I wanted to discuss the idea of God's love being reckless, as sung in the Bethel Music worship song, "Reckless Love."
 
There has been a lot of conversation around this song as to whether we should use the term "reckless" to describe God's love for us. To some, the use of this word is dishonoring to an all-loving, all-wise and all-powerful God, reducing Him to an obsessive deity, unable to control His own responses. To others, the use of this word speaks volumes to their soul as they consider how God left nothing on the table to rescue and redeem the lost sinner, even setting aside His own dignity in pursuit of His personal passion.
 
My intention with this response to "Reckless Love" is not to establish or discredit either view, but rather to turn us to the unifying truths of Scripture as we seek to understand Him who exceeds the ability of our mortal understanding.
 
When we hear the word "reckless," we tend to think of things that have to do with being foolish, undisciplined or unwise, right? The word relates to something done without applying wisdom, without thinking it all the way through, lacking prudence and good judgment.
 
So from that point of reference, you might be thinking "God is not any of those things! God is wise! God's judgment is always good!" And I would agree.
 
But here's the thing. God doesn't use the world's standards to judge and define His actions. He uses His own heavenly standards, which seem foolish to the world. And often God chooses to explain His wisdom and truth to us by referring to it in the most opposing words available in contrast to worldly wisdom.
 
For example, when speaking of those Jesus bled and died for, the pure white bride of Christ, Paul says in 1 Corinthians that we are "scum of the earth." When speaking about living a life based on faith in the power of the resurrection of Christ, again Paul concedes that to the world we should look like the most pitiful people on the planet (see 1 Cor. 15:19).
 
So the concept of using undignified terminology to highlight the great chasm that separates the world's understanding of God to His own understanding is well established in Scripture.
 
Take a look at what it says in 1 Corinthians 1:18-25:
 
"For to those who are perishing, the preaching of the cross is foolishness, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God" (v. 18).
 
Would you call the cross foolish? Of course not! You understand what the cross is, what it means? But to the world, it is foolish indeed.
 
"It pleased God through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks" (vv. 21b-23).
 
They (the unbelievers) don't get it. It doesn't fit into their model of thinking ... their standards. It's foolish! It's reckless!

"But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, we preach Christ as the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men" (v. 24-25).
 
Consider this: God tells us we must become like children to come to him. A child, when he or she sees what they want, will go after it with reckless abandon. It judges for itself what is most important, and will leave all it has for that chance at getting that one thing it deems in that moment to want the most.
 
Remember the parable Jesus spoke about the "pearl of great price." The man sold everything he had to gain access to this one pearl of great value. Foolish! Reckless spending of all he owned! But to the person of faith it's not foolish, it's not reckless. It's the wisdom of God calling.
 
Jesus will leave the 99 sheep to go after the one that is lost. Jesus will leave His throne in heaven to take on the frailty of human, mortal flesh, to save even just one lost sinner. To the world, to a grownup, this is childish, reckless thinking. But not to the one who knows what's most important.
 
The father or mother who has lost his child will give up all sense of proper etiquette when searching for that child. I don't like bringing attention to myself in any normal situation, but when I can't find my small son or daughter in a crowd I get reckless to my own standards. I become a spectacle to all those around me in my effort to find my lost child.
 
Jesus became a spectacle on the cross, for all to see. Not prim and proper, no dignity, just a spectacle for all to see. Reckless love for those He came to save. Reckless by worldly standards—but not by the heavenly standard.
 
The Bible consistently encourages us to represent Him in this life by living the life of a fool. Fools that love others with the same reckless abandon as Jesus loves us. Fools that love as if this world and what it offers means nothing, and God's kingdom and our eternity mean everything. To the world, that's foolish, dare we say, even reckless. To the one being saved, it is the power and faithfulness of God the Father to do whatever it takes to save those He loves.

