A Call To The Remnant

There is the presence of God to be found in enthusiastic and energetic worship, the kind of worship that lifts your spirit. It can lift up the head that hangs low and invigorate the heart and fill you full of joy and leave you strengthened. This is good worship. Yet there is another kind of worship that seems to have fled the land. A worship where we breath in rarified air. Oh how desperate is our need for this kind of encounter in our day.

The first kind of presence lifts your heart to gaze upon the Master, the second kind of presence invades every part of who you are. It falls from heaven like a heavy dew, heads are lowered and hands are raised. All becomes quiet, one barely dares to breathe as the Spirit of God slowly descends down through our out-strecthed hands and our hearts and minds and down to the very soles of our feet, and the ground upon which we stand becomes Holy ground. The first kind of presence uplifts us, the second changes us fundamentally. As living waters pour into us then it rises up like a great river that is so full that it overflows its banks.

The banks themselves begin to crumble and fall into this river of pure life as it swells up and floods through every part of who we are. The landscape is being changed by this flood, the very topography of our lives is being flattened by its powers and everything that is not securely rooted to its foundations is simply swept away. Changed forever. And when the flood recedes we are left with a glorious afterglow. As the deer pants for the waterbrooks, I wonder, do our hearts pant after this kind of encounter.

The Lord Himself does not need professional worship teams. He does not need people to encourage us to stand and jump up and down and raise our hands. In the Welsh revival two young women singing either acapella or simply backed by a piano typically sang “Here is love, vast as the ocean.” And there was Love, in the very midst of them, vast as the ocean, flooding the hearts and minds of all who attended.

Brothers and sisters, in all our modernity, what have we lost? In the programs of our churches and the professional class of worship leaders and pastors have we lost the simplicity of it all? And in the losing of it we now have to entertain the people. Spirit led worship is exactly that, it is Spirit led. In work we have a routine. In life we have a routine. Prisoners in prison have a routine. Oftentimes we are slaves to the routine, it is what gets us through life.

Yet, there is nothing routine about the Holy Spirit of the Living God. He is dynamic and you can never know what way the wind will blow next. Have we sold out our souls to the routine? Routine in the home, routine at work, routine at church. Routine people do not change the world. Routine people do not do wage war on the battle-fields of life. Saints, you are extraordinary because of the great treasure that lies within you. Extraordinary people change everything by the overflowing power of God that flows through every part of who they are.

The Spirit of God is dynamic and those filled with His “dynamis,” change the environment around them because of the environment inside of them. Their spirits have been filled to capacity and is overflowing their banks. And all who come near are caught up in the flooding overflow of a mighty all consuming God. Lord fill us again to overflowing with the kind of presence that invades every part of who we are and may all that we encounter be caught up in the flood that overflows our spirit.