Shades and Appearances of Praise (November 16th):

Friday, November 30, 2007


This is a concise summary of the beautiful conference we had about "praise."

Explanation by the contributor (Curvyice):
Shades of Praise are the different colors of praise. The different ways that we can praise God are shades of praise. A diamond has different cuts, but is still a diamond. A color can have several shades, but it is still one color. So is Praise.

Praise is anything that glorifies God.
If I wear yellow pants and it is bringing glory to God, then that is praise (quoting T). Praise is a sweet-smelling aroma unto God. In prayer, there is a segment of praise, in vows, there is a segment of praise. Praise is something that has many layers like an orange that you have to peel. Offerings is like the peel, singing songs of worship is like the seeds of the fruit, but at the end of the day, there are different layers that make up the whole. So also, there are different layers of praise. Remember the Casting Crowns song, "Let my Life song sing to you," in the same way, the stories of our lives can serve as PRAISE to God.

Anything you do that glorifies God is your praise, 'let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to You, O Lord, my Strength and my Redeemer" Psalm 19:14

Also, in Psalm 103:1, "Bless the Lord O my soul, and ALL that is within me, bless His holy Name." Let ALL that is within us glorify His Name. Everything about you must glorify God.

Can we find examples in the bible? Yes, there are numerous examples. One example which shows that our sacrifices praise God is the story of Abel's sacrifices in the book of Genesis.

Praise is a spiritual offering.
Hebrews 13:14, "Therefore by Him let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to His name."

Prayer and Praise work hand-in-hand:
Illustration by T: You may be really hungry, and there may be rice and beans, you would rather prefer to eat them together, even though they are separate types of food. They complement each other. So also, Praise can serve as an intro to your prayers, so prayer and praise go hand in hand.

Music is not all that is praise:
Music sung unto God is praise, but praise is not only music. There are numerous ways we can praise God besides reveling in musical notes. Music is praise but is not the totality of everything that praise is.

T: works with three other students who are atheists. They were having a discussion about music, and T was led to tell them about gospel music. They asked her, "what do you think about Christian rap and Christian rock???" Hmmm...what a thought to ponder on.

If you don't understand the lyrics or the meaning of a song, regardless of who made the track you won't understand how to praise God through that medium. Worship and Praise are really about the words (the intricacies of the lyrics, and they must be glorifying to God). Not all songs that the world terms as "gospel music" glorify God. Because a song merely has the Name "Jesus" in it doesn't necessarily mean that song is glorifying, praising, or worshipping. But know that whenever the Name of Jesus is pronounced, every knee must bow! Rap may work for some, hard rock may work for some, metal may work for some, yet still R & B may work for others. You have to worship God in the way you know how, but make sure your entire words are glorifying God. If you're listening to a rock song and all they are doing is screaming and banging heads against drums, then you may walk out with a headache and won't have done anything else but listen to noise. Not everything is praise, but still even in certain rock songs, the musicians glorify God and pull millions closer to Him, especially those who are used to rock and actually like rock music (not everyone likes rock music). Those who worship God must worship Him in Spirit and in Truth. It's all about your spirit...your spirit may not feel every music or every pastor, but let your spirit find your own connection to God. Yet still, don't undermime any 'type' of music because it may be changing someone else's life.

