Praising Him with Psalms and Songs

Carolyn

I just had an interesting follow up to a blog entry I wrote earlier. I had written about my friend praying a psalm for my husband a year or two ago, then him waking up in the night a couple of weeks after that feeling led to that psalm.

My daughter writes constantly (she is 8). I often walk over and find a poem or story or card she has put together all by herself. The other day, I found her, and she had just made a card for me and one for my husband. There was a verse on both of them. She apparently had decided to go through the Bible and randomly choose a verse for each of us. She chose a verse in Malachi for me. For my husband, she chose the first verse of that very same psalm! Out of all the verses in the Bible, that is the one she chose. I have to say, if I were my husband, I’d be giving that psalm some pretty close attention!

On another note, I started the Beth Moore Stepping Up Bible study on the Psalms of Ascent last week with some friends from work. The whole video this week was about song in Scripture and how that speaks to our heart. I’d never seen this in Scripture that much (that song accompanied creation, that God rejoices over you with singing, that Jesus will sing praises in the presence of the Father, etc.). It is its own language, and things can be expressed in song in ways that words cannot.

I find that to be so true. Praising God in song lifts our minds to higher places and even can change a bad mood to good or wrong thinking to right. I want to practice that this week and see again what God can do through praising Him and choosing to think on things above.

I will praise You in this storm!

Carolyn

Psalm 63:3 “Because Your lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise You.”

It’s been raining in Chicagoland for a couple of days now, mostly heavy and nonstop. Yesterday was the greatest amount of rainfall for a single day since they started keeping records back in 1871. Cars have been submerged in some places, basements have flooded, people have had to be rescued. I realize this is nothing compared to Ike and the devastation there; this is for the most part an inconvenience, but I have never seen it rain like this. I can’t imagine what it would be like to live in a rainy part of the world with rainy seasons.

My husband and I have spent the last 2 days cleaning out the cellar of our home built in 1887. We were told in March when we moved in that it had never flooded. Not so this time, but the water was pretty minimal and able to be removed with a small pump. It did, however, cause all of our boxes to get wet, so we have now gone through all the remaining boxes from our move and either thrown it out, given it away, or stored it in plastic containers. This is a project I’d been intending to get to for 6 months, so maybe this was a blessing in disguise.

We’ve also found a small leak on the porch, and for some reason, our door to the house stopped closing. I guess when it rains, it pours! In the midst of the storm, though, I’ve found a lost journal that I had been intently praying I would find (of letters I wrote my daughter when she was in the NICU for 3 months after birth). I’ve been able to finally clean that cellar. And it happened on a weekend, so my husband and I could be home and handle this. We also found lots of toys and books the kids had been missing, and they’ve had fun playing the last couple of days while we worked. There are many things to thank and praise the Lord for in the midst of this storm.

I know it’s such a small thing, really, and such a small illustration, but when life seems a bit drab and dreary, the sun isn’t shining, there’s uncertainty around me about what’s going to happen, do I really find my refuge and confidence in the Lord? As I read Psalm 63:3 this morning (“Because Your lovingkindness if better than life, my lips shall praise You.”), I wondered, do I really believe this? Do I really think God’s lovingkindness is better than my very life? In the midst of a “storm,” can I fix my eyes on Him and have great joy because He is better than all else, even when I feel insecure and uncertain?

It’s these little imperfections of life that increase the longing for the perfect, for the eternal place where all will be right. I pray God will increase my faith so that when my feelings are inconsistent with my head and heart and I feel unsteady, I will still believe Him.

This week, we have visitors staying with us from South Korea, I start a small group women’s Bible study in our home, and I have a busy week at work. There is too much for me to lose sight of the big picture by life’s disruptions from this storm. So I choose today to praise You again, Lord. I praise You that You are here with me and that You do not forsake those who trust in You. I do praise You in this storm and praise You for Your lovingkindness toward me. I know that You are enough and all I need, so I may say with the psalmist, “Because Your lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise You.”

The Spirit-Filled Life

Carolyn

As I’ve reflected on my last post, I think I’ve combined two separate ideas: how God reveals Himself and His character to us and how God speaks to His people. I think one point I was hoping to establish is that God is vast and boundless and not restrained to act just as our minds can understand. He is above the natural, and it’s incredible when you find Him invading your life in supernatural ways.

The way God has most powerfully revealed Himself to me is as my Rock and my strength, which are parallel Hebrew words. This was on April 27 and 28, 2005 (which I wrote about in an earlier post). He is also a God who can speak and act in our daily lives through His Word, prayer, and the power of His Spirit. Since April 28, 2005, He has shown me this again and again, but prior to April 28, 2005, I would have been skeptical and reluctant to believe that.

One example jumps to my mind. A couple of years ago, I was at a friend’s house and we were watching the kids play in her yard while we shared what God was doing in our lives. When we started to pray, she felt led to pray a psalm for my husband. This was not a familiar psalm to me. I thought that was sweet. A few weeks later, I was waking up one morning and my husband had been awake for a while. He said he woke up in the night and felt led to read his Bible. He had been drawn to a particular psalm and couldn’t explain why, but felt like God was showing him this. This was the same psalm my friend had prayed for him a few weeks prior to that.

