Healer - Hillsong

The song “Healer” appears on the new “Hillsong Live - This is Our God” album (i highly recommend it). The story behind this song is amazing. The song was written by Mike Guglielmucci from Planetshakers (another australian chrisitan band that I also like). He was diagnosed with a blood disease, some kind of cancer, that kept him in a wheelchair for a long time. While suffering he wrote this song:

I BELIEVE that YOU’re my HEALER
I BELIEVE YOU are all I Need
I BELIEVE YOU’re my portion
I BELIEVE YOU’re more than enough for me
JESUS, YOU’re ALL I NEED

You'll see on the video that he is still singing - even while still on oxygen. While we know that God doesn't always heal our physical aliments (anybody who believes that he does must be ignoring the staggering statistics on the % of people who eventually die), at times he does still choose to heal. Better yet, he is constantly healing and softening and drawing the hearts of people... an even greater miracle. Anyway, check out the song and video. They removed the best one (the one about the story), but this still gives you a great idea. It's a great song!

beauty

This week I have been thinking a lot about worship. What does it mean to worship something/someone? How do we conjure up worship? How can we change the things that we worship? As I was thinking about this, there was a passage from the Bible that stood out to me. It's out of Isaiah 6 and Isaiah is standing in the throne room of God completely captivated by the beauty of God. I love this passage because its clear that isaiah is grasping for words. He doesn't have the vocabulary to explain what he is seeing. The beauty of the Lord is evident in this passage, but what is more interesting to me is Isaiah's and the other creatures response. Worship.

I am convinced that worship happens when we see God for who He really is... in all his beauty, purity, holiness and majesty. Another thing that I am convinced of is that worship is so much more than a song. For Isaiah, worship realizing who he was in relation to God and his sinfulness. For Isaiah worship was say, "I'll go, send Me."

Worship is serious business, because we are all worshippers. It's the way we were designed and we innately do it. All of us. It's serious business because worship determines who and what we will become. Ralph Wlado Emerson wrote this:
"THE GODS we worship write their names on our faces, be sure of that. And a man will worship something —have no doubt about that, either. He may think that his tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of his heart—but it will out. That which dominates will determine his life and character. Therefore, it is to our benefit to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming."
Powerful!

Robbie Seay music review

I recently got the newest Robbie Seay Band CD - Give Yourself Away. This is a really good CD, it's one of those that you can listen to all the way through. However, we were singing on of the songs from the album yesterday in church and a few of the lyrics struck me as being theologically iffy. Here is what we sang (from the song 'Song of Hope')

I will sing a song of hope

Sing along God of heaven come down

Heaven come down

Just to know that You are near is enough

God of heaven come down, heaven come down

That sounds all nice and good, but as followers of Christ the hope isn't that God will come down, the hope is that God HAS come down. That's what we celebrate when we celebrate Christmas, that God came down. Emmanuel; God with us. Heaven came down crashing into earth in the form of a baby, born to a teenage family without dime in their pocket, in a dirty barn sorrounded by animal crap. God came down.

I don't want to destroy the song too much, I actually really like the melody, but the lyrics are just not theologically correct. He then goes on to state that God is near. On the contrary the Bible states that God is here! (Psalm 139, Romans 8:38-39) There is a big difference between God being near and God being here.

Let's celebrate a God that has come down and God that is here. That is a song hope!