Category: Come As You Are

Come As You Are – Entry #5 of 5

Today I wrap up my analysis of this song, with the focus being on the last complete verse. Most of the remainder is chorus.

There’s hope for the hopeless
And all those who’ve strayed
Come sit at the table
Come taste the grace
There’s rest for the weary
Rest that endures

When you stop and think about it, there are many times when you have a hopeless feeling. We start asking ourselves questions such as how did I get here, how could this happen, how can I ever get out of this feeling of hopelessness and helplessness? The normal tendency is to exhaust all of our own ideas, maybe then we turn to internet research, we then probably turn to friends for their guidance, and once we are completely overwhelmed with our challenge, we turn to God. What’s wrong with this picture? It doesn’t mean we won’t have challenging times in our life, but we can probably decrease the amount of time in which we have that feeling of hopelessness. We need to see God first for answers since he has given us hope through eternal life offered by the death of his Son.

We all wander away from God at some time. There are times when we feel really close to him and there are times when we feel distant. We stray from God when we sort of forget him or move him to the back of our thoughts, we are no longer walking beside him and listening to him; we have gone off on our own path. This happens when we turn our focus to other things and we don’t read our bibles as we should, we don’t pray as often as we should, we don’t go to church as we should, and we aren’t the light that he wants us to be. If we had others ignore us as we sometimes ignore God, we would probably lose friends and the closeness of family. The good news is that he is a loving father and is always waiting for his children to find their way back to him. Reading the parable of the prodigal son tells us how God still loves us, not matter how far we have strayed or how long we have forgotten or ignored him.

God has already set his table for all of the people described above. It is a table of not just great food and drink, but a table of love, fellowship, a time of rest and relaxation, and time with our father. There are no restrictions on who comes to his table, he only asks that we accept his son as our savior and the table is open to all who have. He doesn’t ask where we have been, why we did what we did, or why we seemed to have forgotten him; he merely says I love you, I missed you, and welcome back. All of our sins have already been forgiven and forgotten, all we need to be focused on is to stay on the path the son has prepared for us. We are surrounded by grace, we have eternal life, and we have a path that Jesus has laid out for each of us and is walking with us along that path.

I believe the title of the song, Come As You Are, tells the complete story when it comes to our relationship with Christ.

Come As You Are – Entry #4 of 5

Today I will focus on the following portion of the song,

All who are broken
Lift up your face
Oh wanderer come home
You’re not too far
So lay down your hurt
Lay down your heart
Come as you are

Are you broken? What does it even mean to be broken? These are difficult questions, but the reality is we are all broken. How we are broken differs for each of us. A person who is broken is someone who feels as if they are not worthy, they are undeserving, they have lost their way in life, and perhaps as if they are alone in a cold dark world. Maybe our brokenness comes from actual or perceived failures in our lives, the way others have treated us, where we live, or just the general environment around us. It is easy for the broken person to fall into a state of depression as they feel they loneliness and failure seeping in. I also believe we sometimes become broken due to a tragedy in our lives, such as a loss of a loved one. Not that we have done anything wrong, but there is now a hole in our heart that we are not sure how to mend.

With a defeated and broken spirit, we hang our heads, our demeanor changes, and the way we carry ourselves reflects how we feel. We essentially have a broken spirit and have given up on our life, we have become the prodigal son that the bible tells us about in Luke 15:11-32. It is during these times, in our darkest hours, that we need to lift up our hearts and faces to God. In this time of our greatest need, he alone can heal the pain and loneliness we are feeling. Psalms 34:18 reminds us that God is always there to take care of us: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”

He feels our pain and he asks us to feel his love and open our hearts to his peace and his will for your life. He heals the brokenness and reminds us we are his children and nothing can take away his love for us or the plans he has for us. It doesn’t matter if we have wandered away from God and that we have not been opening our hearts to him as we should, he still loves us and has his hand open to us at all times. Yes it might be challenging for us to hold our head up again, to admit our failures, confess our sins, and admit how we have turned away from him. We just need to come back to him and put our pain, suffering, and brokenness at his feet. As he reaches out to us, we will feel his warm, his love, and I am sure a look of compassion and a smile would be on his face if we could see it.

