How to know if your spirit has been "stirred"

“In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia… Then rose up the heads of the fathers’ houses of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and the Levites, everyone whose spirit God had stirred…” (Ezra 1: 1, 5)

The Hebrew word translated “stirred” literally means to awaken. Not stirred as in mixing two things in a container, but stirred as in roused from sleep.

What does it look like when someone’s spirit has been “stirred up”? A person whose spirit has been stirred by God:

1.  Takes God at His Word. “Then arose Jeshua the son of Jozadak, with his fellow priests, and Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel with his kinsmen, and they built the altar of God of the God of Israel, to offer burnt offerings on it, as it is written in the law of Moses the man of God…And they kept the Feast of Booths as it is written, and offered the daily burnt offerings by number according to the rule… “ (Ezra 3:2, 4)

For these men, the scriptures weren’t something nice to put on a coffee mug. They were the words of God given not as homilies or sentimental thoughts, but as commands for living in His presence. Obedience was not optional. And when it ran up against the popular opinions and customs of the culture, they didn’t back down. Even when it meant personal suffering, they took God’s Word seriously and obeyed it to the letter.

2.     Makes worship a priority. “… the people gathered as one man to Jerusalem… and they built the altar of the God of Israel… But the foundation of the temple was not yet laid.” (Ezra 3:1-2, 6)

These guys started offering sacrifices before the foundation of the actual temple was even started yet! They weren’t going to wait until the building was completed before they began worshipping; they knew they would never be able to complete the work without God. So they began regular worship every single day from the first day forward.

Gut check: What do we let keep us from making worship the first priority of our day, every day?

·      I have to get up early for work.

·      I have to work out.

·      I’m too tired.

·      It’s too hard.

·      I forget.

·      I get busy, distracted, stressed out with other responsibilities, etc.

How easily we forsake seeking the presence of God for other, lesser gods! How freely the excuses come! But let our world get rocked by some tragedy and suffering and we immediately expect God to drop everything and make our problems His first priority.

Look, I don’t want to be legalistic about it, but the reality is that if we don’t intentionally spend time in the presence of God at the earliest possible moment each day, we will most likely never get around to it at all. The root of the word worship is worth; the root of our worship is what God is worth to us. That’s why you never see worship without sacrifice. The only way of knowing the true worth of a thing is by seeing what someone is willing to give up to get it.

3.     Get generosity. “… everyone who made freewill offerings to the LORD… So they gave money to the masons and the carpenters, and food, drink, and oil…” (Ezra 3: 5, 7)

Let’s just cut the crap right here, right now. If you want to know where a man’s heart is, look at what he spends his money on. Period. Ignore the whiners and squealers who start squirming when the pastor mentions giving. If someone has to stand in front of you week after week and beg you to be generous towards the work of the Kingdom, you just flat don’t get it. Sorry, but it’s true.

If you really believed the gospel, if you really understood who Jesus is and what His death, resurrection, ascension, and return really mean for this world, your pastor would have to beg you to stop giving because the church would be overwhelmed. Ha! And monkeys might fly out of my… well, you get the idea.

Generosity is the natural response to grace. A person who has received so much, so lavishly, so undeserved should have no trouble at all showing generosity towards others in need of grace.

Why don’t I give away more? Why don’t I spend more time, energy, resources, focus on those around me? The flesh is that inward gravitational pull of the heart towards self-worship. And it never sleeps. It never rests or goes away or takes a break. The second we stop being intentional about focusing our hearts on Christ, it immediately starts drifting back towards self. Like a garden that must be weeded constantly or it will revert back to wilderness, so is the heart.

When God “stirs up” our spirits, we awaken to what’s really true. And they reveals what’s really important. And that fuels our choices. And those choices take us in a direction towards God and away from self. That direction will some day end at a destination. Generosity is one of the surest signs that you are headed in the right direction.

4.     Know how to party. There is this sick idea in the modern church that emotions are bad and should not be a part of worship. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that that’s not just wrong, it’s evil. It’s a lie from the pit of Hell. The Thief comes to kill, steal, and destroy. And what he has successfully stolen, killed, and destroyed in modern churches in America is authentic, heart-felt, emotional worship.

Look, the appropriate response to the Gospel is overwhelming joy. It’s shouting, singing to the top of your voice, dancing like a fool and not giving a rat’s hairy backside who is watching or what they think about it. “That’s not reverent,” someone may say. My good friend and mentor Johnny Hunt would respond, “Sir, that’s not reverence; that’s rigor mortise!”

There’s no disconnect between doctrine and emotion in the Bible. The Gospel of the Kingdom is not data to be stored, it’s Truth to be celebrated – with our whole hearts!  In Ezra 3:10-13, it says that when the people finally finished the foundation – not the building, mind you, just the foundation – that they were so overcome with what that meant for them as the people of God that “all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the LORD… But many of the priests and Levites and heads of the fathers’ houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid, though many shouted aloud for joy., so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping, for the people shouted with a great shout, and the sound was heard very far away.”

Authentic worship always, always, ALWAYS involves emotion. Emotions are part of the very image of God we bear, they are a family resemblance. Emotions are only  harmful if they are inappropriately self-focused. They were created and given to us to be appropriate responses to a God-centered reality. Those whose hearts have been roused awake by the Spirit of the Living God know this to be true – and they are happy! (See what I did there?)