breath of life and we have it so we can praise with our lives.

We may start our praise in the valley among the dry bones but that’s not where we are supposed to stay. We are supposed to come alive, we are supposed to live. We are supposed to be the ones who are crying out. I don’t know about you but I don’t want some stones harmonizing with Jesus when he’s put his breath into me and given me life and a reason to live. 

We are called to raise our holy hands in prayer and I would say in praise too, laying aside anger and anxiety. A posture of praise, hands raised, is also a posture of surrender and praise is about realizing that there is a God and we aren’t him and there is a plan and it’s not ours. But that his plans are good and they offer hope for the future. 

Accept that you have the breath of God within you, a God who can restore a valley of dry bones to warriors. You are one of them. Get into a posture of praise, raise those hands and praise. 

Awake

Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. 

- Paul a messenger of Jesus 

Praise is a call to wake up but what are we needing to wake up from? 

Well I think we are called to wake up from the lulling of the world around us. 

As a man I can struggle with passivity it’s a battle everyday but in the battle of life I want to die standing up not laying down as an old frail man would. 

In the movie braveheart William Wallace gives a speech and asks the warriors gathered if years later lying in their beds as old men they wouldn’t wish for the chance to come back to this battle and fight for their freedom. 

Well I’m asking myself that question. I’m asking you that question. 

The wake up call is going out and praise is leading the way. 

In ancient Israel it was the singers who went into battle first. This was a declaration to the army that it wasn’t the strength of the warriors or the tactics of generals that was going to win the fight. It was God who was leading who would fight the battle first not in the physical but in the hearts and minds of the enemy. 

The reason the Scottish warriors (Back to Wallace) used bagpipes in battle wasn’t for stealth or misdirection it was to tell their enemies who was coming to fight them it was a warning. 

Praise leads the way when warriors walk it’s a declaration to the enemy that the warriors on the move are awake and ready for a fight. It’s a statement of who is marching. 

We can be raised from a valley of dry bones and participate with Jesus partnering with him in praise but if we don’t wake up from the slumber of complacency and shake off the anesthetics of streaming networks and social media apps, pick up our weapons not of destruction but of freedom and of worship we will find ourselves as truly old men frail and dying and will wish for just one chance to go back to today and fight. 

So while you're in today wake up, get up and get praising. 

Invest 

“A farmer went to plant seeds and some fell on hard ground… some fell on rocky ground… some fell on thorny ground, other seeds fell on good ground and produced 30, 60, or 100 times as much as was planted.”

• Jesus 

Praise is an investment into your own heart; it's planting a harvest of his presents in our lives. The parable of the sower is a famous one. Jesus uses it to illustrate life, it speaks to so many different stages our life go through. 

I think we are all at some point at each of the first 3 stages with God's help shifting into the 4th. 

The decision to praise God puts him first in our lives. It's the very thing that makes our lives blessable. 

Stage 1 Hard Ground. 

We all have hard parts in our hearts. Things happen that cause us to have hard hearts and this stops us from even accepting what God wants to say to us. Praise breaks up the hard ground of our hearts that stop God’s words from penetrating our lives because praise draws us closer to God and it’s he who is the gardener planting the fruit of his spirit in our hearts. 

Stage 2 Rocky Ground. 

Rocks keep us shallow in our relationship with God. Praise identifies rocks like ego, fear and pride things that stop us from having a fruitful relationship with Jesus. Praise turns ego, fear and pride on their heads and reminds us of who we are in Christ and allows him to excavate our hearts. 

Stage 3 Thorny Ground. 

Thorns choke life by sucking up the resources like the time and talent we have to give to God’s purposes. 

TV and video games can be thorns that choke time best spent elsewhere but even good things can stop us from having a great harvest. Praise will bring awareness of what needs to go and how to best deal with it. 

Stage 4 Good Ground. 

When we are participating in praise we get God's breath of life and we are restored. We wake up to his call on our lives and our investment reaps the benefits. When we praise we are investing in our own hearts to see them become ready to accept and return God's word a harvest 30, 60 or 100 times what we put in. In God's economy that’s how praise works it’s exponential.  

Sing

Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. 

There is always a reason not to praise and at the same time those are usually the same reasons to praise. 

The heart of praise needs to be expressed. I think a great way is to sing our praise. 

Praising God means that we are entering into God's presence and singing is praising with some rhythm. 

Personally I love to sing and as you can see I love to write these are my favorite ways to praise. 

Singing is such a door opener not just into the presents of God but into our own hearts. I think of singing as the tilling the soil of our hearts. 

I find song to be the simplest way to enter into God's presence and to bring my praise. 

I challenge you to sing some songs outside the regular church time be it in community or on a screen. A little one on one time done regularly goes a long way to making singing actual praise. 