Tracy Manno currently resides in central Pennsylvania with his wife and three children and is president & CEO of His Way Worship® and co-founder of Narrow Road Ministries where he has serves as director of business and worship. Drawing upon 20+ years experience as lead worship pastor, as well as a broad range of achievements as a songwriter, artist and business executive, Tracy spends much of his time coaching new artists and mentoring those with a desire to live out their God-written destiny in Christ.
 
For more information and to contact Tracy about coaching, worship and speaking engagements, go to HisWayWorship.com or connect on Facebook at facebook.com/HisWayWorship.

Does it strike anyone odd that Jesus made wine for His first miracle? Perhaps the strangest part of the first miracle was that Jesus used bathing jars to hold the wine. Honestly, isn’t that a little gross? As crazy as this first miracle seemed, the strangest part to me was when he had them fill the huge jars full of water. He had his disciples fill the stone jars to the brim. Why didn’t Jesus just go over to the jars and pray a little prayer and make wine? He could have. There is a purpose for the water.

In Bible times, stone jars were used for purification rituals.  Stone was believed to hold purity.  These jars were often made of limestone, which was easy to carve.  The water poured inside would thus be pure, “living water,” held in this cistern of sorts, for later use.  The jars were useful, moldable, pure...but just attractive jars without the water being inside them.  The water was the tool to be used.  The water was the key element in the purification ceremonies.  The water was the stuff of Heaven, being held in specially chosen earthen vessels.  The water was the game changer.

We are the jars - chosen, moldable, ready to be used for the Kingdom, waiting for the Water that will flow and heal.  But if we come before God without being filled, without lifting our hearts and empty vessels for a fresh filling of His Spirit, power, and direction, we are just attractive stone.  We may clean up nicely and say, “Amen!” at the appropriate time, but we are hollow, cavernous, and cold inside without the stuff of Heaven sloshing out and into the world.  The stone is nothing without the water.

If I may be honest, we live in a world of carbon copying. Everywhere you look and in all things, we are looking for the next cool look. We are waiting on the next mega church to write another hit song so we can share it in our church. We wear our hats certain ways, bend our brims in certain ways, roll up our pants legs, cut our hair, wear our jewelry and plan our church services in certain ways in hopes to have success. I’m guilty more than anyone else. It leaves me asking myself, “What am I depending on to radically love and change the world around me”. When I try to perform or create things to change the world without listening to God, I am making my own “boxed wine?”. Am I squeezing my own grapes and trying to manufacture my own power?  Am I bypassing the living water and hoping the stellar stone will do the trick?  A wine connoisseur can identify a fine wine a mile away.  They can distinguish its aroma, its intensity, balance, and complexity of notes and flavors.  Our hearts are the same way.  When you have had choice wine, boxed wine is way less appealing.

Jesus was making a huge point. In John 4:14 He asked the Samaritan woman for a drink. He was building up to an eternal and epic moment with her. “With this living water, you will never thirst again.” I have tasted this water. I’m so glad I did. I, too, fill it to the brim and it bubbles over. If I fill my life with my talent, performance, hard work and grit, I offer the world box wine, devoid of Heaven’s flavor and intensity.   If I fill my life with His Holy Spirit, the miracle happens. He allows choice wine to spill out of my dirty stone jar. This, and this alone, is what our world needs. People need much more of Him and much less of me. They need my worship flowing from my emptiness and His filling.  They need all of us to go from water to wine, pungent and resplendent for His glory.

​Kick the boxed wine, my friends. Let’s go for the Chardonnay!

We can carry around a lot of things that can hinder our worship.  Self-condemnation, sorrow, fear…  I feel like we hear a lot about these things.  Today I want to talk about something that isn't really talked about a lot.  I want to talk about anger. 
 
Last Sunday morning, I walked into the church sanctuary as the lights began to dim.  The band came out as I found my place in my row.  I'd had a hard week, but I was glad to be in the house of God.  I wanted to lay it all down and worship the Lord.  Our first song was 'This is Amazing Grace' by Phil Wickham, and I had just really started to enter in to worship.  My heart began to engage with the lyrics, which recount many of the wonderful promises of God, as I sang to Him.  Things were going great, until we got to a particular promise in one line of the song that says "Who makes the orphan a son and daughter."  And I froze.  I started to feel a heaviness in my chest.  And then the tears started.
 
