Lord I’m Amazed!

Every Wed night we have a praise night out on the beach at Coney Island with all of the groups that are here. So we have a time of worship, some testimonies, a time of teaching, and then some small group time

As we were closing the night I was talking to the group about prayer. The verse I read to them, the theme verse for my CSM experience, was Ephesians 3:20, which I’ve talked about before. It reads,
"Now all glory to God! By his mighty power at work within us, he is able to accomplish infinitely more than we would ever dare to ask of hope." I also shared this story:

On Monday as we were going on our prayer tour it looked like it was going to rain. So our group prayed for it to stop. And it did. The next day it was getting kind of hot, so one of my kids, Matt, was like, "I wish it would rain" I did. So we blamed him for the rain and since they were supposed to do the immersion that night I told them that we needed sun. He prayed for sun and the rains stopped.
So then the leader, also named Matt, jokes with student Matt saying, "You pray for rain and God answers. You pray for sun and, again, God answers. Why aren't you praying for bigger things?" To this, student Matt responds, "I am."
When I heard this, I was floored. We could either choose to simply discard this as strange New York weather, or we could believe that maybe God really did answer our prayers. So many times we limit what God can do. Or maybe for one reason or another, we're simply afraid of asking him to move. God is huge, but I don't think we are going to really understand how big he is unless we invite him to show us.

With that I challenged the groups to be praying for big things. And that if we give God the opportunity to work, he's going to show us how powerful he actually is. We closed with the song, From the Inside Out (which we've done every single week so far because the other interns always request it and supposedly one of the groups did today as well). That was a truly amazing time of worship. We were all in one giant circle in the middle of the boardwalk with people singing their hearts out, eyes closed, hand lifted up, focused on God. It was so free.

-Josh, CSM New York City Host Summer 2008