Make a JOYFUL sound unto the LORD:
It doesn't matter 'how' you make your own joyful sound, if it is joyful then it is giving praise to God. Imagine if you were there when Joshua and the Isrealites walked around the walls of Jericho while blowing loud trumpets. Trumpets for one do not necessarily sound nice when played by itself, yet when one plays a trumpet unto the Lord, it is PRAISE to God. God will delight in his praise if it's from the bottom of his heart, because God is a God that looks at our insides and not on our outward appearances. The book of psalms even talks about praising God with clanging cymbals. I mean why would my cymbals be clanging? Isn't that noise. But yet, when the people did it unto God, He accepted it as praise. Naijabloke briefly gives an example of one of his friends (a girl) who invited him to listen to "fuji" Christian music and everyone laughs (Fuji is a popular Nigerian musical genre. It arose from the improvisation Ajisari/were music tradition, which is a kind of Muslim music performed to wake believers before dawn during the Ramadan fasting season. Were music/Ajisari itself was made popular by the likes of Alhaji Dauda Epo-Akara, the deceased Ibadan-based "awurebe" founder and Ganiyu Kuti or Gani Irefin. Fuji is a percussive style of music, relying on complex interlocking rhythms played on a variety of traditional drums, while also incorporating drum machines and keyboards in its modern incarnation, wikipedia). Popular fuji stars are King Sunny Ade and Ebenezar Obey.

People who enjoy the so-called Christian fuji music may have been listening to fuji all their life, and hence this is what their niche is and how they know how to sing. Indeed if they sing fuji unto God, then it will be PRAISE to God.

Summary so far: Basically praise is everything that glorifies God. The preferences of praise: what may appeal to you may not appeal to someone else, but that does not mean they are not glorifying God. When we are glorifying and praising God, it just needs to be straight from our heart, giving the highest encomium to our loving Father.

When the Holy Spirit Visits:
When the Holy Spirit visits a particular place, sometimes there is chaos. People begin to do 'crazy' things. Take the cue from David who ran out naked praising His God (not to say you should blind eyes with your nakedness), but yes, David praised God in this way at a particular point in his life. You come to that place where you literally lose it, running around the walls of a house, rolling on the floor in worship (e.g. Jaycee), and running down the street several blocks from your house in a strange neighborhood (e.g. ms. "T"), or the day naijabloke closed his eyes in bliss as he listened to the yoruba worship song by Lara George as she called out the Names of God (until his co-worker asked him if he was ok...lol). Spelling out the Names of God can make one go crazy, because you call out the names of God according to the different ways that He has expressed Himself to you in your past (Jenhovah Jireh, Jehovah Nissi, Lord of Hosts, the Uncreated Creator, the One Who is, Who was, and Who is to come). There is really no such thing as "outrageous praise." People praise God based on the way they see God.

Praise comes with INTIMACY.
Knowing who God has been to you in times past. Your experiences will cause you to debase yourself in praise in front of the Almighty God. Because of Job's experiences, He called God the One who gives and takes away. When you are hungry and God gives you food, there is an extra sweetness on your lips when you call Him Jehovah Jireh. It is with the revelation that you have that you can praise God. Arugbo Ojo, the Ancient of Days. Breaking down the Names of God can mess one up (in the words of Niyi). There is a saying that "the language you pray in is your first language" (because that is how you know how to express yourself best)~by Allied.


"ACT CRAZY FOR GOD & GIVE HIM THE HIGHEST PRAISE!!!!!!"
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To Listen to TERC"s last conference:
Dial this number: 641-715-3437
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LAST TOPIC: Hindrances to Our Destinies
(That's hot!)

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"Bad Company" (Nov 02,2007)

Tuesday, November 6, 2007


This is a compilation of the wonderful phone conference, held on Friday, November 02, 2007. Whereever two or more are gathered in His Name, He is there is their midst. You're invited to join the next terc meeting, join others in the blogosphere as we learn more about God...


Two main scriptures:
1) 1 Corinthians 15:33 “Do not be deceived: evil company corrupts good habits.”
2) Proverbs 12:26 “The righteous should choose his friends carefully, for the way of the wicked leads them astray.”

Main summary:
Bad company definitely will corrupt anyone…no one is immune to corruption. Therefore, we have to learn how to choose our friends very carefully, as the bible instructs us to. There is an old adage that says, “Your friends will either pull you up or bring you down.”

