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Psalm 63:2-4
So I have looked for You in the sanctuary, To see Your power and Your glory.
Because Your lovingkindness is better than life, My lips shall praise You.
Thus I will bless You while I live; I will lift up my hands in Your name.

In verse 3 of Psalm 63 David declares something that should stir our hearts. The experience of God’s lovingkindness is better than life! This declaration should leave hearts wanting and minds wondering, “What did he mean?”
I desire to live in the same reality of encounter as David, but it so often seems fleeting. The truth that the experience of God’s lovingkindness is better than any other pleasure life has to offer, I do not doubt. Yet as I examine my own heart in light of this scripture, I find I declare this back to God in prayer not from a place of knowing, but rather hoping that it is true. “God I want your lovingkindness to be better than life!”

However, David was not writing about an ideal, he was writing about a reality of his experience in daily encountering the living God. Out of the substance of his relationship with God, continually dwelling in His sanctuary, He could declare back to God something he knew to be true on the deepest levels. Out of the revelation of David’s days in Gods sanctuary, we lift our own praises, as we grasp to understand for ourselves what David knew to be true about God.

How often are the things we declare to God in prayer and worship unfelt aspirations? We know truths about God from His word, but we don’t necessarily attain an understanding of truth from the way we live before, and interact with, God. How much greater is it to worship from a place of knowing the truth about God, not simply intellectually but from a place of deep revelation in His Spirit? Truly, how would it change the way we sing and pray to declare from a place of “knowing” not just knowledge. I believe the same thing David had in the sanctuary of the most high, is what Jesus offers every believer in John 4:23-24, when he declares to the Samaritan woman “But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”

The angels who continually declare Holy, Holy, Holy never grow weary, because the reality of what they are saying is being continually refreshed and expanded. I am convinced we could sing “our God is an awesome God” for all eternity, and never find it dull or repetitive, if we sang in Spirit and in Truth! Worship and Prayer are more about the knowledge of God behind what we say, as opposed to the words or tune we repeat.
So Father, give us wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of who you are so that we can truly declare, because we have been convinced, that your lovingkindness is better than life.

Ecclesiastes 7:4 “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.”

The world again and again is calling us into mirth, entertainment and amusement. Mirth is characterized by frivolity, giddiness, amusement, recreation, entertainment, drunkenness, carousing, and partying. Mirth attracts friends–a large crowd to eat, drink, and make merry with. Mirth inebriates and intoxicates the senses until it renders you dull, sluggish, and asleep.

As strongly as the world is calling us to embrace mirth, the Lord is calling us to embrace myrrh. Myrrh is a burial spice, a bitter herb. It points to suffering and death. Myrrh repels the masses. The way of myrrh is the road less traveled. Myrrh causes men to turn away; and yet, it is what the Lord is calling us to embrace. He desires a people who will go the way of myrrh, experiencing the death of the cross until He causes light to break in and the gray areas to flee.

Song of Solomon 4:6 “Until the day breaks And the shadows flee away, I will go my way to the mountain of myrrh …”

Psalm 27:13 says that we will faint if we don’t believe we’ll see the goodness of Lord in land of living. However, if we don’t set our minds on the age to come we will also faint in this life. Though we experience momentary joy in this life, our greatest joys won’t come until the next age. On the day that we stand before Him and receive our reward, we will surely enter into the joy of the Lord. Until then, the path of this life is spent on the path of myrrh.

God wants to offer His people the gift of mourning. Matthew 5:4 declares “Blessed are those who mourn.” Spiritual mourning is not something we are to graduate from in this life. We mustn’t refuse the gift of mourning saying, ‘It’s not my season;’ when in actuality, we are using it as an excuse to hurl ourselves into frivolity, drunkenness, and carnal pleasures. We are called to weep and mourn all the days of this life until we die, until we see Him. Joel 2:12 declares that we should, “Turn to the lord with all of our hearts, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.”

One of the greatest temptations at the end of the age, prior to the return of Jesus, will be the same as it was in Noah’s day—pursuing mirth rather than embracing mourning, in light of what is coming (Luke 17:26-27). Noah was gripped by the Word of Lord, crying out that a flood was coming in a time when it had never rained on the earth before. He began to prophesy with his words, and yea more than his words, but with his life as well—building an ark in the desert, day in and day out. Noah warned and pleaded, undoubtedly imploring the people with tears, all the while hammering nails into wood. He invested his life into the foolishness of building a boat on sand in the middle of the desert. His message was not palatable. It was too extreme: “Judgment is at hand; a flood is coming!” Noah did not give himself to merriment and mirth. The people of the day gave themselves to eating, drinking, carousing, and being preoccupied with the cares of this life. They continued to go on with business as usual, refusing to embrace the mourning and sobriety necessary to save themselves in the day of trouble. The message of mourning is not popular, and yet Solomon instructs the wise man to find himself in the house of mourning, for only fools live in the house of mirth (Eccl 7:4).

