So I’m sitting in Realife. The band is playing. The songs are up on the screens. Everything is just like it always is. But I can't sing. I fumble for words. But I just can’t bring myself to let them out. I just felt fake. Like I don’t really mean what these lyrics are saying. They sang of redemption, of a God of Love, of grace. But I didn’t want to believe it. Sure I knew in the back of my mind that He loved me regardless of anything I could do, I’d even heard Stephen talk about it that morning, about how indescribable Abba’s love really is. I knew it. But I didn’t know it. A song or two roll by, I honestly don’t have a clue I couldn’t bring myself to get involved, to worship. And then My Glorious by Christ Tomlin was struck up.
It’s a good song, most have heard it before. You know those few songs that just bring you to tears every time you hear them? They just bring you facedown in front of the Lord? Yeah, not one of those. It’s just another song. One that I’ve sang a thousand times and felt no more direct connection to God than with any other song. But as I was listening, as was all I could do, I latched onto to a particular phrase: “God is bigger than.” It made me start thinking; God is bigger than ______ (blank). It was then that I realized what my problem was, why I couldn’t look God in the eye so-to-speak. I was ashamed of my sin.
We don’t ever really think about it like that do we though? Sin is always just an idea, a notion, an ambiguous sort of thing that we really aren’t ever having much of a problem with when someone else brings it up. I didn’t even realize that’s what was holding me back. But as that short phrase just hit me, I really started to have my eyes opened.
I just began to simply list them out, my heart began to overflow. God is bigger than my sin. God is bigger than my pride. God is bigger than my fears. Then it got deeper. God is bigger than my worries about my mission trip. God is bigger than my lack of faith. God is bigger than my cowardice towards him. God is bigger than… you name it. For the final two or three songs I just kept them coming. My heart was overflowing; I had found this sweet release. So if you would, stop for a minute.
Yeah, you. Really stop and at least think about this crazy concept with me. We have a God who, like it says in Hebrews 4:15-16, is able to sympathize with us because he’s already done this rodeo. He’s lived as a man, and he beat sin, Satan, death, and the grave. His brutal beaten body hung from a tree, the most gruesome form of death and torture any man will ever have to face. All for me. All for you. All for us. Phil Wickham described it with the lyric “walls we couldn’t move came crashing down.” God beat the worst, there is nothing he left unconquered. He’s bigger than it. Your sin, he beat it. He’s bigger than ______. Fill it in, he OBLITERATED it. It’s gone forever.
That was part one. Part two is what Amanda talked about. Her talk revolved around knowing God, and how else can you know someone than by talking to him. Yet again, I restate myself. This is nothing new. I’ve heard this talk before; I’ve taught this lesson to my fourth and fifth graders, to my En-Fuego kids I mean it’s not earth shattering new news. But it is. I’d shut down. Locked the gate to my soul and refused entrance to the King of the UNIVERSE. Sounds kinda dumb when you put it in writing doesn’t it? But it compacted on what God had been stirring in my heart earlier. That He IS bigger than my struggles. But he isn’t just a behemoth of Might. He also is Abba Father, daddy. He loves us. He loves Me. And all he is asking that I’d come play with him. That I’d just be in his presence once in a while. That we could just have that relationship again (not that we’d ever lost it, I’d just hidden my eyes). Now it’s cool to look back and get what I had to relearn and I have no doubt I will need to relearn again before even this year is over. God is BIGGER. He loves me. My sin has been CRUSHED. All he wants, in the whole wide world is to be with me. Me, scrawny, 5’6”, 130 pound, scraggly, teenage, me. And that hit me.
So to all of you who have “heard it all before”, hear it again.
That’s all for now.
-matt
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