I know I could use more song time either listening to music and singing along or just sitting in quiet reflection however I praise when it’s with a song it's very meaningful and powerful. 

Evermore

“I heard what sounded like the roar of a great multitude in heaven shouting: “Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God...”

Honestly I don’t think about heaven as much as I need to but it was a pretty big part of what Jesus talked about and praise is a key part of what we are told heaven will include. Praise is one of the things that will carry past this life on earth into heaven with us. Praise transcends our lives; it's one of the only things that we do on earth that echoes into our eternity. 

What would it look like to put my focus on the eternal and not on the temporal? Would we stop trying to make the most money or have the biggest house. Would we stop comparing ourselves to the social media Jones. Letting what we admire and laud point to eternity will, for me at least, free up a ton of mental and emotional bandwidth that can be used to love on people, give hope, be joyful, and just be awesome. 

FATHER

Faithful Forever

Dads we have a unique role to play not just in our children’s lifetimes but into eternity. 

One of the things I grew up with was an unfaithful father. He wasn’t unfaithful to my mother but he was unfaithful to his children. 

He never left us but he wasn’t present as a dad growing up I didn’t really get how bad that was, it was just normal for us, but it led to the relationship being really short in the grand scheme of things. I left the house shortly after high school and I never looked back. I was 27 when my dad died and I saw very little him in those 9 years. 

As a father of four I don’t want that kind of relationship with my kids. I want them to not want the relationship to end when it’s not forced on them. I want them to enjoy our relationship and to cherish it. 

I never did learn how to be a good father from mine in fact the first time someone told me that God was my father I had a pretty negative reaction, there may have been a swear word in my reply in fact, but I did eventually learn about the faithfulness of a father from my forever father in heaven and now I get the chance to share with my kids that they have a forever father who is faithful to them too. 

We have so little time to share the nature of God as father with our children and I often feel like I am misrepresenting him but one thing I can do and that any father can do to represent fatherhood well is to be faithful. Not just in your marriage but in your fathering in pointing your kids to their father in heaven. He’s the one who will pick up all the slack that we leave and fill in all the gaps we create. 

My encouragement to myself and my fellow fathers who read this is to say, that no matter what level of faithfulness your earthly father was at your forever father in heaven wants to teach you that no matter the gaps and slack that you have left your kids with as their earthly father your forever father and theirs is faithful and will take care of them and teach them where you left off. 

Raise your children in the way they should go… because we only get a short amount of time gentlemen so let’s do it right, perfection won’t happen with us but let’s point them to the one who is. 

And Action...

Dads need to act. Passivity isn’t in our makeup because our fatherhood DNA is comes from our forever father in heaven. 

The call to act when it comes to fathering, isn’t just a call to movement, it's a call  to create a place where our children can learn and grow. I’ve learned a ton of what my role as a father is from seeing out fathers in action and learning from them I hope to teach and my kids and others too, how to grow by learning and growing. 

One of the things that I have done to take action is for the last three years I have been writing prayer journals weekly for my whole family. It’s given me a way to speak into their lives when I am no longer influencing them directly but it’s also given me the opportunity to tie my heart to them in the now and learn where I need to lean in. At this point I haven’t given them to the kids but when I do I hope it will help them see the road signs to our Heavenly Father by how I saw them then and in their future. 

Another action that I’ve just started is practicing the presence of God with my kids. Teaching them to seek God and to hear from him so they will know how to hear his still small voice and be able to distinguish it from their own thoughts. 

Like anything, learning to hear their forever fathers voice takes practice and my role as their dad is to act on their behalf teaching, encouraging and modeling. 

If you’re a father ask yourself what action you need to take to help your kids learn and grow in this next season? There are many roles that we as dads must take in our kids' lives pick one to work on this week and don’t be afraid to fail because being a man of action does not mean being perfect. 

Teach me Teacher 

Dad’s we make the best teachers when they are vessels of our father in heaven. We dad’s carry a great burden of responsibility to be great teachers but we must become great students. 

The best teachers I’ve ever met were the best students not just once upon a time but continuously, and they have taught me to be too. 

In fact they continue to teach me my best teachers learn from a variety of places but always they strive to learn. 

My favorite teacher is Jesus. He was also a great student. Jesus always said he only ever did what he saw his father do. This is our mission dads to do only what we see our Heavenly Father doing in this way we can teach our children and model for other men how to become their best selves. 

How committed am I to learning as a father about being a better father directly affects how I father my children. I can’t teach without learning and I can’t learn without being open to the teacher instructing me. 

Dads we are always being taught and we are always teaching but who are we learning from and what are we teaching our kids? If you can’t answer that definitively then there’s a good chance you're not being intentional enough. 

Look no further for where God want to grow you. 