What do we mean when we say “friends?” It may be funny, but we may all have different definitions of who a “friend” is. My definition of a friend is someone you can talk to, a shoulder to lean on, someone to get advise from and someone to give advise to, someone you hang around with all the time, someone whose ideas usually matches with yours (at least some times), and just someone who usually feels you and is almost always there for you (cares about you and you care about them). Now, a unified global definition of a friend, according to the dictionary, is “a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard; a person who gives assistance; patron; supporter (unabridged dictionary); a person whom one knows, likes, and trust (American heritage).”

Actually some dictionaries have the definition of a friend also as an acquaintance, but they don’t mean exactly the same thing. An acquaintance may just be someone you know very well, but a friend goes deeper than that. You can have very many acquaintances, but only few can truly be called your true friends.

I talked about how I was reading this book called, “Warren Buffet Speaks,” and one of his quotes was, “always hang around with people better than you and you will float up a little bit. Hang around with the other kind and you start sliding down the pole.” I think this is a very wise quote. Amongst your circle of friends, you must always have a role model, someone you can talk to, who can give you “Godly advice.” It does not mean that you should only pick friends who are wiser or higher than you in general knowledge, because God may place people in your life, in specific friendships, just for you to become a hand-lifter to them, as a source of strength, and as a light in the midst of their darkness. If not Jesus would not have commanded us to “be ye the light of the world and the salt of the earth.”

Have you noticed that you can’t really affect lives from an impersonal standpoint? Merely quoting scriptures doesn’t cut it all the time. It is good to disburse the knowledge that you know, but it may not change a life. What changes lives is your personal story. Everybody has a personal story. In fact, each day, we build up on our personal stories. God has placed you in one of your friends’ life so that your personal story may be a bible to them.

So T gave an awesome example. She has this friend in medical school, who she’s unusually drawn towards, despite the fact that her friend confessed to her that she is an atheist (someone who does not believe in God). Her question was, “So should I pull away from this person? Isn’t this the typical example of bad company about to corrupt good habits? (paraphrasing her)” The answer was, in summary, it depends on the situation. In this case, T’s spirit matches her friend in the sense that they have the same general behaviors, they both don’t smoke and drink, they are both not “party people” (as T coined the phrase), and they feel each other strongly on several issues (they even have discussions about God and Jesus). In this case, I strongly believe that T is in this girl’s life for a reason. Sometimes she asks T to pray for her about certain issues. Allied made an awesome comment that if an acclaimed atheist can ask someone to pray for her, then maybe somewhere on the inside of her she actually believes that God does truly exist, but she just doesn’t understand how to access Him). It would make sense, in this specific case, for T to stay in this friendship and see where God takes it. It may be for many years, but patience is a virtue, and there have been stories in the past where atheists have become born-again and incorporated into God’s family. If we don’t have people to change just by them watching how we live our lives, then how can we personally be the “light of the world?”

Psalm 42:7 says, “Deep calls unto deep at the noise of your waterfalls.” There’s something about two like spirits getting attracted to each other. That’s how a relationship or a friendship begins. It’s a natural law; you just get attracted to someone who feels the same way as you do. Don’t be a repellant. That’s why it’s possible to be friends with an atheist when you guys have the same characters and view the world in the same way. Except they have just that one (most important) fact all twisted… (But don’t repel)…be attractive…

Jesus’ Spirit called out to the deepness in Matthew’s spirit, even while he was still a tax collector who accepted bribes.

Where a friendship goes wrong is when we get influenced and pulled in the negative direction, as opposed to us pulling our friends in the positive direction.

Evil company corrupts good habits; the more you let them get you involved in bad activities, the more you get pulled towards the negative side. Evil company means a continuous cycle of hanging out with the wrong crowd, at the wrong place, and engaging in the wrong activity. This doesn’t mean that you should now “isolate” yourself in a self-designed purified bag, no, because we see that the example Jesus gave was to go and eat and drink with sinners, and to visit tax collectors (who were involved in bribes in those days) in their private homes. But when Jesus hung out with them, it was to eat…and it was to teach! In other words, He was engaged in a “good activity.” In mathematical equations: Bad people + good activity = good company. Bad people + bad activity = bad company, and it is this “bad company” that can lead to corrupting your good habits. There’s a difference.

