Godified

I Want You Back

This is a rap that I performed at the 2011 LifeChurch Family Reunion Talent Show. It’s similar to my Freaks and Geeks rap, but I thought I would post the lyrics anyways.

Alright Jesus is the mastermind
Turned that water into wine
Mass appeal He came to heal
Died for all sins rid me of mine

This beat is for my Lord
But beware this rap is potent
Weird like Edgar Allen Poe
Now that’s poetry in motion

Jesus make so right so I turn to Him at all times
Yeah He’s so divine so to Him goes all of my rhymes
I got a fear of the Lord of what I am without Him
It’s way worse than a body that don’t hit the gym

It’s a soul that’s weak and a heart that’s full of nothing
But the Lord will fill you up that’s the truth I ain’t bluffin
Because I know I always fall so short of His glory
But wow by His grace He still loves and adores me dang

 I used to think I wouldn’t be good enough for God to love me
And later realized that I never ever could be
So I accepted His grace and His love
Started livin for His kingdom above

He changed my heart renewed my mind
I kicked selfishness and wished it goodbye
Now I’m living for the One who died for me
Because He calls me His son on His family tree

We shout to all creation Jesus is Lord
He’s your savior so come serve Him with us man all aboard

This ship this relationship I guess I should call it
This intimate thing God offers to all His people
So people please pull yourselves together
And whether or not the weather is hot I promise His love will never ever stop

It’s overflowing it’s ongoing and your love for Him will always be growing
Never slowing it’s pure like it’s snowing
God is awesome and he’s all-knowing

He knows your thoughts knows your deeds
Humble yourself before Him please
Pray to Him get on your knees
Tell God He’s all you want and need

So heads up LifeChurch everybody look up
Ladies need to step up fellas gotta man up
Read Ephesians 5 Colossians 3 Proverbs 31
Work hard to hear God’s voice men well done son

And earn your praise at His heavenly gate you godly daughters
So His presence will flow down like fresh water
His approval is all we want that’s for sure
Galatians 1:10 people haven’t you heard

How amazing it is to be a Christ follower
This joy in your heart when you livin for the church
With LC’s mission we see the great commission
As a calling to tell the world what it’s missin

So at lifechurch we preach with every word we speak
People might say we’re weird we’re Jesus Freaks
I’m livin on the run man I’ll never unpack
When you go silent Lord I say I want you back

Jesus Freaks

This is a remake I wrote of Childish Gambino’s “Freaks and Geeks.” It’s one of my favorite beats I’ve ever heard, but the lyrics were way too misogynistic and harsh and it ruined the song for me. Here are my new lyrics - Godified! (modified for God)

Alright now Jesus is the mastermind
Turned that water into wine
Mass appeal He came to heal
Died for all sins rid me of mine

This beat is for my Lord
But beware this rap is potent
Weird like Edgar Allen Poe
Now that’s poetry in motion

Yeah so Jesus make so right so I turn to Him at all times
Yeah He’s so divine so to Him goes all of my rhymes
I got a fear of the King of what I am without Him
It’s the same thing as a body that don’t hit the gym

It’s a soul that’s weak and it’s a heart that’s full of nothing
But the Lord will fill you up and that’s the truth man I ain’t bluffin
Because I know I always fall so short of His glory
But wow by His grace He still loves and adores me dang

I used to think I wouldn’t be good enough for God to love me
And later realized hey I never ever will be
So I accepted His grace received His love
Started livin for His kingdom above

He changed my heart renewed my mind
I kicked selfishness and wished it goodbye
Now I’m living for the One who died for me
Because He calls me His son on His family tree

We shout to all creation Jesus is Lord
He’s your savior so come serve Him with us man all aboard
 

(1:11)This ship this relationship I guess I should call it
This intimate thing God offers to all His people
So people please pull yourselves together
And whether or not the weather is hot I promise His love will never ever stop

It’s overflowing it’s ongoing
and your love for Him will always be growing
Never slowing His love we’re showing
God is awesome and He’s all knowing

He knows your thoughts knows your deeds
So humble yourself before Him please
Pray to Him get on your knees
Tell God He’s all you want and need yeah (1:35)

 Surrounded by Godly people in my life so
Just like my love for Christ my love for others tends to grow
I prayed for strength in a best friend you know
And I found her she’s a theta so it’s black and yellow black and yellow

All the time cuz she’s constantly on my mind
We doin life together leadin each other to be more like Christ
I love it through me God is loving on her
Our lives you see are one big romantic blur

And we love the Father more than each other
His love is in our pot and we get to have the joy of
Stirring it up cuz He’s overflowing our cups
Every day and we pray before we play yeah that’s what’s up

