I was talk some pretty heart to heart things to my friend Tucker Richmond last night. Tucker is one of my groomsmen in my wedding and plays guitar for me a lot. We were sharing some heart felt stuff about worship and all kinds of personal struggles. Well, this was still on my heart this morning as I woke up and I decided to go up to my bookshelf. So I grabbed a devotional that I haven’t opened in years called “Out Cry: Vital Worship’s 31-Day Devotional”. A friend of my dad’s friend Jamie Harvill (Integrity and Maranatha author of the songs “Ancient of Days” and “Firm Foundation” and lead guitar player for Don Moen) gave this book to my dad at an Integrity Conference….possibly to give to me. I don’t remember. None the less, Dad was a spokesmen for Integrity and he brought me all kinds of free stuff all the time. Well this devotional really stuck out to me. It was…raw…real…honest. I dug it.
Well I had completely forgot about it until I picked it up last night. Well I read Day 1. It spoke about how worship is far more than just music. It is all of life. For those of you who don’t know me very well, I have a tattoo over my heart with the word “Surrender”. This is my personal definition of worship…heart surrender. Surrendering all of our life…every aspect…that, is worship.
So I wanted more, so I went on. Day 2 told the story about how Satan used to be the worship leader of heaven. How he was perfectly beautiful. And how he saw the worship and the praise and the love that the angels gave to God and he desired it. He wanted the believed he deserved the worship of heaven. Well we all know the story and know where he is now. There was a great story too: “There was a man who challenged God and told Him that he could make a human being just like God could. God said ‘Fine, let’s go.’ So they both reached down for the dust of the earth when God said, ‘No sir, you have to make your own dirt.’” We need to refuse to let anything take the place of God in our heart and life. For those of you who might remember when I played in the christian rock band, Dead Man Walking, our last cd had a song called “Illuminated” on it. I wrote that song the night I first read that devotion. The words to the chorus were:
Illuminate my life
I’ll let You dive right in
Let me touch Your hands
where those nails pierced Your skin
Illuminate my soul
Lord God, Son of Man
Allow me to be whole
and never thirst again
Illuminate my life
So…I still wanted more. Day 3 was about the masks that we wear and how we need to ask God to uncover us to reveal Himself through us. So then I came across Day 4. It was about how we keep our little secrets bottled up. And at the end, I had wrote a prayer, a prayer that had little to do with the devotion. But on that night on January 27, 2002, I had wrote out a prayer that said,
Dear God, break my life open. Crumble it to pieces so you can see everything I have bottled up inside. Let my tears be wiped by Your hands that were pierced for my soul. Let my tears of brokenness enter the punctures and mix with your blood so that I can be more of You and more like You and less of me and less like me. Cleanse me. Then restore me anew. In Your precious Son’s name I pray, amen.
Now for you, this prayer isn’t that special, but for me, whoa. The background info that you should know was this was just a few months before my world, as I knew it, literally crumbled. I thought my life was perfect. I had a wonderful family. My mom and dad gave me everything I ever needed and most everything I ever wanted. We lived in a beautiful house in Kennesaw. I had a girlfriend that I had been dating for 2 years and had a good relationship with. I had a great friends at Kennesaw First Baptist in which I had made in the 13 years I was there.
Then it all crumbled. It started by when we left KFBC. We started going to Wildwood Baptist and I had to make all new friends. And the friends I had at KFBC I lost some type of connection with…one that still is no longer the same today. The relationship I had with my girlfriend took an ugly turn for the worse and we broke up. My parents that I thought were perfect…sat me and my little brother down after returning from a cruise for their 20th anniversay and told us they were no longer happy and were getting a divorce. They promised it would be clean and they just wanted to go their seperate ways. 2 days later, my mom told my dad that she had been having an affair. This affected me in a huge way. I trusted my mom. The divorce sucked. I wasn’t planning on having to tell a lawyer who I wanted to live with. And then having to look her in the eyes knowing what she had done. Since then I have forgiven her…just so you know and we are currently restoring our relationship.
To keep this post alot shorter and to avoid discuss current events still going on, EVEN TODAY, there are battles going on that are tearing me apart. But I think that God still has some work to refine on me. But I mean, that is what my prayer was. And my prayer today is that He is ALWAYS refining me. He has restored me anew and I pray that you ask God the same for yourself. God has so much to offer and we get so amazed when we begin to see it. Then we get stuck on that amazement and never go on to discover more. Keep growing in Him.
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