Even if I die...

Last night during worship the Lord brought me to Matthew 26 and opened up the following passage to me. Then this morning as I was on my way to church I was listening to a Jason Upton song that says something along the lines of "am I sleeping while my savior is dying, oh teach me how to pray". "Coincidently" Pastor George preached on this same message today. Hmm, I'm thinking that it was more than a coincidence. Here are the verses:

35But Peter declared, "Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you." And all the other disciples said the same.
Gethsemane 36Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, "Sit here while I go over there and pray." 37He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. 38Then he said to them, "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me."

There is a lot of stuff in there but some things really stuck out to me. One of those things is that my life is not my own. I literally have nothing of any worth, but that which God has given me. And because of that, it is not, or at least it should not be difficult to give that very stuff back to Him, since he's the one who gave it to me in the first place. However, I struggle with that. One reason is the mere fact that I am human and live by sight and not by faith. It is easy to give a starving man food if he is in front of you and you can see his bones sticking out, but it is much harder to give that same amount of money based on a "feeling" that you have on the inside. I want to live like that. I want the Lord trust me to the point of being able to put an inkling in my heart and for Him to know that I will follow through and be faithful with whatever He puts there, but it is not always easy. Not to say that it does not happen. But I know that I don't act every time that the Lord calls me to, and I'm longing for that. I'm longing for that "intimacy" with the Father where I KNOW his voice more clearly than I know my own. However, that type of intimacy only comes from stepping out and training my ear to the Father's voice. Solution: I go and live in a cave for the rest of my life, listening to the Lord. ABSOLUTELY NOT! We are called to live in the world but to not be of the world. I am here to be a witness, not a recluse. So what then do I do? 1) I pray, spend time with God and listen to the Lord in the quietness of the day. 2) I listen, I intentionally turn off the tv and radio and listen for the Lord to speak. How else do I tune out the other voices and noises and listen to God? 3) I step out, the other day I was setting up for practice and I closed my eyes for a moment and the Lord gave me the word "M*A*S*H". I asked the girl next to me if she liked the tv show, to which she responded that she did. THEN the Lord gave me the rest of the word. It didn't come before I asked her the question, it came after I stepped out and asked her. It ended up being a word that really touched her, and spoke to an area of her life that she needed comfort in.
I have found that lately these type of things have been happening more frequently, but I fear that I am not paying attention to them. A friend has been having a physical problem for the past week, and I was asked to pray for him today. I wanted to pray for him, but I had an impression to let others start praying, and then to begin once I felt released to do so. That was a little un-nerving since I didn't know what point I would be released and I WANTED TO PRAY. But I waited, and just as I was walking over to begin praying for my friend he began to open up to the guys around him about the very thing that the LORD had put on my heart to pray over him about. If I had not waited, it would not have been God's time. It very well could be that the words that the LORD wanted to speak over my friend would not have been spoken at the right time, or to an openness of heart that they were spoken to when the LORD dealt with the timing issue. Both of us ended up leaving the prayer time touched, but it required sensitivity to the spirit.
I wasn't intending on spending so much time on intimacy, but rather, on the joyous message that the Lord has given me this weekend. I am HIS and no one can ever change that. Not only that, but my life and every breath in me is the LORD's. HE CAN DO WITH IT WHAT HE WANTS!