Witness

God desires for us to worship Him to glorify Him out of JOY and THANKSGIVING, not duty or obligation. No praise will come flowing out genuinely if we don't grasp this. If you've been around the "church scene" you may be thinking duh, heard this already. But think about it! It's a constant battle to reject that insecurity that may slip in by not "doing enough" or by looking at your identity in the Lord and someone else's and seeing dissonance. Let me preface this post by saying that this is by no means an excuse to sit back and be lazy... we shouldn't want to be anyways! But instead, it's a proclamation of freedom from the burden of busyness.

In John Piper's Let the Nations Be Glad, he writes, "God is glorified precisely when we are satisfied in Him- when we delight in His presence, when we like to be around Him, when we treasure His fellowship. This is an utterly life-changing discovery. It frees us to pursue our joy in God and God to pursue His glory in us because they are not two different pursuits. God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him."

Now usually I read this famous phrase of John's, a message of the Lord of course, and think that it means the "better" my Christian walk is, the "closest" I feel to the Lord, the more capable I am of being most satisfied in Him. But it hit me last Wednesday. I can only be MOST satisfied in Him when I recognize my extreme insignificance in this world.

As a Greek at Carolina, we have a unique ministry that has proven to be such a blessing to me and to thousands of Greek students here. It's called Greek Impact and meets once a month with a youth group style meeting: game, prizes, speaker, usually a fun video too. This month a fraternity man who's now on staff with Greeks at UT came all the way to speak to us and share a beautiful message. I can't remember the details of this message, couldn't even give you a full summary because I was just praying my guts out. As a community, we've faced persecution like never before in our Greek system. Not beatings and torture persecution, but just feeling a bit isolated, unable to initiate in the outreach things like we used to. And it's every house it seems. No more praying in chapter meetings, no more verses in chapter meetings, and the list goes on. So needless to say we've all felt a bit ineffective this semester. A war is being waged because we're all standing boldly in our faith, and satan doesn't particularly like that. Anyways, I diverge. I doubted the "success" of our meeting because of this barrier that's been built up against us. I didn't think the meeting was capable of producing fruit. I feared the blunt-ness of the speaker, thinking it would offend and turn away these 300-some people who came. I'm not a fan of the Gospel all wrapped in a bow so this attitude was a bit unusual for me, but Wednesday I just wasn't feeling too hopeful.

As some of you may have read in my Zambia blog, God has continually met me when I feel most inadequate. He performs miracles to show that He's the One to be glorified, not the actions or the carriers of those actions. God loves surprising us! And that He did on Wednesday night in my own sorority house. With every head bowed, we closed in prayer but Hank, the speaker, did something I don't think we've done before. He did the alter-call thing, asking students to just look up at him if they wanted a breakthrough in their lives, if they wanted to give it all up to our Savior. With that he paused and then spoke, "welcome to the family of God." I had to grin a little bit. God moved and brought a life into the light when I was doubting! So incredibly powerful and faithful! ...Of course it's not enough to stop there. Over the next few minutes with every head bowed, perfectly silent in the room except for maybe a few sniffles we heard "welcome to the family of God; welcome to the family of God; welcome to the family of God." And it continued. I thought for sure this was just to hype people up. To fake it that other people were making that decision just so others felt comfortable to do so. But this wasn't the case at all!! Every single "welcome to the family of God" brought chills up my arms, tears to my eyes, and a heart bursting with praise for the Sovereign Lord.

Twenty Five. If you didn't catch that, 25!!!, students took the step of faith to invite Jesus to perform a breakthrough in their lives. And in that moment, God was glorified. Not because I was doing anything. But because I was nothing; merely a witness. Because I was marveling in the vastness of His splendor, in awe of His timing and His miracles. God is MOST glorified in us when we recognize we're nothing and that He's everything.

incredible.