You see, we have been pursuing an international adoption from Africa for four, very long years.  2 years ago, we actually had a referral to a little girl in Tanzania.  We had her picture up on our fridge, and our family was really excited to bring her home, and in my heart she was my daughter.  But because of some political issues we lost our referral, and we lost her.  It was very painful, but we still felt called to adopt.  Soon after that we started the process all over again, this time in the African country of Guinea.  We have been waiting on a referral for a 12 month old little girl, who has been chosen for our family, but recently found out that there are some serious complications with THIS adoption as we found out our adoption agency will be closing permanently.
 
I've spent a lot of time talking to God about our adoption process, declaring victory and begging God to intervene.  We really felt like God told us to pursue this, and believe He promised us a little girl from Africa. But this has been such a long, difficult journey.
 
Sometimes I do great, I'm filled with expectation and strength to keep waiting and trusting God.  But there have also been seasons when all I can do is cope, and I just force myself to not think about it.  Then there are the times when all just feels really hopeless.  It hurts.  It doesn't seem fair, for us OR these orphaned children.
 
Here's some of the awful thoughts that I wrestle with in those darker moments.  “If God REALLY does give mom's and dad's to orphans, then what about the little girl we almost brought home from Tanzania?  She's still stuck in an orphanage.  What about the baby girl in Guinea?  Are You going to take her away too?  What about my feelings, my husband's feelings and my 3 bio kids?  Why am I being punished when I'm trying to do something GOOD?  And spending a lot of time, energy and money to do so?”
 
The most painful part is that I KNOW God could change all this right now.  He is sovereign.  He could have stopped it.  At any point He could have made it right for all of us.  But He didn't.  And right then, in that darkened church sanctuary, I realized that I was really angry at God.
 
Nothing shuts down a relationship like anger.  For all the married folks, have you ever tried showing affection to your spouse while you were angry at them?  Have you ever tried honestly blessing them, or harder still, giving your whole heart to them in intimacy?  You can't do it!  Not for real!  You can fake it.  You can go through the motions, but truly, anger is a nemesis of heart intimacy.  The worst of it is, anger is that it doesn't just "go away."  You can push it back, try not to thing about it, but in that moment when you try to make a heart connection with someone, it comes right back up.  To move forward in relationship, any relationship, the anger has to be recognized and called out for what it is.  It has to be dealt with.
 
We all know anger is bad, but anger at God seems particularly bad somehow, doesn't it?  I mean, He's God, right?  He knows everything, who are we to question His judgment?  Just ask Job, who got an earful of holy lecture when He dared to question God's judgments.  This is Christianity 101!  But the truth is, God knows the anger is there anyway, and He wants all of us, the good bad and ugly.
 
The worst thing we can do in our relationship with Him is to try to hide ourselves from Him.  It stops our trust, stops our ability to be intimate with Him.  He asks us to not hold anything back.  To give Him our whole hearts, however sinful, and to let Him create in us a clean heart.
 
In that moment at church, I knew I couldn't keep singing to God as if nothing was wrong.  It would have been fake.  I knew I needed to deal with my anger at the Lord.  And, as embarrassing as it was for me (cause, shouldn't I know better by now?), I confessed anger at God to Him as sin. But I also recognized that He wasn't angry or disappointed at me for being angry at Him. God, Himself is SLOW to anger.  He knows our hearts, He understands our pain AND our imperfect love.   I gave Him my emotion of anger.  Then I told my own soul, my own emotions, to line up with the truth of my good and loving God.  I told my spirit to rise up within me. I cried as I affirmed that my family, myself and both of these little baby girls, are perfectly taken care of by my Father.  I affirmed that His ways are not my ways, and I relinquished the right to understand. 
 
