Grace Gates Into His Presence

I have found that there are some songs when it's there season, have the capacity to immediately transport you into the Presence. Those melodies by-pass a rational understanding of music and worship, and while the song in another "season" may have no impact at all -- in the right kairos, you're there!

Joe Pace's "In This Place" seems to be that kind of song for me personally and probably for many worshipers at Covenant Church. I have noticed the change in the atmosphere when we sing it and particularly in the way the Holy Spirit uses Pastor George's sax intro. The old saints called certain places "thin places" because of the intangible something that enabled you to bypass the "noise" that often interferes with our access to His manifest presence.

Our innate and instinctive hunger for God's presence has its own PPS, my car has a GPS (a Global Positioning System, but my heart has a Presence Positioning System. Many living creatures can move thousands of miles seasonally from their natural birth place; but instinctively can return to the exact place they were born. Birds, fish, animals of every kind do it without any resistance. The only creature that resists this internal mechanism is the so-called "intelligent" members of creation. Psalm 84:5 in several translations tell us that the "highways to Zion" are in our hearts.

Today, Pace's song, along with other elements in our services, proved to be a "highway" into the Lord's presence, and the worship plan that we normally use to plan our services took second place to what the Holy Spirit wanted to do. My earlier message from the first simply "morphed" into a clarion to call to CCOPers to "recognize" the Presence that's here.

Jacob said, he was in an awesome place and didn't know it; Jesus wept because a city did not recognize the time of their visitation. What's would be equal to these moments would be to be present in a worship service and never even know that God was there!

Let's pray that the Holy Spirit will so sensitize us to those moments when He is manifestly present -- because it's in these moments, He wants to give us something we need!