Hurt & Healed

Dads we have two roads we can walk down the choice of what road we walk down isn’t dictated by where we started in life but where we let God direct us. 

Fathers can set their children apart and make them ready to prosper by teaching them to live in God's healing and wholeness or they can set their children adrift by teaching them to fail when they live out of their brokenness and pain and hurt. 

A statement I heard a long time ago that has stuck with me is this. 

“Hurt people, Hurt people. 

 Healed people, Heal people.”

What kind of kids we are raising depends not on where you started out but where you decide to be today. Hurt or Healed is a road that we can choose to walk down and we all will walk down one of them. 

The healed road isn’t the easy road it’s painful and hard because we get to challenge the past and seek out our forever Fathers present blessings and decide to embrace his future of life for us. 

The hurt road is even harder though not always at the moment but eventually and for longer because in the end it only leads to destruction and loneliness. 

I started my life on the hurt road and I was headed to destruction and then I met people who were walking the healed road to life and they helped me to change lanes then exit the hurt road altogether and I’m inviting you now. 

If you're reading this then you have been invited to leave the hurt road to destruction to the healed road to life.

Be healed so that you can be a healer. Let the hurt stay where you drop it and become whole, be a hero for your family. 

Elevate and Encourage 

 

As dads our role is to elevate and encourage our kids. That means more than just getting them to an adult age in life with all their fingers and toes attached. 

Raising kids means raising them personally, elevating them individually, giving them strong shoulders to stand on, our shoulders in fact and that means we need to stand strong and be standing on strong shoulders ourselves.

Elevating means we support, we hold up, and raise up our kids. 

Think about the actual mechanical contraption that takes people from floor to floor. We get to pick our kids up and take them to the next level again and again without criticizing them for the speed at which they are moving. I personally have never had an elevator tell me I should be going to the fifth floor when I stop on the third even if it is true, it just fights gravity for me to help me reach the next level. My God given father figures who have taught me, and teach me to this day, do not rag on me about stopping short either. They do however encourage me to go further and that is just as important. 

Encouragement is a big deal. I have been challenged lots in my time as a father to stop

being a critic and to be my kids champion. 

Fight for them not beat on their self image when they mess up. Now maybe you, like me, didn’t get that from the start of your life but you can change. Refer to the hurt and healed section for my thoughts on that.

Encouragement does not mean excusing my kids from their bad choices. I can call someone out and encourage them; it just means I have to think more about them then myself. 

(Just between you and me that’s a true challenge for me). 

Being an encouraging father is partly about making failure a stop on the road not the end of the road. We all fail and when we do we need to be encouraged to get up and keep going and not to stop and wallow in self pity. 

So today ask yourself who holds you up, whose elevating you and who pulls you up by encouraging you. 

Then ask if you are being that way as a father.

Roles to play

As dads we are role models for our kids. This means the role we play as fathers should be worth duplicating. 

God doesn’t have a cookie cutter so no two people are exact but we are made in his image so we are similar but unique. 

Some big theological terms I learned years ago are incommunicable and communicable attributes. Things about God that are not in people and things that are in us. 

All knowing, all present are attributes that are not passed on. Being able to love, extend forgiveness those things were passed on from Gods to us. The list is large, this is just a few.  

What are we as fathers passing on to our kids? 

I know my kids have a mix of my humor and my sensitivity. Some got more of one which makes a booming mixture when someone does something “funny” and someone else’s feelings get hurt. Add to the mix my wife’s personality and let’s just say dinner isn’t boring at our house. 

There are lots of things I don’t want my kids to duplicate from me on a daily basis like a bad attitude or mis-management of anger. There are things I want my kids to model after too like my smile and love of reading and music. So I need to show them the things I want passed on and limit as much as possible what is on display that I don’t want duplicated. 

Being a good role model is not something that just happens, it takes work, it takes having a healthy model to base ourselves off of, but who?

I was told by my first mentor that leadership is caught more than it’s taught. That's the same with fathering it’s caught by us by those we associate with. Being a good role model as a father means being around those who will teach us and being around our kids enough for them to pick up who we are. 

Our forever father in heaven  shows up faithfully, takes action, teaches, lives from a place of healing, raises up with encouragement and shows his kids how to do the same. 

That is a role worth duplicating. Will I duplicate it in my life, will you duplicate it in your life? That is the question we need to answer everyday. 

GRACE

G. 

God 

Grace wasn’t an idea created in the hearts of people but rather it was created by God for people out of his love. 

I think for me I’ve had a total misunderstanding of grace simply because I didn’t understand it’s origin. 

God made grace so that people could have a easier time getting to know him. 

The Bible says his throne is a place where we find grace and mercy; it's meant to be approached with that in mind. 

I grew up with the idea, and maybe you did too,  that dad's office or the principal's office or pick any authority figures office were places to fear approaching because I ended up there as a result of poor behavior and that person was the final authority to judge me. 