Those kinds of stories are just unmistakable evidence to my heart of a God who speaks, who is intimately involved in our lives. In many ways, I think I’m writing this blog to recount His work in my life, to remember what He has done, to praise Him — but I also find I want to encourage those who might have grown up in a way similar to me. I not only had no expectation that God would speak to my heart through His Spirit, but I also rejected any notion by anyone else that He did.

But look at the promises of God in the Bible! I was missing something so wonderful, so amazing, and I never even knew! It’s called the Spirit-filled life. It’s not one that’s directed by me, dependent on me. It’s one directed by the God who has saved me and rescued me from death and the power of sin and raised me up with Him, given me new life, and given me the gift of His Spirit! The very moment I believed Him to be more than I thought or understood or could mentally manage, He absolutely revealed Himself to me that this was true!

Another thing I want to clarify is that I am talking about something here that is on the other side of salvation… after we are saved. There is only one way to God… Jesus! His shed blood on our behalf. For those who believe on Him, they are given eternal life and their sins are forgiven. He died on the cross to bear our sin and take our punishment so that we could live. And He was able to do that because He was sinless, fully God and fully man.

But I do believe that many people stop there. They believe the gospel, pray asking God to forgive them and save them, and then go on living the same way. That’s what I did. And I thought I was doing pretty good because I acted nicely, behaved well, and did what I thought was right (in my own eyes) and what I had learned by being in Christian circles. But I was missing so much!!

Christ came to transform us, to mold us into His image, to sanctify us. As we seek Him daily through the Bible and prayer, His Spirit is at work to do these things. We yield our lives to Him, and He fills us with His Spirit. And He is not confined by any limitations that we want to set upon Him.

This morning, I praise God because He loved me and saved me. And I praise Him for opening my eyes to see and know more of Him.

The God Who Speaks

Carolyn

I love that we have a God who reveals Himself to His people. He is so personal with each of us.

As I studied Genesis and Exodus a couple of years ago, I couldn’t help but notice all the names of God that are introduced and how He spoke so personally. In Genesis 17, He said to Abram, “I am Almighty God; walk before Me and be blameless.” This was the first time God used the name Shaddai for Himself. To Hagar in Genesis 16, He revealed Himself as El Roi, the God who sees. And in Exodus 3:6, God revealed Himself to Moses as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Later in verse 14, God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM” declaring Himself to be the Eternal One, uncaused and independent (according to my Bible notes).

Those are just examples of the ways God revealed Himself in those days, and yet today, He is still a God who speaks and reveals Himself. He does this first and foremost through His Word and through His Spirit. And He can do this in innumerable ways because He is so vast and beyond comprehension; God cannot be put in a neat box that we can understand. I am stunned by the personal nature of how He speaks and reveals Himself to His people.

One way God ministers to my heart is through music. This is something that began in April 2005 after I really surrendered my life to Him. I was so thrilled by what I was discovering about God and so sick of being “lukewarm” and having a faith that God would want to spit out of His mouth, that I went around ecstatically proclaiming what God had done for me everywhere I went. I remember our small group meeting at our house, and I just went on and on about it! I started to wonder if I was being a little overboard with all my gushing. The only thought that kept going through my head though was “If you don’t praise Me, the rocks would cry out” (a reference to Luke 19:40).

I traveled to Memphis that next week in May 2005 for Mother’s Day and to see a friend whose son had just been diagnosed with leukemia and was being treated at St. Jude. At church that Sunday morning, the anthem was about this very thing that had been on my heart all week:

“If we keep our voices silent,
All creation will rise and shout,
If we fail to praise you, Father,
Then will the very rocks cry out!”

I’d certainly never heard this song or an entire anthem declaring this message. In the past, I would have questioned “coincidence”? But God had been revealing Himself so clearly in so many ways, that I didn’t doubt this was from Him.

I flew back home and was feeling led to do a neighborhood Bible study that summer. As I prayed about it, there were so many ways that God answered and led so clearly. I did though wish after my quiet time one morning, “I’d love to have a song for this, but I know there aren’t really songs about your neighbors!”

As I went to start breakfast, I turned on the radio in the kitchen, and the words to the song that were playing by Steven Curtis Chapman were: “Wake the neighbors! Get the word out! Come on, break out the music, climb a mountain and shout. This is life we’ve been given, made to be lived out… so live out loud!” That became my neighborhood Bible study song.

I literally have a song for most major events in my life. And when I hear them, I can remember how actively God revealed Himself during a time in my life (my grandmother dying, selling our house, my son’s broken wrist, etc.).

One last quick song story. I have a benign kidney condition where my kidneys are misshapen and I therefore have lots of stones and diffuse calcification throughout. After being diagnosed a few years ago and finally figuring out the source of the pain, I was told I’d need lithotripsy every year or two to manage this. Each checkup revealed more stones and more concerns from the tests they had done.