Who would dare to live this life soberly? In sobriety, our hearts come face to face with pain. Most would rather live drunk and in spiritual fantasy than have to look down the barrel at reality to comprehend the desperate season of time in which we live. So we give ourselves to anything and everything that drowns out the sirens. We will run after anything that silences the message that causes our hearts to tremble, and mourn, and turn to the Lord. We must cry for mercy in this hour in light of our own impotence to save ourselves.

In this urgent hour we must reject the temptation to live frivolously, given to mirth, and become those who give ourselves to embracing myrrh. What was acceptable in years gone by is not acceptable in this late hour. It is time to weep, to mourn and to seek the Lord while He may be found (Isa 55:6).

I wept and wept, I have never ached so deeply in my life. Spit, snot, and salty tears covered my chin and stuck to my beard in a gross amalgamation of sorrow. The pain in my soul was tortuous. All I wanted to do was shut myself off from the depth of the emotions I was feeling. My flesh so deeply wanted to go numb, but the draw of the spirit prevailed and led me deeper in travail. In the midst of the storm, came stillness in the inner man. In that moment I was given an understanding; this is what it means to begin to touch something God cares about.

In reflecting on my own zeal, I can recount many times when I sought to overcome challenges and obstacles by the sheer force of my will, personality, and gifting. Even in ministry, out of sincere efforts to serve the Lord, I undertook “good” things in the zeal of my flesh. Can anyone relate? The expression; “when there is a will, then there is a way” comes to mind. For a long time I have confused doggedness, perseverance, and self-effort as the defining characteristics of what it means to be zealous.

Yet, I have begun to learn that to possess the Zeal of the Lord of Hosts in my own weak frame is altogether other than the experience I have within myself, or have ever observed in the world. “For our God is a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29)” To truly possess his heart over a matter leaves no room for the calculated efforts of the flesh, or for the wisdom of man.

Therefore, God brings us into a Matthew 5:3 reality, where we are confronted with the poverty of our own Spirits, and broken there within. It is only then that we can agree as intercessors - in faith - with the principle of Zechariah 4:6; “So he answered and said to me: “This is the word of the LORD to Zerubbabel: ‘Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ Says the LORD of hosts.”
When we have touched a desire of the Lord in our own souls by the Spirit, then we have stared starkly at our own inability to bring any of his desires to pass, apart from He himself doing this work through us. Thus the breaking, before His zeal can truly take root. God wants us to know that through him all things are possible, but that apart from Him we can do nothing.
It may trouble us at first that we cannot qualify ourselves to do anything for Him, but in the end, it will bring us peace. All that He requires of us, we have already been made fit for by the blood of his son; to love him, to know him, to agree with him, and to serve him in the simple devotion of sons and daughters toward their Father. We can rest in this reality, cease from striving in our own zeal, and truly begin to connect with something God cares about. With respect to seeing his zealous desires accomplished, we can trust that on the behalf of those who are willing He will prove himself strong.

Yesterday I participated in my graduation commencement ceremony at Emory University. It was a strange consumation to the “bizarre in between” that I have been living in for the past six months. It was a commencement that was fittingly disjunct, and therfore fully in step with God’s process in my life over the past six months. I graduated from Emory in December, and have been full time in the House of Prayer since then, so this particular graduation ceremony - five months out of step with my reality- was in a way a climax and entirely anti-climactic. God told me I needed to go - so there I was. We all lined up alphabetcally, black gowns, caps, 07′ tassles. I graduated from the Business School at Emory, most everyone I talked to yesterday is going to work for financial firms in New York. I was a consulting and venture management concentration, and from the outside looking in it may seem that I could have gone a very different route than the direction I have taken. It must seem to some that I must have burned out in school or gotten too “into my religion”.

To family and friends the explanation of what I am doing after graduation is admittedly a little befuddling, as we talk over Merlot and Smoked Salmon at a Buckhead restaurant, they nod and smile politely. Maybe wondering where a child with seemingly “so much potential may” have gone wrong. To them the idea of talking to God all day seems a little silly, which I can’t blame them I thought it was silly at first - at least until He started to talk back.

So as I observe the confusion of my family, the calls for the “betterment of humanity” from commencement speakers, and the dollar signs in the eyes of my peers - I consider, why did I choose to be where I am?

After the ceremony I return to the House of Prayer, tired from feeling the weight of “so much potential”. There I ask my Father what he thinks. “Dad what do you think about the decisions I have made?” He answers in the way only he can, with a fresh wind of his Spirit as sweet to my soul as a sincere smile and a pat on the back. I am so grateful to not have to worry about fulfilling any of “my own potential”. I am so thankful that to simply accept His love in all of life’s circumstances, will be both the challenge and fulfillment of all of my life’s potential.

So I sit in the room, I talk to Him, He whispers back. I feel his pleasure and pride over me, not because I have done anything particularly good, but because I am just with Him and He likes me, alot. So I praise Him that even though others (I myself included) maybe confused at times about the choices i have made, He never is. He knows my way, so I will lean on him the best I can.

Where do I plan to go with what I have choosen? Hopefully, deeper in love.