Pentecostal Devotions

An Invitation to Worship God

by Tammie Sutcliffe

Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD;
       let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.

Let us come before him with thanksgiving
       and extol him with music and song.

For the LORD is the great God,
       the great King above all gods.

In his hand are the depths of the earth,
       and the mountain peaks belong to him.

The sea is his, for he made it,
       and his hands formed the dry land.

Come, let us bow down in worship,
       let us kneel before the LORD our Maker;

for he is our God
       and we are the people of his pasture,
       the flock under his care.

Psalm 95:1-7

WOW! God just loves to hear us worship Him. Give to your God His greatest desire. God loves to hear your heart bring Him Praise and Worship. He just loves to sit with you when you give Him your time in Praise and Worship. Rejoice before your God, let your mouth sing songs and shout out His goodness to you. For his love endures forever. Let songs, shouting, gratitude and praise be inside of your being so you are open to worship your God. Let there be a time of silence and quietness as well for this is also a time of worship. For he is well pleased with those who make time to praise and worship Him and all He has made. He loves to communicate with those who love to worship him alone. Let no other God or thing take away your time to Worship the one and true God. So make time today to give your God His greatest desire. This is to have you worship and honour His name.

The Dummy or the Real Thing

by Amanda Huthnance

How hungry are we for God? How hungry do we get for those encounters? Are we leaving the presence of God changed then from when we went in? God is calling us to fulfill a great destiny and complacency is something that can come upon us and stop us from moving forward. But if God is calling you to a life of GREATNESS why settle for just Good!

When babies are hungry they cry out to their parents… as do we cry out as Christians to God. To stop the crying the baby is often given a dummy. The Encarta dictionary says that a ‘dummy’ is a small rubber or plastic object with a teat that a baby is given to suck for comfort. The baby becomes content with the dummy and stops crying… although the baby is comforted and temporarily is satisfied… they soon realise that it isn’t the real thing.

When we get hungry we desire to be fed. And unfortunately like babies we can sometimes settle for the dummy instead of the real thing. We lose our momentum and enthusiasm to dive deeper within our relationship with God - to go to the next level. Unfortunately church to some Christians is the dummy – they go and worship God and get comforted and it only satisfies them for a short time.

Food is the source of nutrients for living beings, it provides us with energy and growth, as does our communion with God satisfy our spiritual hunger. Once we step up into the next level of maturity and growth spiritually, we must realize that worshipping God isn’t a ‘comfort thing’ – we are to be worshipping God in every aspect of our lives during the week (Romans 12:1 – give your bodies to God because all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice- the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him - NLT).

We need to continually be fed so we can grow, mature and develop in our walk with God. As we spend that one on one time with God our relationships will be strengthened. God is waiting for us to commune with him so he can build us up and equip us to do all that he has called us to do. In John 4:34 – Jesus explained: My nourishment comes from doing the will of God, who sent me, and from finishing his work (NLT).

Let’s not be people who stay on the dummy for comfort but realise that Christianity isn’t supposed to be comfortable. It’s about doing what God has called us to do. An example of something that pushes us out of our comfort zone is fasting. It is a sacrifice of the flesh to develop spiritual growth and a deeper connection with God. We deny our flesh food so we can focus on feeding our soul – our spiritual food.

How comfortable do we get in the presence of God?? How comfortable are we to worship God?

Worship isn’t always going to be comfortable either; it’s a sacrifice of praise. It’s about pushing through and giving praise to the one who is worthy. We should be worshipping and serving God because He is who He is and deserves it rather than for the way it makes us feel. God is crying out for our attention. He wants us to want him. He wants us to choose to spend time with him. He desires us to be with him.

If we are getting ready training and equipping ourselves to be and do what God has called us to do then we need to be consistent in our feeding, not only getting it on Sundays but every day. We need to be courageous and willing to take the next levels into a deeper intimate relationship with God. He is waiting for us and he doesn’t what as to be satisfied with the mediocre life – he wants us to experience the real thing, this will empower us to move forward. Let’s not settle for the dummy but be hungry for the real thing.

Do This in Remembrance of Me

by Ann-Elise Koerntjes

When I went back to Melbourne in the holidays I saw my Grandpa for the first time since Christmas. But he didn’t see me... I walked into the room but there was no flicker of recognition, no spark of joy at my presence. Instead he kept the same bewildered look on his face, the same look that has been on his face for weeks…for months. A look that reveals nothing but emptiness…

Doctors call it Alzheimer’s, a crippling disease that renders an individual with no past, no present and no future. A tragedy yet nothing can be done about it. Family are left helplessly watching the devastation that this disease ravages on their loved one returning them to the helpless stage of infancy.

Watching this forced me to think. How many people around me have spiritual Alzheimer’s? Do I? Just as there is spiritual blindness and deafness perhaps there is an equivalent to the tragedy that destroys the man of joy, strength and laughter that once was my grandpa. I think I have suffered from it myself. If not then why was Jesus so passionate about us commemorating a tradition whenever we fellowship in memory of Him?

