Blessed Are The Pure In Heart For They Will Write Great Worship Songs?

As a worship writer, if I am writing from a place of right motives, I am trying to use the vehicle of a song to let people see a new picture of God or a more familiar picture of God that will remind them of who God is and what He has done. Hopefully, that reminder or that new perspective will cause them to want to engage God directly and gush over how amazing and beautiful and merciful He is. But in order to describe something I have to have seen it or, more importantly, in order to describe someone, I have to know them.

It's interesting that before the fall, Adam and Eve could engage God directly with all of their senses. They walked in the garden with their creator and were able to see Him, hear Him, touch Him, and I would imagine they could even smell the air of Heaven on Him. But after the fall, they could only hear Him and that has been the plight of man since that time for "no man could see God and live"...and then there was Jesus.

Jesus came and once again, we could see, hear, touch and smell the Creator. Maybe we didn't know it at the time but God was allowing us back in to the intimacy that was once shared in the garden. And it was Jesus that uttered these beautiful words especially for anyone who may one day seek to describe God and His attributes.."Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God". Now, obviously, this present generation doesn't get to experience what must have been such the amazing experience of getting to engage God in every way through Jesus but it is through Jesus and what He did to restore us that makes it possible to have a pure heart and, based on his words, allows us to once again see God.

So what does it mean to have a pure heart? what does it mean to be pure? I don't know if I have a complete answer for that but I have a few guesses at least in how it relates to songwriting... I think having a pure heart means that you fight to have right motives that are agenda free in dealing with people...I think it means that you are a person of your word..I think it means that you fight the tendency that is within all of us to use people or even use the Gospel for personal gain...and when you do find yourself crossing that line, that you make it right by confessing it and apologizing to whom you have wronged...I think when we begin to fight for these things, we begin to see God a little more clearly and that allows us to describe Him with right motives and a love for sharing with God's people through our songs what we have seen in Who we know.

The Kingdom is like.... Captain America

I will not ruin the new movie release of Captain America for you bc I have not yet seen it. I, like you, have only seen the trailer but there is one scene from the trailer that so moved me because it reminded me of God and what He values in His Kingdom. In this particular scene, a military officer and a scientist are walking through a bootcamp of soldiers in training and they are talking about the qualifications and type of man they need to be a candidate for the new super soldier experiment. The officer unexpectedly throws a grenade into a crowd of men and the skinniest, most unlikely hero dives on the grenade to save the other soldiers from being harmed. Turns out, the grenade is fake but the test was real. The skinny guy ends up being the candidate and eventually...Captain America.

I love the message that this scene conveys because it reminds me of all of the 'unlikely heroes' that God uses in His Kingdom. God, like, but far superior to, the super soldier program, can provide all of the strength, ability, and skill for the calling. The things that we in the world value are exterior things....things that God can add to any man at any time because He is God. The beauty of it all is that Captain America was Captain America before he had the powers and the shield and the cool costume because he already possesed a hero's heart. The heroes of God's Kingdom in the Bible had a hero's heart first, and then God added the powers and miracles as they were neeeded. If we are to be heroes to the broken world around us, we must first seek to have a Kingdom heart and then "all these things (strength, miracles, and maybe even a cool costume) will be added to you as well."

Cigarette Smoke

I love the smell of cigarette smoke, particularly Salem cigarettes. I think it's because my mom smoked that brand when I was a child (she quit after we started doing the 'stop, drop, and roll' bit every time she lit one up) and the smell reminds me of being a kid.
It's funny how the societal perception of smokers has so drastically changed over the last couple of decades. Now when I walk past the designated smoking area in the airport, I immediately rush to hyper-judgement of the 'dirty' smokers with their 'dirty' cigarettes huddled together in their glass chamber of addiction. In our modern caste system of addictions, cigarette smokers are at the bottom of the pile...the lepers.
I have a pretty good idea of how God feels about cigarettes overall but I suspect that there is one particular type of cigarette smoke that God may actually like. It's the cigarette smoke that you smell outside of an AA meeting. Every Tuesday night, I lead worship for our college worship service and as I'm leaving, I always see the AA crew hanging out in the parking lot of our church because they have just wrapped up their meeting. Not everyone is smoking but someone almost always is and I love the smell because of what it represents. It's a step forward...it represents getting up one more time after getting knocked down... it represents the transition of going from a greater and more destructive addiction such as cocaine or alcohol to a lesser and more non-consequential addiction such as cigarettes. I know that God's ultimate design is that we not be addicted to anything but, in a fallen world, sometimes, we just have to take it one step at a time. I'm sure, in their journey to freedom, there will be a place where they realize that they need to be free from their addiction to cigarettes but for now, the smell of their smoke will be the smell of little and daily battles fought that lead to life changing victories.