Being Filled With God's Glory

We sang a song this past Sunday in church by the Zoe Group called "Let Your Glory Fall". I love that song. At Highland Oaks we are trying to be more intentional about being out in "our front yard". We want to be more intentional about being available to our community and being a good neighbor. I love that we are moving in that direction. It is what God has called us to be as His people.

The first part of that song says...

Let your glory fall in this room,
Let it go forth from here to the nations.
Let your fragrance rest in this place,
As we gather to seek your face.

I have not been able to get those phrases out of my mind. As we sang that song, we sang it as a church. And while I am extremely thankful and grateful that is who we want to be as a church, I cannot help but look at it from a personal perspective. The phrase "let your fragance rest in this place"... I want that more than anything. I want the fragance of God to rest in me personally. If it's not already resting in me, it's going to hard for it to rest in us as a church. But when I/we are around others, is that the fragance they smell? Do they smell the fragrance of God? Do they smell the fragrance of hope, of peace, of compassion, of love? Or do they smell the stench of judgment, of anger, of hatred.

If we want to be churches where the fragrance of God rest, we first have to be people where the fragrance of God rest. We have to individuals where the fragrance of God rest. Only then will that fragrance of God not only rest with us and within our churches but it will go forth into the nations as we show the world and our communities what God smells like.

We have staff devotionals every Monday morning. A great blessing of working in a church! While Monday's are a drudgery for many people, I love Monday's because of our devotional time. This Monday, we started with the following quote from Parker Palmer, Leading from Within... And it again reminded me of our song from Sunday morning.

"A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what's going on inside him or herself, inside his or her consciousness, lest the act of leadership create more harm than good."

So before we can have the fragrance of God as a church, we first have the fragrance of God within ourselves. Oh how I want to smell like him! Our minister Pat Bills is fond of saying at the end of our devotional time, "let those thoughts frame your week". My prayer is that the fragrance of God will frame me and then our churches always!

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens;
Let your glory be over all the earth.
Psalm 57:5

Blessings!