Megan Lebo

So my mom and I are headed to Indiana for the weekend.  My mom was asked to speak at a women’s retreat and I am going to be leading the worship.  This will be my first time to actually be the worship leader for any particular event and I am really excited.  I am also extremely excited to get to hear my mom teach.  She is a very wise woman and a woman I believe to be a gifted speaker.  This being my first time to actually plan and lead worship I am not sure what to expect.  There certainly is an element of the unknown that can often times be uneasy but I am so excited to see what God has got planned for the weekend. 

Please be in prayer for the both of us this weekend as we both attempt to bring glory to God through worship and teaching.  It is a constant struggle for me to keep my focus on the calling of my life.  Not being called to worship ministry but being called to spread the Gospel of our Lord and Savior and to bring glory to His Name through my life.  My prayer is also for the women we will be ministering to.  I pray that God is preparing their hearts and ours alike so that His Glory will manifest itself in the way He intends.

I appreciate your prayers and look forward to seeing everybody when we get back!

I read an article this morning in yesterday’s issue of the Tennessean that I found interesting and that I find myself agreeing with.  As a matter of fact it is something that I have thought about on a certain scale but could never really pinpoint exactly what the issue was, but this man said it well. 

FAITHFUL QUIT SECULARIZED CHURCHES TO PROTECT THEIR BELIEFS  by Paul Proctor

“The Washington Times reported last week what many of us Southern Baptists have known for some time: Evangelicals are ‘flocking away from chruches’ in ’significant numbers.’ 

In past columns, I have cited reasons I believer the church is in decline, few of which were included in the Times.  But instead of rehashing years of commentary on the subject, suffice it to say the reinvented church has become so much like the world, there is little left for anyone to come to anymore that they can’t find in greater quantity and quality elsewhere.

You see, today’s church is reproducing consumers and compromisers, not committed Christians – people who seek popularity for themselves, their interests, their pastimes, their churches and their leaders rather than being the ‘peculiar people’ God has called us to be in Scripture.  (1 Peter 2:9, Titus 2:11-14)

But we don’t want to be peculiar, do we?

No, we want to be popular.  We want to be just like the world around us so the world will like us and want to join us when, in fact, it is we who are joining them.

U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn, raised a big stink recently, calling Jesus a ‘community organizer’ in his promotion and defense of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama; and I would submit to you that this liberal perception and perversion of Jesus Christ has so infected the church today, even among conservatives, that our pulpits are now occupied more by community organizers than preachers of the Gospel.

Why do you think so many churches have done away with biblically and/or denominationally distinctive names and adopted the generic and begign term ‘Community’ to name themselves while the general attitude toward sin has become so blase?

Is it not to be more attractive to a fallen world and increase their market share in the community?  Is it not to bring people together regardless of their conflicting values, beliefs and religions?  There’s no biblical basis for this; and yet it has, in many respects, become paramount.

The one thing I did agree with from the Times report was that many of those leaving the institutional church today are not backsliders.  A large number of them are faithful and mature Christians who are being driven away by backsliding churches and their leaders.  They are protecting themselves and their families from a faith-destroying environment of covetousness and pragmatism.

Today’s churches have become so obsessed with results and relationships that they no longer have an interest in the things of God – only building community.

It sounds benevolent, doesn’t it?

And that’s just what community organizers do – they build community -which has absolutely nothing to do with repentance and faith in Jesus Christ – the one who said: ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ “

“True religion confronts earth with heaven and brings eternity to bear upon time. The messenger of Christ, though he speaks from God, must also, as the Quakers used to say, ”speak to the condition” of his hearers; otherwise he will speak a language known only to himself. His message must be not only timeless but timely. He must speak to his own generation.

The message of this book (The Knowledge of the Holy) does not grow out of these times but it is appropriate to them. It is called forth by a condition which has existed in the Church for some years and is steadily growing worse. I refer to the loss of the concept of majesty from the popular religious mind. The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshipping men. This she has done not deliberately, but little by little and without her knowledge; and her very unawareness only makes her situation all the more tragic.

The low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us. A whole new philosophy of the Christian life has resulted from this one basic error in our religious thinking.

With our loss of the sense of majesty has come the further loss of religious awe and consciousness of the divine Presence. We have lost our spirit of worship and our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence. Modern Christianity is simply not producing the kind of Christian who can appreciate or experience the life in the Spirit. The words, ”Be still, and know that I am God,” mean next to nothing to the self-confident, bustling worshipper in this middle period of the twentieth century.

This loss of the concept of majesty has come just when the forces of religion are making dramatic gains and the churches are more prosperous than at any time within the past several hundred years. But the alarming thing is that our gains are mostly external and our losses wholly internal; and since it is the quality of our religion that is affected by internal conditions, it may be that our supposed gains are but losses spread over a wider field.

The only way to recoup our spiritual losses is to go back to the cause of them and make such corrections as the truth warrants. The decline of the knowledge of the holy has brought on our troubles. A rediscovery of the majesty of God will go a long way toward curing them. It is impossible to keep our moral practices sound and our inward attitudes right while our idea of God is erroneous or inadequate. If we would bring back spiritual power to our lives, we must begin to think of God more nearly as He is.”

A.W. Tozer – The Knowledge of the Holy

Wow!  Its been a long summer and I haven’t written anything.  I don’t really have a good reason for not writing other than I’ve been in kind of a slump.  I’m in such a strange place right now and I’m having a hard time making sense of my life.  I graduated in May and was sure that I would have a job by now but unfortunately I do not.  I was so ready to be out of school and on with my life but now that I’m finished I’m having trouble coping with this reality. 

I’ll be real transparent.  Six years ago, when I first began college, I was certain that I would not finish.  I was so sure that I would be happily married and possibly have children and a career by now but instead I feel as though I have fallen back into the place I was before I even entered college. 

There are just so many things I do not understand!  I want to be angry with God right now!  I want to know why he seemingly took away my friends.  I want to know why he has with held from me the romantic relationships that I have so DESPERATELY desired.  I want to know why it seems as though everyone around me gains every opportunity that I have ever sought after.  I am a passionate person with such deep emotion and such intense longing for these things and yet these things are the ones that God has not allowed me to have.  At times I ask myself, “what is it that I am not doing?”.  Sometimes I feel like Job, looking at God and asking “What have I done?”.  I realize that I cannot possibly compare my situation with Job but the feelings are the same.   

It is then I hear Him speaking out of the whirlwind and knocking me to the ground.  “Who are you to question me?”  I think about Joseph, in Genesis, and all the things he had to go through before God raised him up for His purpose.  And what a GLORIOUS purpose it was!  O God!  That is my heart!  To be used to acomplish YOUR purpose! 

The waiting is so hard.  The lonliness is almost unbearable!  But even worse, feeling as though I have no purpose.  Yet, in the midst of the heartache and the turmoil I have to keep reminding myself that If my only purpose in life is to worship God in the privacy of my own bedroom, and to sing to Him in my own solitude, then I need to worship as if it were my last day in this world, and I need to do it with such joy as if I would never be happier or more peaceful than at that very moment.

“God cannot give us a happiness and a peace apart from Himself, because it is not there.  There is no such thing.”  – C.S. Lewis