I started to feel lighter, like a guard around my heart was falling off.  Worship was still going, and now the song was 'Do it Again.' by Elevation Band.   "I've seen you move the mountains, and I believe I'll see you do it again, You made a way when there was no way, and I believe I'll see you do it again”.  I looked up at that projection screen and literally forced myself to begin to sing out these words, through tears I felt His peace come over me.  I started shouting the words, and the Lord began to remind me of all the times He came through for me.  The many, many times and situations that He has helped me, provided for me, saved me, fulfilled His promises, miraculously healed me. And I began to praise Him for those times and for the times to come.  I allowed my faith to rise up again over our adoption. 
 
Hey, maybe you have some really tough stuff going on in your life right now, and you're reading this and realizing that you are angry at God. That it's keeping you from being truly intimate with Him.  There's good news for you!  He's just waiting for you to come to him, with all your stuff, and pour out your heart to Him.  He longs to reassure you of His love, like He did for me last Sunday, so come to Him.  Be real about what's going on, He understands!   Submit your whole self, even your emotion of anger, to Him.  Call your faith to rise up, even if it's just a mustard seed.  Remind yourself of how He has come through in the past, how He's proven His goodness over and over again, and then worship Him for who He is, what He's done, and what He's going to do!

“Worship!”  Reading or hearing someone say the word worship can invoke a number of responses in each of us.  Depending on our upbringings and life experiences we each have our own personal take on what worship means, how we define it, and varying emotions and imagery it conjures.  From thoughts of performing ceremonial religious acts and memories of fragrant incense, to rousing our feet to stomp and hands to lift high in praise with cymbals, horns and guitars, there is no shortage of opinion on the subject.

The point of our “Rediscovering Worship” blog series, and really the point of His Way Worship at heart is to set a tone where we can start to set aside our finite ideas on “how” God wants to be worshipped, and explore the endless ocean that is ours in worshipping the Lord Jesus.

Let’s start by just ripping the band aid off and saying worship, in its primary form, is not a musical concept at all.  Think of music as a vehicle for our worship to travel in.  We get in a car, airplane or boat that provides us transportation to someplace we otherwise couldn’t have gone.  Music is a place that we can enter into so we can tangibly express deep longings to the Father from within our souls.  The lyrics we sing connect the truths of who God is with our own living spirit.  The music we play allow us to physically interact with that connection by playing instruments, tapping feet, lifting hands, singing voices.  We “enter into worship”, individually or together, through the medium of music.

Music is such a powerful and universal vehicle for us to worship in I believe, in part, because we are created in the likeness of Christ.  We create music using the very likeness of Himself, and we naturally connect with this likeness at the untouchable place it was created… deep within our souls.

Worship is where our spirit and soul collaborate and agree together that Christ is above all and in all.  When sin came into the human DNA our eternal connection with God’s spirit was severed.  We needed a savior to revive, restore, and bring new spirit life back to us.  Through the process of salvation God gives us His own Spirit, and once again our soul can connect eternally with God, and in our worship we agree with Christ, that He is Lord of our lives.

Romans 12:1 tells us that this is our spiritual act of worship… the sacrifice of our lives to Jesus for His purposes.

This is why worship at its core is not about music.  It’s a heart condition.  Worship happens as a lifestyle, in the mundane, messy, broken, painful, joyful journey of our daily lives.  We find our worship in the surrender of every moment as we agree with His Spirit that He is worthy of it all.  In this way our very lives become the ultimate vehicle for our expression of true worship.  We allow God to play us as His instrument, freely giving Him every moment, every circumstance to the obedience of serving our beautiful Creator.
​
Let the symphony play on Lord Jesus!

​I have been in fulltime work of the Gospel for nearly 15 years, and no matter how hard I try, inevitably I find myself fighting against the knowledge I have of God’s love for me.  My “default” thinking wants to see God with a list of my good and bad deeds, rewarding or denying His goodness towards me based on that list.  This is wrong thinking and I am regularly amazed with how easily I get caught up in it over and over again.
 
I “know” He loves me, and I “know” that it’s unconditional… but I often don’t truly live in that place in my heart and mind.  God’s love is not just to be heard about, but experienced.

