Worship through it

I had an experience at church this morning that I feel like I need to share. I had to sing a solo at church this morning. Normally, I'm never nervous, but today was different. I sang in the 8:30 service (everything was fine) & after went over to our regular practice with the worship team in the family life center. They were having some technical difficulties with monitors & sounds and had been trying to work through it for about 20 min. Our worship pastor finally stopped & said let's pray & ask God to help us figure this out. He started to pray & before he even asked, everything started working with the sound. Isn't is amazing that if we just take time to stop & let God be in control, He will answer even the smallest prayers? Obviously something was trying to hinder the Spirit in church today because all through the 9:30 service it was strange. People's faces were so bland, the atmosphere of the service was cold, it just plain ole felt weird. Then this pastor got up to speak & he struggled through the whole message. He had to stop several times because he kept losing his train of thought. He even asked at the end of the service for us to pray for him in the next service so that he could preach without being disrupted. Then I got up to sing at the end of the service. I was really nervous. I'm usually never nervous, but I was today. It was as if Satan was trying to prevent us from worshipping God today and hearing what our pastor had to say. Then it came time for the 11:00 service. I said a prayer for our pastor before I went up on stage & said "God I'm going to worship through it no matter what". I took my attention off of the audience & the strange air lurking around the building and focused on God & what he was ministering to my heart. Obviously people were praying for our pastor during his sermon because it was great & he nailed it this time. He talked about issues of integrity & taking a stand on what we know is right even if it means not blending in with the crowd and going with the flow of everything else.

God calls us as Christians to be different. I know God's calling me to be different, but will I listen? In today's society we've taken God out of schools & government and even taken One Nation Under God off US currency and we wonder why the world is the way that it is now. We've got to be different and take a stand. We just had a group return from China where you can be arrested for worshipping God. We have so much freedom in our country that we take for granted, but we as a nation are moving further & further from God just to please this world. Everything has to be politically correct these days as to not stir up any bad feelings or make anyone upset. It's like we are becoming a neutral nation. God calls us to be different. Be salt & light... be the salty bitterness of something when everything else tastes so sweet & the light in dark place that makes us stand out. I know I struggle with this every day. It's a challenge to me that I have to work on constantly.

I know in the days to come that spiritual warfare will be more frequent in places of worship in all nations. Let us not give into the temptation to just sit there & blend in... let us worship through it... to God's glory!

you can watch today's message here