Right or wrong I feared God in that way too. I’ve recently discovered I was looking at someone else’s picture when I thought I was looking at God. 

He is the creator of grace not a get out of jail free card but a no more condemnation promise. 

God made a way for me to come that didn’t involve me earning anything or paying anything to get his love. 

Wow what a concept. 

I consider myself a follower of Jesus so if that is true then I have got to start having more grace and let people know that approaching me as a dad, a husband,a friend, a co-worker, and fellow commuter on the road of life means they aren’t getting a fistful of judgment but a handful of grace. 

R. 

Reaching

Grace doesn’t sit on its butt and neither does God. That’s why Jesus came. 

I loved watching westerns as a kid one line that clearly stuck with me was the long arm of the law. The idea that you could not put pace the law. The Sheriff or Marshall the hero of the movie would always get his man. Grace is supposed to be like that outpaceable you simply can’t outrun grace. 

God is always reaching out with grace it’s we,who are labeled Christians, that have messed the whole thing up we treat people who are in need of grace like Dr. Seuss’s Grinch. We wouldn’t touch them with a 39 and a 1/2 foot pole. 

When grace is really present it is like taffy it can be stretched and pulled and twisted around corners and through mazes of peoples wonky and broken lives and still hold it integrity. 

If you ever meet someone who really has a ton of grace regardless of their religious label they have had a God encounter and have been influenced by a real touch because as I said before grace isn’t a human idea it’s right from the mind of God. 

I find myself all too often not showing grace when I need to and that’s me failing to truly follow Jesus because he was the ultimate expression of grace in action. 

This year, 2021, I choose to be more like the one I claim to follow by choosing to actually follow him in reaching out with grace whenever I can. 

I hope more will follow not me but the grace maker. 

A. 

Accepting

Grace accepts everyone but it does not bend to our whims. 

I think there is a side of grace that people fear it’s the idea that grace will be used to cover over our choices against Gods best for us also called sin. 

There are two kinds of people in the world those who have experienced grace first hand from God and those who haven’t. 

For those who have we need to make grace as available as water from a fountain and accept all who come that are in need of it all people no matter what they believe or practice are accepted by Gods grace. 

For those who haven’t had a direct experience your first encounter, like mine, is going to be by someone who has and it’s not anyone who is walking around a job to say what you need to change because no one gets cleaned up to take a bath and no one gets ignored when grace is in the house. 

Jesus never qualified those who deserved grace he called out those who said they earned it by works and said that didn’t earn them squat and those who felt they deserved it least he deepened it to the point that they were swimming in it by the time they left him. 

If grace was a swimming pool there would be no shallow end so I’m done trying to make one and I’m done trying to ease in. 

The grace is deep here so I’m diving in. 

C. 

Coming

Grace is a servant. Not in class but in application. 

The idea of coming involves little action on my part. Someone or something is moving toward me. That’s grace. 

Grace at it finest is shown when we go out and serve people with no expectation of repayment. 

The grace Jesus shared with us was done with a servants heart knowing we couldn’t repay him

Grace doesn’t wait for people to change before making its move toward them. All to often I find myself waiting for someone to change so that I can have grace and that is so counter to how God does it. 

While we were still in rebellion to Gods plan Jesus came to save us. That is grace on the move and that one hits me deep and needs to stick with me better when,to be blunt, people tick me off. 

Grace is hard simply for this reason it’s hard to be the one to initiate and to keep coming but it’s the heart of grace and it’s the heart of God to move closer first and to stay longer. 

Is there a relationship where it would be easier to wait but you feel the need to make move toward them? 

That’s the whisper of grace you, will you listen?

E. 

Everyone

Everyone means you too. The summery of grace is it’s available for everyone. 

I read a book by Bob Goff called Everybody Always last year and it’s still shifting my mind to understand how everyone is included in Gods grace plan. It’s kinda hard to imagine having grace for everybody always but that’s what grace is about and we can’t change that because it’s Gods original idea. 

Too often Christians have been known for who and what they are against as opposed to who and what they are for. 

I want to apologize for being that way in the past and being religious (Christian) rather then a follower of Jesus. 

Jesus never apologized for standing up for truth and Gods way but he never stood over people and shamed them with the reality of who they were and what they did. He embodied GRACE God Reaching out Accepting you Coming close to Everyone. 

My favorite story that Jesus ever told is about the banquet. All the noble people were invited to come and share in the feast the king was having but one after another they declined. With an upcoming feast and no guests the king sent his staff out to find anyone who wanted to come to gather at the hall in time to celebrate. 

Everyone has a place in the house of grace. 

Next time you encounter someone in any need great or small and you help them without any expectation of payback. That’s grace and that how we need to be living.