All we need to do, is to humble ourselves before God and give him all our suffering and our pain and he will heal our broken heart and our broken spirit. We only need to come as we are.

Come As You Are – Entry #3 of 5

Today I will focus on the following part of the song, only a couple of lines but a lot to cover.

So lay down your burdens
Lay down your shame

Have you ever stopped to think about all of the burdens you might be carrying? The basic definition of a burden is that it is a heavy load that slows us down or drags us down in some way. Maybe we do not have a single massive burden such as an oxen might carry, but we have a lot of smaller things we carry that end up being a burden. We have a tendency to carry the past around with us, we carry worry about things we cannot change, we worry about our family, we are concerned about the future. Any one of these is a heavy load, but when combined they become a massive burden that none of us are able to manage. The end result is we make no progress on any of these because all of our time, energy, and spirit are spread across all of these worries. The only way we can make any progress and see that there is a future for us, is to take these burdens and drop them at the feet of Jesus.

Worry is the heaviest burden for most of us and Jesus addresses this for us in Matthew 6:25-34, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

I realize this is a long passage of scripture, but if our greatest burden is worry; then it seems appropriate.

Part of the burden of the past we carry is shame and is also a burden of the present. We have hurt someone, we have not helped someone when we know we should have, and we are ashamed of certain actions that we took that were not appropriate. Perhaps we are ashamed to face God in our prayers because we did not stand up for him when we should have. We encounter situations where we should have spoken up and called out the wrong that was taking place, but we kept quiet. I am not suggesting that we put ourselves in a threatening situation, sometimes we send a message by walking away or perhaps standing alone for what we believe is God’s direction for us. If you think of your earthly father, isn’t it hard to tell him that you did not stand up for him today when people were criticizing him, laughing at him, and maybe not being willing to say in public how much you love him? We would be ashamed of ourselves, and we should feel the same way when we do not support our heavenly father. But all we need to do is confess our sins to him and he will forgive them, he does not want a wall between us at any time. He knows we are ashamed and that we were weak, but he still forgives us and loves us unconditionally. Remember that even the Apostle Peter denied Christ openly three times, yet he was forgiven and ended up becoming a strong leader of the early church.

What burdens and shame are you carrying that you need to give to the father so you can feel the peace that passeth all understanding? What is keeping you from letting go?

Come As You Are – Entry #2 of 5

This Blog entry will cover the following lines:

Come find your mercy
Oh sinner come kneel
Earth has no sorrow
That heaven can’t heal
Earth has no sorrow
That heaven can’t heal

We all make mistakes. Some of our mistakes hurt us, some hurt others, and other mistakes may have some challenging consequences. One of the most difficult mistakes to overcome is when we hurt someone else and they have trouble forgiving us for our actions. Maybe we hurt them badly and they are not ready to forgive us, and that makes our own regret run deeper. The good news is that God is always there to accept us and forgive us, no matter what we have done; this is what mercy is all about. Hebrews 4:16 says “Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” God doesn’t ask us why we did something wrong, he only asks that we confess our sins. Christ died for all of our sins of the past, the present, and the future; so all are forgiven. Even though our sins are forgiven, we are told to confess our sins. We need to confess to help us stay as close to the father as possible, he wants to know that we are truly sorry for our wrongs. The closer we stay to him and open our hearts to him, the more we feel his love and his forgiveness. It is hard to feel love and forgiveness if your heart is not tuned into God as it should be. So fall on your knees and pour out your heart to God and let him know how much you love him and how sorry you are for the things you have done; feel his love and his arms around you. Remember that mercy is when we don’t get what we deserve and grace is his absolute forgiveness.