When you have lost your memory, you lose your identity. My Grandpa has no idea of where he has come, or where he is going, and even the people who mean most to him are becoming total strangers. If we forget what Jesus has done on the Cross we lose our identity as Children of God, we lose our future as part of His coming Kingdom and we lose our family, fellow heirs in Christ. We lose all ability to worship, to acknowledge who God is and celebrate what God has done, is doing and will do in us and others.

When Alzheimer’s begins no one is aware, it subtly enters and begins its destructive course. In the same manner, we can easily allow ourselves to forget what God has done, who He is and who we are in Christ. When facing tough times, sometimes the only way to get through is to live on the memory of what God has done in the past, and a knowledge of His character as revealed in Christ, otherwise we will fail.

History proves this true. When the children of Israel were wandering through the desert, they continually forgot these very things. Despite God’s continual reminder of His presence in the tabernacle, a routine of worship and a system of laws involving every aspect of life, they continually forgot the mighty miracles that God has worked among them and for them and his great provision and longed for a life they remembered, their spiritual infancy of Egypt. It is as if their encounter with God had been wiped from their memory, Alzheimer’s of a spiritual variety.

I think that one of the most poignant aspects of communion is its call to remembrance. A call that God made time and time again to the children of Israel. A call that Jesus was sure to ensure that we received loud and clear. "As often as you come together do this in memory of me."

As any act of worship, communion is a choice. A choice to remember, to focus on Who God is, what He has done in Jesus and our new identity as His Child an inheritor of the love and grace of God. If there is any form of antidote to spiritual Alzheimer’s it must be found in our worship, and what could be more appropriate than the very action that Jesus initiated to sustain our memory?

The Lord is There

by Tanya Riches

‘And the name of the city from that time on will be:
THE LORD IS THERE.’ (Ezekiel 48:35b, TNIV)

The book of Ezekiel fascinates me. It is full of the incredible, inexplicable wonders of the spiritual realm, brought to earth and told in a way that causes us to catch our breath in awe of the prophet’s startling and profound revelations - so far beyond the realm of human imagination, they seem credible to even the most cynical reader. It begins with Ezekiel’s proclamation ‘In my thirtieth year, in the fourth month on the fifth day, while I was among the exiles by the Kebar River, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God.’ (1:1). OK, well this is not your ordinary day fishing! And the account begins, of flying creatures that appear in a windstorm of thunder and lightening, all at once human, lion, ox and eagle; wheels within wheels of topaz spinning in a crystal heaven opening the scene for the voice of the Almighty, ‘like the roar of rushing waters’, ‘like the tumult of an army’ (1:24); with all of this in the first chapter alone.

I love the strength of Ezekiel’s courage to declare his message, unswerving despite the cost: ‘The word of the Lord came to me: ‘Son of man, with one blow I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes…So I spoke to the people in the morning, and in the evening my wife died (24:15)’. I love his order and precision (personally, God would have lost me when he tried to dictate the allocation of the land to the various tribes and families!); and I love the way that Ezekiel’s respect and adoration of His Yahweh shines through his writing despite the sorrow as a refugee in another land. Under pressure, when I remember the heavenly cloud of witnesses described in Hebrews 12:1, I think of Ezekiel’s face amongst those who cheer us on to complete the race that God has set before us, and often think of him being led out to exile from his home, oppressed and downtrodden by his overlord, but yet lifting up his face, and beholding the wonder of God.

In an affluent Western world, It’s amazing to me how easy it is to ignore the majesty of this God who ‘…by the word of the LORD were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth’ (Ps 33:6) …What do we need stars, or sun or moon when we are inside working, and can’t spare the time to look up - when we are in a hurry to finish our emails; or when yet another frustrating challenge to our to-do-list presents itself. How relevant are any of the four-faced creatures or the army of bones to our situation as adults in a ‘real’ world? We can create a world with our own two hands that seems more real than God Himself at times.

And yet, here is the most profound and simple of truths, the time at which the veil is torn back, and God in all his vulnerability is seen. The great climax to Ezekiel’s travels through time, space, and the wildest of the great mysteries seem to be for the very substance found in the tiny final sentence of the book. ‘And the name of the city from that time on will be: THE LORD IS THERE’. All of the plans of God for the Israelite nation, and for us now living as we do in the shadow of the cross, amount to one thing - He Himself wants to be present with us. We theoretically know God is the immanent God and that He is in all things, through all things - however He asks and longs for more than this, that He would live in relationship with us, in our everyday lives.

We see in this passage that God can dwell beyond what we are willing to give Him, beyond our cultural boundaries - in the things we sometimes easily ‘do away with’ -in the realm of fantasy, of childhood imagination, of fiction, of metaphor. And that is perhaps not what we want to hear or know of Him as we go about our busy lives, hoping for a quick answer so we can accomplish more - that he desperately seeks us. That he isn’t hoping to fix our problems in our day, and that he requires more of us than just our time or effort; he wishes to live present amongst us. God’s passionate dream is seen in His grandiose plans for His city …That He would live there, and that the city would become known for His presence. May we be a people who live with the ever-lasting God in our midst, and are famous only because ‘THE LORD IS THERE’.