1 HOUR Calm Relaxing Snowy Day Instrumental Guitar Worship For Prayer or Study
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SONG LIST:
Introduction: 00:00
Great Are You Lord 00:28
Way Maker 6:00
100 Billion x 10:53
Here As In Heaven 17:47
Breathe 24:29
Shout To The Lord 28:20
Above All 32:42
All Things 37:25
Lord I Need You 41:52
Love Never Fails 45:34
Here I Am To Worship 48:44
Do It Again 52:31
I've been around this music all my life. But it's about a lot more than just the melody.
One April day in 2020, I was having a lot of doubts on what is real and what my purpose was, and I decided to go buy a Bible. At that time in my life, I wasn't living right, and I had known I wanted to pursue God, but I got the impression from the church I was at that if I was truly saved, I would know the moment that it happened, and that there had to be tears and the worship team going full blast, or else how would I know that I was 'saved'?
My first decision as a new Christian was simply to start. To put everything else aside, and to humble myself and say, 'I don't know anything, but I am trusting that I will learn God's ways'.
I started reading the Bible every day, and trusted more and more that the knowledge in this holy book will help me to live a better life. My pursuit of knowledge in and of itself wasn't necessarily a bad thing; in fact it was a very good thing. However, my heart wasn't changing, as much as I tried to follow God's commands. Jesus spoke to us in parables "because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand" (Matthew 13:13).
I was driving one day, and I was really fed up with waiting. It felt like I was somehow being punished by having to wait for the promise God has for me. After all, I had been good, right? So I ask God, "Where is it? Where is she? Where are the things that You said would happen?" And God simply replied, "She's on the other side of the mountain."
Now, I was reading the Old Testament. I had thought I knew what the mountain meant, and I thought that I had to leave the desert, and climb. Clearly, I had some sin issues that, if I could discipline myself for at least 60 days, and hopefully for the foreseeable future, that I would be on the other side.
So I took the knowledge that I had gained, and I put on my hiking boots. And I climbed. I was holding some friends accountable too, and through taking notes of when I was vulnerable, and identifying evil thoughts, and writing down the biblical responses to them, I climbed. I had attached a piece of paper with milestones on a mountain that I had photoshopped, and every morning, I would move a pin to the next peg if I was victorious the previous day. If I fell into sin, it would move to zero. The base of the mountain.
I climbed higher than I had ever climbed before, higher than my friends, and higher than I thought was possible. But as I looked out into my future, all I saw was more desert. More struggle. An endless cycle of discovering a new way to attack, and then a new thing would happen and I would be weak. Over and over and over and over and over again. I think I knew it would never end, and I began to lose hope.
Finally, I had written down enough things to where I held myself accountable 24/7, and had everything covered, and I really believed I was invincible. What I didn't realize was that even though I had fixed my actions, I hadn't fixed my heart. It was at that point that the devil started attacking the core of my being.
Satan didn't hide this time. That's huge. Before, he would work by placing doubt in the power of God, or my willpower, saying that it wasn't strong enough. Now, he said "You have invoked me, and if you want to actually pursue God, then it's a war you'll get."
For the first time in my life, I had experienced spiritual warfare. I didn't leave my room a lot, I fell into the very habits I had resisted, I went out and got a big burger, and I just gave up.
I knew the only way out was to fight. I look up "how to fight spiritual warfare" on KZfaq, again still looking for knowledge, and not for God. It was then that I learned the one piece of knowledge that made all of my efforts look stupid.
It's not my fight. It never was, and in the future, it never will be. The best thing we can do (and the ONLY thing we can do) is to just accept that we can't do it, and that there's a good reason that God has grace and mercy for us. Jesus said in Matthew 9:13, "But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”
Satan is stronger than you, but Satan is not stronger than God. God is God. He has control, and He has authority. Accept that God is giving you the grace to learn, fail, and try again. Accept that you can't fight your way out of this and survive. And so my walk with Christ didn't actually begin until I gave up, surrendered, and let God have control.
Amen