The Gospel According to Gladys Knight & the Pips

One of the things my parents unintentionally passed on to me is a keen understanding of music history.  No, I never spent hours being lectured about the great classical composers of the 15^th-17^th centuries- I learned about greats like Patsy Cline, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, The Righteous Brothers, Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys, The Byrds, Diana Ross and a whole litany of artists that span the early days of Mo Town, Rock-n-Roll, Blues, Country and Pop.  Whenever the family would load up in the trusty old Chevy to traverse the hot Mexican countryside to do the Lord’s work, we’d escape reality between stops with dad’s music collection of what we called “The Cruisin Oldies.”   To this day, I get those songs stuck in my head.  As a matter of fact, I woke up this morning with a  line  from  “Midnight Train to Georgia” stuck in my head.  You know the part, where Gladys Knight proclaims.  “I’d rather live in his world than live without him in mine.”

After singing that line to myself for the 400^th time, I started thinking about what it really means. Gladys is declaring that she’d willingly give up everything for the man of her dreams.  She’d forego her “own world” to be with him in his.  And that brings us to the place in which I find myself today.

See, I’ve been at a veritable loss for words lately because God is revealing himself to me in ways that I’ve never experienced.  Through His word, Christ is showing me that He is not the means to an end…He IS the end.  He is the prize at the end of the race, the treasure after which I should be running.  If I were to lose everything but still have Him, that would be far more than enough for me. I now realized that I’d rather live in His world than live without Him in mine.  I agree with Jesus about who He says I am and I want to live on His terms, not mine.

A few years back I got the privilege of working with Shane Barnard & Shane Everett.  They were doing a weekend-long youth rally at my church and one day we were all sitting around talking before one of the evening services.  Someone asked them about their plans as musicians, where they felt like the Lord was leading them and how they planned on continuing their musical career.  I was pretty interested in what their answer was going to be…because at the time I played in a band and playing music was all I ever wanted to do with my life.  But their response to my friend’s question shocked me.  The Shanes jumped in quickly, almost interrupting my friend and said “The minute we feel the Lord leading us to do something other than music is the minute we’ll put down our guitars and do something else.  We do this because we feel like it’s what God has asked of us, but we’re just waiting for Him to tell us to stop. We just want to love Jesus and serve him…not matter what.”

Or maybe my wife said it best.  The description on her blog reads, “I have discovered a God who is worth everything. And to have Him, He asks from me just that: EVERYTHING. I have decided that He is worth it.”

This is the ground on which I stand.