Sleeping Monkey

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Greater things are yet to come

I know I haven’t been back to this blog for quite some time, and for that I’m sorry! My only excuse is that things have been very busy with exams, revision, and everything I do socially with my friends from King’s, as well as the Community Week, Party in the Square, Rock Solid, Phat Cafe, and everything that goes with being heavily involved in a church. At some point, perhaps in this post itself, I will blog about what I’ve been doing.

But the thing I most want to blog about today is what happened last night. As some of you may know, it was the Passion London conference, and a bunch of us from King’s headed up to London in a minibus yesterday afternoon, and we attended the conference at the Hammersmith Apollo that evening. It was an amazing night, God really moves in times like that. Three-thousand plus students in one theatre worshipping God with no restrictions, no inhibitions, nothing to hold them back. Worship lead by Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman, David Crowder… but it really wasn’t about who was there, or who was playing, or what the music was like, or what the visual effects were doing; it was about God. The whole evening was totally about God. So many people focused on God in one place. Louis Giglio lead the talk; he’s one amazing speaker, and so many people there seemed to be moved by what he said, bringing all of us back to the heart of what it means to be a Christian, bringing it all back to what it is to love God, and reminding everyone that there is something more important in our lives than anything else.

I also discovered something quite interesting about myself, but also quite scary. I decided I want to do what Adam Roseblade does, I want to use my life to work with students (or that age group) in a church, in a university, bringing people to God and helping them stay with God through the thick and the thin.

Who knows if that will actually be where I end up, but I realised last night that that is what I’d like.

Scary, huh?

Anyway, back to what I’ve been doing. Today, I’m free, I have no commitments (aside from Rock Solid later this evening), and I’ve just moved a whole load of my stuff back home. My room is feeling empty, and I was sat at my computer wanting to write. As I said to Jay online, my keyboard is calling out to be used. So I decided I’d write a blog, and I’m using a new piece of software I found for the Mac called Writeroom. It’s bascially a tool designed for people who have to write with no distractions. At the moment, my screen is entirely black apart from the simple white text in the middle of the screen that I’m typing now. Everything has disappeared, no MSN, no web browser, no e-mail or feed reader, just text! And basically no interface either. If I want, I can move the mouse to the right of the screen and reveal a scroll bar to read back what I’ve written, or I can move it to the bottom to view the word count, or to the top to reveal the usual menu bar. A very conducive environment to write in, I must say.

I had my final exam of my second year yesterday, shortly before going to London for the Passion conference. My exams this semester seem to have gone fairly well, and it’s certainly encouraging to get three or four texts before each exam from close friends saying good luck, praying for you, hope it goes ok. I haven’t been nervous going into any of these exams, and I haven’t felt bad when I’ve left them either. I have the results of one exam, and the piece of coursework for that unit, and the overall mark I achieved was 82%, so I’m incredibly happy with that! I really want the marks back for the other exams and coursework too, but they’ll all come in good time.

Recently, I seem to have been helping out more at the church than before. Firstly we had Party in the Square, where although I wasn’t down to help with anything in particular, I did spend 12 hours in the square from half 6 in the morning helping with whatever needed it. That was good fun, and in the following week I gave a hand with Rock Solid Live, and I’ve recently been doing the occasional Phat Cafe too. I meet up with Alex regularly, and he seems to rope me into things! Not that I mind at all. On sunday afternoon, after the morning service, I helped serve Chilli to fifty plus people, followed by various flavours of cheesecake. It was good.

I’m listening to Chris Tomlin’s God Of This City – “Greater things are yet to come, greater things are still to be done in this city” – Let’s hope we can be the people to start these greater things. God’s put a calling on our lives to change the lives of those around us for the better. I want to be crazy for God, I want to be a “fruitcake” for God (those of you on the Passion tour will know what I’m talking about), I want to be “out of my mind” for God and “in my right mind” for God [2 Corinthians 5:13], I want people to ask me “why did you do that?”, I want people to say “what made you say that?”, I want people to say “how come you’re like you are?”, and I want to answer one thing: God. I want to point them to Isaiah 26:8 – “Yes, Lord. Walking in the way of your truth, we wait for you. Your name and renown are the desire of our soul”. Yes, Lord. There is no one like our God – let’s let other people see that. Let’s take this wonderful salvation we have to the streets, let’s let everybody we encounter see something in our lives that makes us different, and makes us stand out. At Passion last night I suddenly thought of a line of matches standing on their ends, one of which was alight. Let’s be that match that’s alight among those who aren’t, and let’s set those other matches alight with our fire. God can do amazing things, God has done amazing things in my life and in the lives of those around me – so let’s show people who don’t yet know how awesome God is; let’s show them His love, His power; let’s just show them God.

There is no one like our God.

Greater things are yet to come. Greater things are still to be done in this city.

Let’s set those greater things in motion.