Humility, strength, faith and confidence
Things I need to grow in seems like common sense
I’m being refined by the brothers in my life
As iron on iron being sharpened like a knife

Godly gentlemen accountability is what you need
Get some boys around you who ain’t afraid to bleed
Let the scriptures start  flowing cuz we all want growing
For the Lord yeah come on get that kingdom sweat going (2:45)

 Heads up heads up everybody look up
Ladies need to step up fellas gotta man up
Read Ephesians 5 Colossians 3 Proverbs 31
Work hard men to hear God’s voice well done son

And earn your praise at His heavenly gate you godly daughters
So His presence will flow down like fresh water
His approval is all we want that’s for sure
Galatians 1:10 man haven’t you heard

To be His follower at times can be tough
I’m telling you people God’s in it to win it cuz living in heaven just isn’t enough
He won’t relent so we hit the streets
Go make disciples Jesus Freaks

Rock Out

This is an adaptation of Anis Mojgani’s “Rock Out.” I have stolen his concept of encouraging people to live life to the fullest and I’ve put a Christian twist on it. If you like the original better, it’s cool, I do too :)

You have been given a direct order to rock out.
Rock out like you were just given the last rock and roll album on earth and the minutes are counting down to seconds.
Rock out like you just won both showcase showdowns.
Rock out like the streets are empty except for you, your running shoes and your headphones.
Rock out like you never have to open a textbook again.
Rock out like you get paid to disturb the peace.
Rock out like you’re standing on a rooftop and it’s snowing and the city’s as loud and glowing as the river flowing below you.
Rock out like the streets and the books are all on fire and the only way it can be extinguished is by doin’ the electric slide.
Rock out like it’s Saturday afternoon and Monday is a national holiday.
Rock out like somebody’s got a barrel pointed at your temple saying “Rock out like your life depended on it, fool,” because it does.
Rock out like Jesus just came back, carrying a journal full of original writings and he wants to have a one-on-one bible study session with his one and only… you.

Rock out like your eyes are fading but you still got your ears.
But you don’t know for how long so rock out like 5 o’clock time is pop-n-lock time.
Rock out like you are the international Ping-Pong champion of the entire universe.
Rock out like you’re worshipping your savior and you are spinning your limbs until they burst into a burning pyre of remembrance.
Rock out like you got an empty appointment book and a full tank of gas.
Rock out like you got pockets full of cash and nothing to do but everything.

And you got nothing to buy so you get to give it all away.
Rock out like we live in a world just like that and somebody gives you the keys to a Mercedes… black.
Rock out like your dead grandfather just came back to take a drive with you in your brand new car.
Rock out like the table is full… like the neighbors are away.
Like the walls won’t fall but, dang, you’re going to die trying to make them.
Rock out like the stereo’s volume knob is the figure 8 of infinity instead of merely numbers.
Rock out like it’s raining outside and you’ve got a pretty girl to run through it with.
Rock out like you’re playing football in the mud and your washing machine ain’t broken.
Rock out like Hillsong just walked into you’re living room with all their equipment needed for a surprise jam session.
Rock out like music is all that you got.

Rock out like a life full of love is all you want and love is staring you right in the face saying let’s frickin go.
Rock out like God is all you need, because He is.
Rock out like you just found out that Jesus Christ died for you and your sins.
Rock out like you were there during that sacrificial bloodbath and you’ve been mourning for three long days and you hear that the tomb couldn’t hold your beloved friend and now Savior… Then you see his face.
Rock out like you get to leave this place and live for Him, but yesterday is not a promise.
So Rock out like this was the last weekend, like these were the last words, like you don’t ever want to forget how… So Rock out right now.

What Leads Me To Worship

What leads me to worship is not my heart’s size but it’s my heart’s cries

My need for his presence is what leads me to worship is not that I have energy right now but it’s that Jesus shed his blood from his brow to the ground and I don’t have to sacrifice a cow to know I am forgiven and I am loved even when I feel like I let my father down.

My worship is not a call for God’s blessings, that’s not my goal

My worship lays down all I can bring, because He’s the lover of my soul

It’s a personal thing between me and my King

It’s us being together, me burying myself in His wings

As He lifts me up to catch a glimpse of His glory

This is a time to be alone with father

This time can be so rare

But right now lift your arms up to God without any care

No caring about how you look, feel, think, what you’re saying or wearing

Separate yourself from this world for a few moments,

Treasure this time with the main component of your faith

Focus on who God is when you give Him praise

Receive His holiness, His love, His sweet embrace

Lift up your hands to the great I AM, the one who gave his life so that we may kneel before the lamb and stand before any man