Sometimes our sorrow is so deep and so devastating that it causes us to be depressed as we deal with the grief, loss, and failures. We often just want to be alone in our misery and sometimes believe we will never get out of this deep dark hole. This is what intense sorrow is all about. In the bible, David wrote about his sorrow, Jesus shared his sorrows before going to the cross, Paul wrote about suffering, and Isaiah 53:3 even referred to the coming Christ as a Man of Sorrows. God is all powerful and his love is never-ending; there is nothing that he cannot do. To believe that that he cannot heal any sorrow, is essentially saying he is not all powerful and that he has limitations. At some point, sooner rather than later, we need to give the sorrow and the grief to the father. This is always easier said than done, but the sooner we turn our hearts to God and ask him to take our sorrows away, the quicker we start the healing process. Paul tells us in Romans 8:18 “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”

Yes, our sorrow and grief run deep, but isn’t it fantastic to know that no matter how bad we feel in our time of despair, that the joy God will give us is beyond our wildest expectations.

Come As You Are – Entry #1 of 5

The next song for my Blog was written by Ben Glover, David Crowder, Matt Maher and was first released in 2014.  A link to David Crowder performing the song is at the bottom of this Blog entry.

Come As You Are

Come out of sadness
From wherever you’ve been
Come broken hearted
Let rescue begin
Come find your mercy
Oh sinner come kneel
Earth has no sorrow
That heaven can’t heal
Earth has no sorrow
That heaven can’t heal

So lay down your burdens
Lay down your shame
All who are broken
Lift up your face
Oh wanderer come home
You’re not too far
So lay down your hurt
Lay down your heart
Come as you are

There’s hope for the hopeless
And all those who’ve strayed
Come sit at the table
Come taste the grace
There’s rest for the weary
Rest that endures
Earth has no sorrow
That heaven can’t cure

So lay down your burdens
Lay down your shame
All who are broken
Lift up your face
Oh wanderer come home
You’re not too far
So lay down your hurt
Lay down your heart
Come as you are
Come as you are

Fall in his arms
Come as you are
There’s joy for the morning
Oh sinner be still
Earth has no sorrow
That heaven can’t heal
Earth has no sorrow
That heaven can’t heal

So lay down your burdens
Lay down your shame
All who are broken
Lift up your face
Oh wanderer come home
You’re not too far
So lay down your hurt
Lay down your heart
Come as you are
Come as you are
Come as you are

I will begin the first entry in this Blog by analyzing the following lines.

Come out of sadness
From wherever you’ve been
Come broken hearted
Let rescue begin

We all go through times in our lives when we experience sadness to some degree. We lose loved ones, we lose pets, we lose a job, we hurt someone’s feelings, have a broken relationship; all of these types of occurrences cause us to be sad and maybe even feel very alone. In times like this, there are days when we feel that our lives are crumbling. We may in fact want people to leave us alone while we work through the difficult time; but the reality is we need someone to help us regardless of the source of our sadness. Too many times we delay getting that assistance to help bring joy back into our hearts and our sadness just continues to linger and the hole we are in gets deeper and deeper. Jesus left us with the Holy Spirit who is to be our constant companion and our comforter so we would never be alone and we would always have Jesus with us at all times.

Broken hearts can be devastating and it is so hard to heal a broken heart. Broken hearts can cause depression, may make us feel as if our lives are completely lost and there is no hope for the future. During a time of being broken hearted, we may doubt our own self-worth. I also believe that those we have loved the most are the ones who can give us a broken heart that we feel can never be healed. We are always told that only time can mend a broken heart and that is probably true from an earthly perspective, but that time and that pain can be decreased or eliminated by turning to God for help. We need to consider a couple of actions, one is to turn to God to ease our pain and the other is to think about the plan God has for us that will be the eternal plan for our life.

The rescue from our pain / the healing of our broken heart starts by putting our pain at the feet of Jesus. He tell us in John 14:27 that his peace is a peace that only he can give; it is a peace we cannot get from anyone in this world. I realize this is easier said than done, but it is the first step in the process of healing; let go and have faith that Jesus will take this burden away. The verse says: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” In Christ alone can we get the true peace, healing, and rescue that we need.

We need to remember that God has an eternal plan for our life, take a look at what Revelation 21:4 says about all of our suffering: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” We are also told in Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” So, yes, God knows we will have suffering due to the sins of this world; but he also reminds us that our physical life is only a blip when looking at the eternal life scale. Things may be painful today, but God has a bright future planned for us and we cannot even begin to imagine what is in his glorious plan!

Click Here to See Crowder Perform Come as You Are