Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Open the Eyes of My Heart, Lord

“Pour out Your power and love, as we sing, holy, holy holy...

Holy, holy, holy...”

~Paul Baloche, Open the Eyes of My Heart, 1997.

This song is such a powerful song of prayerful worship as we seek to come into the very Holy of Holies—the indwelt Presence of God; his Holy Spirit. We want to “see” him at these times. We want to see as he sees, our hearts opened and broken afresh to the things he’s broken for—rampant sin and injustice in the world; his will for our lives in response to what we now see through him.

And it’s a sweet worship song. Focussing on the holiness of God we sing our song and somehow the Presence of the Holy Spirit anoints our worship and thankful praise for the holiness we’re in awe of and simply seek.

Prayerful worship such as this is a great thing to do, for it seeks the right thing in prayer and not the wrong thing. The right things to pray for are those things that form and conform our characters to the Christ. More and more with each passing day we’re becoming like him when we sing this sort of prayerful worship song with wilful intent.

In our hearts we want our Lord to be ‘high and lifted up, shining in the light of his glory,’ for it is his glory that shines from us when we place the Lord appropriately from our personal standpoints. Yet, if we do not place him at the heights of our desires and wills, who is God to us? He’s made of no personal effect or power when, of course, he easily could be.

Besides the high place belongs to God, not ourselves. We take ourselves off the high place and place him there. It’s our nature to need to do this over and again.

We’re perfectly emotional when we worship with the intent of this type of song at heart. By that I mean our thoughts are aligned with where God wants us and our thoughts are informing, correctly, our feelings. This, in perfect fruition, can generally only lead to right actions.

This is the very point and goal of Christian discipleship.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.

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