At this point, Allied began to teach us about self-examination. That scripture says, “Evil Company corrupts good habits,” but have we made sure that WE are not the evil company ourselves? Have we removed the plank from our own eyes before removing the tiny specks from our friends’ eyes? Are we the people bringing people down, rather than pulling them up? These were the categories or characteristics she listed, asking us to examine ourselves to see if we belonged to any. If you belong to any of these categories (which ALL of us on the phone today belonged to at least one), then we also need to ask God to renew our characters and make us brand new, to teach us how to become good company:

a) Someone with a pessimistic attitude.
b) Someone who is extremely sensitive (you have to walk with eggshells all around them).
c) Someone who is extremely defensive (you can’t really talk to them as a friend).
d) Someone who is always self-conscious about their appearance and status (do you like to take all the glory?)
e) Someone who is extremely competitive (esp. Christian friends who try to outshine each other). We’re all running our race on individual lanes, and we don’t have to struggle to be on the same lane. The difference from the Olympics is that there isn’t only one winner with the gold medal, in God’s books we’re all going to be winners, as far as we get to the end of our individual lanes (completing our own race). So don’t speed ahead of the gang when your friend is lagging behind, you can slow down a little bit and lend a helping finger when your friend needs one. After all, when you get to the finish line, God will not congratulate you for being first, but He will ask you why you refused to see your friend when he/she fell down!
f) Someone who is almost never comfortable with him or herself (please you have a talent in you, stop looking at others and find your own talent, we were created to complete each other, not compete…one part of the body completes another part).
g) Someone who is critical and judgmental
h) Someone who cannot be corrected (always wanting to be right).
i) Someone who constantly thinks about what others are saying about him or her (the things they say can either make or break you, typical case of lack of confidence).
j) Someone who has an extorted image of God.
k) Someone who follows the crowd (does not have his or her own dreams).
l) Someone who constantly shifts responsibility or blame.
m) Someone who’s afraid of close relationships.
n) Someone who’s a gossip.
o) Someone who just has a casual relationship with God (isn’t intimate).
p) Someone who’s extremely conscious of the devil (always rebuking stuff, highly distracted by what the devil is doing and cannot even see what God is doing) ~ an addition at the end of the conference (e.g. people always praying for their enemies to “somersault and die” instead of praying for their enemies).

Question: What about things about yourself that you cannot change? Take for instance your facial expressions? (e.g T’s example of waking up in the morning and saying “good morning” to someone else, and their retort was “why are you angry?” They thought she was frowning, but that’s just how her face looks sometimes!) Also Naijabloke’s example of how some people bottle up things they claim you’ve done to harm them, meanwhile you never even was aware of the fact that you did anything!

Answer: First, there is nothing impossible with God, anything can be changed. Just make sure it’s not leading someone away from God. If someone tells you once or twice that you did something to them, which you claim that you didn’t know it would hurt them (maybe that’s just how u joke or something), then you should just apologize and learn to act in a way that won’t hurt that person next time. But if different people keep telling you the same thing all the time, it may be worthwhile to cross-examine yourself and ask, “Am I really doing things the right way?” Then a third-case-scenario is that if these people keep accusing you of what you’re sure you’re not intentionally doing, then maybe they’re just crazy and you need to pray for them.

The devil attacks your best trait. So if you ticked one of the options on the cross-examination scale, remember to make sure you walk in the opposite direction. Define yourself how God defines you (and He defined you before you were even born); don’t define yourself based on your emotions or your character. Tell yourself that you’re not that person, and anytime those traits come, fight them and be an overcomer! Be a true friend, and choose your friends wisely…because evil company corrupts good habits!

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