As I was preparing for my next visit, my quiet time that morning was in Habakkuk 3. As I finished, I decided that whatever I learned at my doctor visit, I would need to give the Lord praise. I then started ahead on my day, but then realized, no, I need to know specifically what I am going to say because otherwise, I will forget to praise Him, especially if the news isn’t good (which is what I expected because I was hurting). I went back to Habakkuk and noticed 3:2: “Lord, I have heard of your fame; I stand in awe of your deeds, O LORD. Renew them in our day…” So the phrase I took to remember was “I stand in awe of You.” No matter what I’m told, Lord, I will say “I stand in awe of You” for You have done great things for me.

Later at my doctor visit, I sat waiting. The doctor rushed in with one of my reports and sat down. He then proceeded to tell me how wonderful it was: “What are you doing? How has this happened?” He went over every level, with each one saying how great it was! I felt like a school kid being praised for doing well on a test. He kept saying how great this was and how this was the best report he had seen from a patient with this condition, on and on. I just started saying in my heart, “I stand in awe of You! I stand in awe of You.”

I left and went to get my kids at a friend’s house. As I was telling them the story and how we needed to say thank you to the Lord, and I was describing to them how I praised God with “I stand in awe of You,” I could hear the music playing on the radio in the background. It was playing an old, but familiar song “I stand in awe of You:”

“Yes, I stand in awe of You, Jesus,
Yes, I stand in awe of You.
And I let my words be few… Jesus I am so in love with You.”

Now, I did still have stones, and I’ve not been healed, but each subsequent visit has held a good report: “This is awesome!” a nurse told me at the next visit. Awesome, indeed.

I love it that God speaks through songs. I’d love to hear the ways He speaks to you, too. He is so personal, so real, so near. I praise the God who speaks in such personal ways!

Trust in the Lord

Carolyn

Psalm 118:8 “It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man.”

With school starting on Tuesday, and kickoff activities beginning tomorrow, I thought I’d share how it is we ended up on this road of helping start a school and being so involved in its growth. This is not something I could have ever imagined!

We had put our son in the public school for Kindergarten, but felt that it wasn’t challenging and I, having had Christian elementary education, missed the Christian foundation. We decided to homeschool for one year, but knew that we were not long term homeschoolers. In November 2005, my brother-in-law dropped off a packet of information about a new school. As I read the information about classical education (a model my husband and I both embraced and which I had gained more exposure of through homeschooling), I wondered if (and secretly hoped) this was the answer for our children’s education.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, a couple had felt called of the Lord to start this school and by themselves had put together this information packet, set up an informational meeting, and sort of laid a fleece before the Lord, asking Him to provide at least 3 other families by year’s end if they were to move forward. At their first prayer meeting on New Year’s Eve, they had 3 other families.

For us personally, we began to pray about it that Thanksgiving, but did not know how we would afford private education. We went to the first interest meeting in early December, even recruiting other families to come. We began praying.

Then one morning that winter, I woke up with the words “one eighteen eight” going over and over in my head. What did that mean? Since yielding my life to the Lord and seeking Him that previous April, there had been a couple of times like this where verses were spoken in my head in the night, and both of the other times, it was very clear what it meant. But in this case, I wasn’t as sure. I knew that there was only one book of the Bible with that many chapters — Psalms. So I looked at Psalm 118:8 “It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man.” Hmmm. “That’s good,” I thought, “and I guess I could apply that to many things, but Lord, I’ll just wait for You to show me what it means.”

A few days later, I decided to go to the school’s webpage that had just been constructed. When it popped up, there was a tree spreading across the homepage. That was significant to me because during our year of homeschooling, our theme was a tree. We had memorized Psalm 1 (also a passage within the school’s website), and we had a tree in the yard named “Roots” that we watched throughout the year. My son would journal about its changes. We studied the fruit of the Spirit and hung fruit on our tree. We wanted our lives to be like the tree firmly planted by streams of water.

But not only did the webpage come up with the tree, it came up with a verse, Jeremiah 17:7, that slowly moved in and out: “Blessed is the man whose trust is the Lord, whose confidence is in Him.” I knew immediately — That’s it! That’s the same verse as Psalm 118:8. In fact, when I looked it up in my Bible, to the side of Jeremiah 17:7, it said “Psalm 118:8.” They are the same thing. It’s better to trust in the Lord than put confidence in man! “Yes, Lord, I will trust You. I will follow You in this!!”

As we moved ahead, God graciously provided me a job at the school doing administrative work to help solve the question of financing private school education for our children. We met with the other “founding families” every Saturday to pray for the school. We saw God do amazing things with such specifically answered prayer regarding everything from teachers to location to curriculum.

Sometimes I think the call was so clear because the road would be so hard! At every point of doubt or discouragement, I could remember what He had shown us, and keep moving forward, despite the obstacles. And He met us every step of the way! He has used it as a means of our sanctification, too, which I had not expected.

We started in the fall of 2006 with 23 children, had 49 during our second year, and have 64 enrolled this fall in pre-K through 6th grade. We look forward with great anticipation to what God has in store as we continue to trust Him for what He has brought together.