This is our time, our time with the sovereign king

The God of this world, the Lord of everything

Our loving Dad who sent himself for our saving

Grace, His sweet grace this is what leads me to praise

Praise our father who art in heaven, hallowed be His name

CCS vs. SCA Football

Last night, I had the incredible opportunity to give a quick 10 minute devotional at a dinner with two football teams. One of my most intense passions is for high school guys, mostly in the sense of discipleship and leading them in their manly walk with Christ. So I consider it a real honor to be able to talk to some young men who are willing to hear from someone who is only a few years removed from their shoes. Here’s what I said:

“Hey everyone, my name is Riley and I’m one of the student ministers here at journey. We’re really thankful that you guys came here and first of all I think it is really cool that both teams are sitting here eating together. Y’all are proving right night now tonight that football really is just a game, and that even though tomorrow night we’ll be playing this game against each other, we are first of all friends and more importantly, brothers in Christ.

So on that note, I’m really excited to share something with you guys. I’m 22, I’m a senior at OU, so it wasn’t too long ago that I was yalls age, and looking at tonight I want to talk to you about the main topic that I wish someone would have told me more about when I was your age, and that’s the topic of manhood, of what being a Man of God is all about.

Manliness – real, God-made, down in the trenches, won’t ever back down masculinity – is something men in our culture are scrambling to understand. We’re confused. It leads to us being irritable and sometimes just downright frustrated. But determined. Determined to discover our manhood and to go live it out.

Well in my opinion, true manhood cannot be discovered and attained outside of the ultimate man – Jesus. By my standards, which have come to me as a result of my faith in Jesus, the only way to become is real man in this world is through a personal relationship with God.

So let me tell you guys about God real quick. God does four things. He puts us on his team, he equips us, he trains us, and he calls us to battle. He has called us up to be a part of his holy team, and we accepted that invitation when we accepted Jesus as our savior and decided to follow Him. He equips us, with His holy word, with people around us who are teaching us, and with his strength, his provision, his courage, and his joy; all the things that carry us through all the things in our lives that try to weigh us down.

He then trains us with these resources, strengthening us, growing us as we submit to him. This is a correlative thing, the more we submit to God and seek and follow His will for our lives, the closer we move to Him and become ready for the battle because of our spiritual training and because of how much more we know him, for he is all that is true manhood.

Lastly, he calls us to battle. Your battle can be anything, but I think you know what I’m talking about here. Saying no to drinking or drugs. Staying sexually pure with your girlfriend or girls in general. Mustering up the courage to talk to your friends about your faith.

Let me ask you guys a quick question. If tomorrow night, just after warm-ups as kickoff is upon you guys, would you have the guts to look at your coach in the eyes and say, “hey I don’t think I’m gonna play tonight. Not this game, this battle, I’m just going to sit on the sidelines and watch this one.”

That would be ridiculous right? Then why do we say that to God when he calls us into the game? We do it so much more often than we realize. I think it’s a fear of failing. Apathy, laziness, disobedience, all the things that hold us back from God’s battle He’s calling us to, it comes down to a huge fear of failure. And that fear paralyzes us men.

Guys if we are to grow in the father and be ready for combat, we have to let go of this fear, because guess what, we will fail. Because of our sinful nature, because of the fact that our sin separates us from God, we are imperfect. So why are we trying so hard to be perfect that we are terrified of messing up?

I have to be honest with myself and say that I WILL FAIL. But when I fail, God is proud of me for playing, for doing what He told me to do, and that goes beyond winning and losing on some sort of society scoreboard. He will only be proud of me and tell me, “well done” if I put on that uniform with full confidence in the abilities he’s given me, in my training, and in my leader, and go fight until I have nothing left, until I have nothing left of myself to give, until He calls me off.

Here’s a quote from Michael Jordan about failing:

“I’ve missed over 9000 shots in my career, lost over 300 games, 29 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I have failed over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed. I can accept failure, everyone fails at some point. But what I cannot accept is not trying. So let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.”

Football teaches us so many things about life. About hard work, about perseverance, about how far we ca push our bodies and minds. But lets not let it end there guys. Let’s not limit our battle to the gridiron. Extend your battlefield, to your schools, your homes, and anywhere that you have a divine opportunity to talk to someone about your faith.

Be strong and walk in the confidence of the Lord. God is so excited to do ridiculously phenomenal things through his real men, his warriors. So let’s seek him together daily, and figure out this thing he made called a man.”

I then recited my Manhood poem, then prayed it out. It was a great night, and I’m wishing those young men a great football season and praying for their manhood, in Christ.

Let’s Go!

This is a rap I wrote and performed at Student Journey Summer Camp this summer during our Late Show to kind of pump up the red team (another leader did a rap for the blue team.) It’s to the beat of the instrumental version of the rap song “Let’s Go.” I had a lot of fun doing it, and the crowd loved it (I think!)

