Our devotion this week comes from the YouVersion Bible App. It was written and provided by Elevation Church. We’ll spend some time this week in a few songs written by Elevation, and looking at the Scripture background of these songs.
Hallelujah Here Below
Take a moment and look up Hallelujah Here Below by Elevation Worship on iTunes, Spotify, or YouTube. Listen the whole way through, and then continue reading below.
“We are an altar of broken stones, but You delight in the offering. You have the heavens to call Your home, but You abide in the song we sing.”
There’s something funny about having guests over. Most of us clean our houses from top to bottom until it looks like a model home: perfect and unused.
And while that might be fine to do for parties, sometimes we try to do the same thing with our worship.
We try to get everything in order before we have God over. We spend our time dusting off our shelves and hiding what we don’t want Him to see. We think that once our place is perfect, then it’s time to worship Him and invite Him in.
We feel that if we get the promotion, fix up our finances, get our kids to do what we say, and repair our relationships, then we’ll finally be able to get into a good place with God.
Our lives are messy — and it’s easy to feel like God can’t do anything with a mess. But in Exodus 20:25, God tells His people that,
If you make an altar of stones for me, do not build it with dressed stones, for you will defile it if you use a tool on it. Exodus 20:25
“Dressed stones” meant stones that were cut and shined — stones that were nearly perfect.
God actually asked for imperfection. He could have told His people to worship Him with an altar of perfect, solid gold bricks. Instead, He asked for undressed stones.
Even if our altar is made of imperfect stones, God still delights in our offering. Struggling, hurting, broken — it’s what He asked for.
He is knocking at the door of your home. Let Him in, mess and all.
