Something About The Joy

I have great cousins. Another one put this youtube video on his Facebook site. When I viewed it, the Easter season was ushered in for me. Hope you enjoy it too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FQND5YFIqA

Just after posting Heights of Delight I opened my e-mail and found a message from my cousin with the following website. I listened and experienced the conscious presence of God. It brought tears of true worship to my eyes. http://pjcockrell.wordpress.com/2007/11/22/amazing-grace-just-the-black-note Enjoy!

In Heights of Delight , Dick Eastman describes three levels of awareness of the presence of God. The first, which he calls “God’s intellectual presence,” is simply the logical recognition that God is omnipresent, and therefore He is here. Though this awareness depends on faith, the faith is in factual claims and the faith, itself, is simply an unemotional acknowledgement of the facts. The second, “God’s conscious presence,” has the added impact of a sense, or a feeling of God’s presence. It may come out of a conscious intellectual recognition of the fact of God’s omnipresence, but it also involves the emotions and a spiritual, almost mystical discernment of some kind. The third is “God’s manifest presence,” which Eastman says is “far more intense,” and often results in an obvious movement of God’s Spirit and observable transformations in the lives of many individuals. He cites the miraculous movement of God’s Holy Spirit over cities and nations at the beginning of spiritual awa

I’ve said that worship comes naturally if we’re in the conscious presence of God. But what if it doesn’t? What if we go through all the steps, from submission to obedience, and we still don’t “feel” worship? Is something wrong? Is worship a feeling? Or is it, like love, sometimes simply a choice or an act? Could the process of drawing near to God, itself, be worship? Maybe we’ve already been doing it? I want the feelings. I want joy alongside the worship. But maybe it doesn’t always have to be there. Some of the most moving expressions of worship in the Bible are spoken out of great trial. In the midst of his suffering, Job says of God: Though he slay me, yet will I hope in Him .* He had to have been saying that through gritted teeth. He was in pain. The pain that might have robbed his worship of joy came from three sources, and we experience the same in our lives. First, Job suffered physical pain. When our bodies are afflicted, pain demands our attention. God knows