No More Rain!!

I've been thinking a lot over the last 24 hours about Julie's wonderful post; "How To Love God, and Kim Walker, I Sing My Love". Worship songs are of such importance - they fashion our theology without almost realising. So if we are singing songs that have an Old Covenant emphasis and are subconciously putting us into the "Debtors Ethic" without even hearing a sermon. Julie sums it up so simply (and in almost complete contrast to the definition of the debtors ethic);

"God is love. When we are in Him, we love. When we believe in Jesus, we receive His love and then we have love to give. Ahhh, the simplicity! So who of God's sons doesn't love to sing back in response to our father how much we love him? Once we have freely received his love for us, have experienced it, then we are free to love him back! If we try to love him under law, we will fail miserably and will not please His heart. We don't love God because we were commanded to but because he loved us first and our new nature was born to love him back!"

I'm amazed that I still have a small element of fear of what people will say on this blog - I should be well past that, I've surely burnt my bridges! So here goes - yes God seems to speak to me through computer games, at the gym and through pop songs. If that disqualifies me in your view - then I can deal with that! Kylie Minogue's song; "No More Rain" has been doing exactly that. She wrote it as an expression of gratefulness after recovering from cancer.

And here's what occured to me in listening to the lyrics ... oh that this would be more reflected in some of our songs of worship! So here's the lyrics of the song and here's my thoughts;

"Have you ever thought, that the sky was just endlessly dark?".

This must be the experience of most Christians. Prayers that get shouted, cried, screamed and yet bounced back seemingly unheard and unanswered. "The heavens are brass".

"And then you look up, and see a million stars".

See that's what the message of grace does. Nothing has changed except our perspective! Grace shows the stars shining! The God who DOES hear and DOES love!

"Have you ever been scared of the water, and stuck on the edge? And then you dive in, how quickly you forget your fears".

Surely it is fear that keeps so many back from throwing themselves into the true glory of the reality of grace. Fear of loss of control. Fear of sinning. But I can testify personally (as can many others) that once you even begin to taste the wonder of grace then the fear is so easily and so quickly gone. And it really is;

"Wave of love coming over me ... Got rainbow colours and no more rain".

Rainbow = a covenant of grace! God has taken an oath! A covenant! This is the Word of God! "For this is like the days of Noah to Me, when I swore that the waters of Noah would not flood the earth again;

"So I have sworn that I will not be angry with you nor will I rebuke you".

This is such good news! This is the best news ever! Yet something weird happened when I was thinking about the line;

"I’m on my knees".

I guess traditionally I've always thought of being on one's knees as a posture of praise and humility. A small gesture in response to all God has done for us. But I began to get a greater and greater sense of the thrill and excitement in heaven from the throneroom itself when God receives true worship coming from a heart TOTALLY free from any sense of a "debtors ethic". But a heart responding in just pure love and adoration for Who God is. Almost like He's been waiting for centuries to find a people who will be set free from feeling "obliged" to worship Him and try and whip up their worship by "reviewing" how sinful they are/were. And when it happens - when a people truly get set free by grace - (dare I say this reverently) - but He falls on His knees with pure thrill!

Well why not? Zephaniah 3:17 comes close;

"The LORD your God is in your midst, A victorious warrior. He will exult over you with joy, He will be quiet in His love, He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy".

Or as Terry Virgo put it;

"I once looked up ‘delight' in the dictionary. It said ‘great pleasure and satisfaction'. But I wasn't satisfied with that, so I searched for it in a thesaurus. This is what I found: ‘laugh, smile, get a kick out of, hug oneself, rave, bask in, enjoy, wallow, have fun, exhilarate, relish, elate, thrill, ravish, intoxicate, entrance, enrapture, purr.' Isn't that wonderful? When God looks at you he purrs with delight!".

As Julie put it - we love Him because He first loved us.

And how will our love ever begin to approach His pure, beautiful wonderful love as long as we are constrained by thinking we can ever repay Him at all? No - our joy is to learn more about His love, bask more in His love, receive more of His love and then and only then will we be able to start loving like He.