No greater example of this problem is seen than with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  To the contrary to what many Christians teach and believe, after they sinned God banished them from the garden, not out of punishment but out of a deeply emotional and loving response from God the Father, God the Son and God the Spirit.  God’s motive for banishing them from the garden is recorded that we might forever understand where His heart was during this deeply traumatic experience.

Genesis 3:22-24
Then the Lord God said, “Look, the human beings have become like us, knowing both good and evil. What if they reach out, take fruit from the tree of life, and eat it? Then they will live forever!” So the Lord God banished them from the Garden of Eden, and he sent Adam out to cultivate the ground from which he had been made. After sending them out, the Lord God stationed mighty cherubim to the east of the Garden of Eden. And he placed a flaming sword that flashed back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

God was not angry with them, and He definitely wasn’t pouring out judgment and punishment on them.  He loved them, and all that they represented as first created of an entire human race meant to live in intimate relationship with Him.  No, the Triune God had to let them go so that they would not remain in a fallen state, forever separated from God for all of eternity.  And as He sent them out, He also set into motion His plan to bring them back!  And as we know from His own words… “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son”… this was no little plan.  This plan came at great personal cost to himself… because of His Great Love!

Unfortunately it doesn’t take much in our weakened sinful state to withdraw back to a place of shame and guilt, even so much as to doubt, and ultimately reject the concept that God loves us with a very personal and intimate love.  The voice of the enemy points us to the angel standing guard at the entrance to Eden, blocking our re-entry, keeping us out, reminding us of our guilt.  But the truth of God points us forward to a place of healing and restored relationship.

God created us from His love.  God sustains us through His love.  God redeems us because of His love.  There is no more condemnation for those in Christ Jesus!  (Romans 8:1) He is nearer to you now than ever before.  He has given you His spirit to dwell within you, to be connected with you, to reveal more of Himself to you.

His love is fierce. His love is intense.  The strength of His love surpasses our own failures.  And yet while none of us are good enough to earn his love, we are loved by Him nonetheless.  No, you don’t need to please Him in order to gain His love.  He loves you already, by His own choice.

Worship is not simply an act of singing.  Worship permeates all we say, do and think.  We worship in Spirit and Truth.  Each day is an empty canvas to paint a picture through our words, deeds and thoughts.  Scripture tells us to paint that picture in the Spirit and in Truth.  As we paint, we have opportunity to worship by creating a picture that expresses the truth of who God is.
​
This blog is a place where I will be sharing my take on real-life issues, and where they find their connection with authentic worship.

You may have heard that God’s love is an anchor that reaches to the heavens.  When we understand that we are anchored to something stronger than the elements surrounding us, we can rest in the strength of the anchor.
 
God’s love anchors us in the storms of fear, doubt and confusion.  It anchors us from the continuing voices of self condemnation, failure and defeat.  We are tethered to a force strong enough to overcome even the loudest shouts that rage against us.
 
To know Him is to know His love for you.  To experience Him as a Father is to experience His unwavering commitment to your good.  His love and commitment to you is so great that He has purposed to make all circumstances in your life ultimately be worked out for good (Romans 8:28).
 
The anchor of God’s love provides a place of certainty, that although your soul may be in turmoil to the current situation, you can cling to the certainty of His good thoughts and good purposes in that situation toward you.  He is not ridiculing you.  He is not waiting on you to do it perfectly.  He is not waving a condemning finger before you.  He is not withholding anything good from you.  No… you are on the road to your purpose.  And on that road He is faithful to you.  His love is not trite nor changing, as is our own.  His love endures.  His love comes from the very heart of who He is.

“Lord may my spirit be tethered to the realness of your love for me this day.  May the turbulent circumstances that trouble my soul this day be stilled as I hold to the knowledge of your steadfast love for me.  Teach me, lead me, and guide me by your still voice.  Remind me again who I am in Christ, that I am loved, I am Yours, I am precious in your eyes.  Give me faith to worship you by standing on this truth today. Amen.”
​