Recently, thanks to a friend of mine, I discovered the music of Phil Wickham. I don't know much about him personally, but I do know that his music is amazing. It's worship, and when you listen to it, you can hear the heart of God. You can feel how beautiful Jesus is.

He has a full CD of live worship music available for download from his website: http://philwickham.com/singalong. The only "catch" is that you have to sign up for his email newsletter—not a bad deal. I would highly recommend downloading the album. The first and last songs alone, "Beautiful" and "True Love" are worth it, not to mention everything in between.

The files are in m4a format. If, like mine, your mp3 player won't support m4a, there are lots of free programs available to download that will convert them to mp3.

Listen, enjoy, and be blessed.

People who don’t know God worship idols. There is no middle ground of non-worship, where I give my allegiance to nobody and nothing. As human beings we are made to worship, and we will worship substitutes if not the true God.

Idols can be many: in the Western world, not usually literal idols, but more often jobs, homes, money, cars, family, relationships, study, good health, beauty, fame, etc: the “good life”. We devote our time, money, energy and attention to procuring and maintaining these things, while God falls by the wayside and receives little or no attention. These “idols” are what we look to for life, security, and happiness, and we truly believe our existence is tied up in them. We manipulate them, others, and circumstances endlessly to ensure they will provide us what we seek.

Recently I've been amazed by the book of Hosea. It describes a principle of God's dealings that I've known to be true in my own life but never seen in the Bible so clearly.

Hosea was a prophet called to speak to God's rebellious people, Israel. Though God had brought them out of Egypt, established them in their land, and won victory after victory on their behalf, Israel constantly forsook him to worship other gods.