“My identity is what you see I’m all about that red team
When you reveal those grassy fields it’s gonna be so extreme
And we’re pretty straight forward that we’re always going hard for our God, He’s in charge cuz He is so large
And it’s Him we’re goin towards cuz in Him we’re restored, so red team all aboard let’s go wild for the Lord

So I stand up and I flow
For the blue team to know
When the red team shows
That’s when the hurricane blows

So I’m red reppin like 24/7
Let’s start the games man isn’t it 11:00?
Blue’s gotta know red’s in it to win it
Beat us on the field we’ll still beat you in spirit

So it doesn’t matter if it’s a hundred degrees
Red’s going on a crazy spree
Comin up from the ground diving out of trees
Runnin and screamin like banshees

We know we’re taking trophy
I’m talking to us I’m talking to we
Let’s show the blue team how we be
Let’s go crazy on one two three!”

P&W

Two things have been pretty heavy on my mind lately… Prayer and Worship. On the topic of worship, I have so many thoughts. It’s too broad of a theme to encapsulate ALL my thoughts into one post, but the lyrics from the Kutless song All of the Words that I posted sort of sums up how I’ve been feeling. Sometimes, our simple words of prayer to God just don’t give Him the proper praise He deserves. And really we can never put into words how awesome He is and how thankful we are for the ONE who loves our soul. So worship is my only answer, my only response to His greatness.

Sometimes I worship to get filled up by God. To pour myself out before Him so He can fill me back up with His holy presence, which lasts longer than anything this world (and by that I mean Satan) wants to fill me with. Other times I find myself already filled, wishing for the Lord to reveal Himself to me in a different way, in an exposing way. I want to sincerely focus on this vision of an awesome, transcendent and holy God who is both glorified and please by my worship.

I’ve been thinking about how at times my soul leaves a time of worship with a happy sense of personal blessing from God. But this should not be the reason I worship, should it? No, it shouldn’t. God desires our worship of Him above all other things. Thus, if we want to be living our lives in a way that is pleasing to Him, we must make worship a serious priority, our fundamental priority in fact, of our relationship with the Father.

For when we meet and worship together, Christ is in our midst. He seeks out those who worship in sincere spirit and truth. But this great feeling we get when we worship, this feeling of knowing God is with us and He is proud of us, should simply be side-effect, not a primary goal, of our worship.

Lately when I’ve been worshiping, I cannot get over how at times I feel like I’m not doing enough, not communicating well enough, like at times I’m “not worshiping right.” When you simplify things, God wants us to honor Him, to simply recognize His glory and grace. This thought brought me to the post about Different and Better, discussing how at times I feel frustrated when not REALLY being able to communicate effectively with my Savior. Those are the times when God tells me He IS with me always, and He is marveling at me from close up as I worship Him.

I’ll leave this long post with John 4:23, then some good stuff from the chapter Discipline of Worship from the book Disciplines of a Godly Man by R. Kent Hughes

“Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father is spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.” -John 4:23 (NIV)

Worshiping “in truth” means that we come informed by the objective revelation of God’s Word about the great God we serve and the precepts He has spoken. In this sense our worship is governed by what we know and believe of God.

            This knowledge of God through his Word ought to heighten our expectation and instill healthy fear and reverence.

            Men, we need to fill ourselves with God’s truth so our worship will be electrified with proper reality!

            Worshipers would do well to remember that when the Lord gave the Church this great prayer, He first warned against mindless “babbling.”

            There is no getting around it: worship requires discipline. We must discipline ourselves to know God’s truth so we can worship Him in truth.

Different and Better

Why do I do this or that? Why are words the only thing I ever feel that I have? Isn’t there something more God has planned for me than silly words in which humans communicate? I want to communicate with the Father. In the same way that I don’t speak English to dogs or birds, I don’t want to speak in my stupid language to God either. I want to communicate with Him on a level that is different than my connection with others and, yeah I’ll say it, better. Different and better, that’s what God has planned for me in terms of my relationship with Him. My surrender of what I think I know will open up doors of knowledge flow that I never thought existed.

Yeah, it will be different, uncomfortable even. But God’s world being revealed to me little by little will be so much more enlightening than the world that was revealed to me when it took my innocence. My innocent heart, my innocent eyes, ears and hands. Public school, television and my friends robbed me of this innocence at a very young age. But God is inviting me to get it back, by opening up His glorious world to me. He is our Robin Hood, stealing back from the devil our innocence, our purity, our all around joy, and letting us see it through a glass door. Are we willing to go all in, really dive into God’s store? Because the only cost of these things is our life, all of it. I hope you’re not just window shopping, because I went in a long time ago, and I want you in here with me. I assure you it IS different. And I promise you, it IS better.