Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Just Open Your Hands

A friend sent me an email with a quote by Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins, “Your basic person wants to talk about material culture, Internet culture. I think about God, cats, and nature.” Reading that quote made my day. I used to listen to The Smashing Pumpkins all time before I was born again, and I’d listen to them loud. I still think they’re a great band, and reading that quote made me want to have another listen. I’m not the same as I was back then, so I don’t know if they’d have the same meaning and feeling for me, and I don’t know if I’d listen to them loud, but something tells me I just might. There are some bands and singers who just sound right loud, and they don’t sound right any other way.

I love my gospel music now – that’s something that the Lord brought into my life after I was born again. Before I would have never listened to it, but now it’s something I really enjoy. Praise and worship songs are important to our spirit – they help renew and strengthen us in a powerful way. Singing them is important too – listening is good, but singing brings the words out of our own mouths so we can claim them for ourselves.
I don’t listen to the music I used to listen to much at all any more, and that’s started to change again which interests me. When I was first saved, I asked the Lord if I should get rid of all the music I owned – I have crates of CD’s and even still have old vinyl from my brother and from my own teenage years. It was a surprise to me when He said I didn’t need to throw them away, and even more or a surprise when He started to show me that within those songs and bands, even bands like The Smashing Pumpkins, there are moments of Divine beauty and truth. I’ve gone to visit churches where the worship service was a rock band, and there can definitely be a place for all kinds of music in our lives. There were a few CD’s He had me get rid of – there was one that I’d bought by accident that was so weird and dark that it gave me the creeps just looking at it – but for the most part He said to keep them, and now they’re coming back again into my life, slowly but surely, the songs, the singers, the bands, the music.

Ephesians 5:18-19 tells us, “And do not be drunk with wine, because that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord.” Once early on when I was newly born again, I was talking to the Lord about why it’s bad for us to drink too much and do drugs, and He gave me an image of His Spirit who lives within us being choked and smothered by smoke and alcohol. We can’t be filled with the Spirit if we are filled with toxic things, and I know that also goes for the food we eat and the things we listen to, the things we read, the things we think, and the things that we allow to fill our heart. Anger, jealousy, sarcasm, bitterness – they’re just as bad as too much wine.
But even through the partying that so many of these bands I used to listen to were doing, they still managed to reach moments of communing with the Divine. That is the power of God – He can get through to us even when we are not in any shape to listen. He’ll meet us where we are, whatever we are doing, and He’ll keep right on talking through the noise and chaos all around us. It may not all get through, but as He says in Isaiah 55:10-11, “For as the rain and snow come down from heaven, and do not return there without watering the earth and making it bear and sprout, and furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater; so will My word be which goes forth from my mouth; it will not return to me empty without accomplishing what I desire, and without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it.”

No matter how far away we think we are from God, He is always near to us, and no matter how far we think we have to go to get back to Him, He always shows us how easy it is to return. All we have to do is open our hands and let Him fill them – with His love, His mercy and His blessings. And as He fills them everything else that has kept us from His blessings will all fall away like sand.
Blessings,

Jannie Susan

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