This week's "thought" comes to you from the book "Simply Christian - Why Christianity Makes Sense" by N. T. Wright. He is presently Bishop of Durham, England (Church of England) and taught at McGill, Cambridge, and Oxford universities. His book attempts to show the reasonableness of the Christian faith and does an admirable job. For those who are honest skeptics (who are earnestly seeking to understand) and not just bandwagon skeptics (who somehow think being skeptical makes them seem more intellectual), it's worth a read. This selection seeks to answer the "why?" of the Bible's call to worship God. I found it helpful, I pray you might as well. Enjoy.
"When we begin to glimpse the reality of God, the natural reaction is to worship him. Not to have that reaction is a fairly sure sign that we haven't yet really understood who he is or what he has done. So what is worship? The best way to discover is to... start in the fourth and fifth chapters of the last book of the Bible, the Revelation of St. John... [There we find] representatives of the animal kingdom and the world of humanity (the whole creation) worshipping God for all he's worth...
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come...
You are worthy, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power; for you created all things and by
your will, they existed and were created...
You are worthy to take the scroll
and open it's seal, for you were slaughtered, and by your
blood, you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and people and nation.
You have made them to be a kingdom
and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on earth...
Worthy is the Lamb that was
slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and
glory and blessing!
To the one seated on the
throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might, forever
and ever. Amen!
(Revelation 4:8, 11, 5:9-10, 12 and 13)
This
is what worship is all about. It is the glad shout of praise that arises
to God the Creator and God the Rescuer from the creation that
recognizes its Maker, the creation that acknowledges the triumph of Jesus
the Lamb. That is the worship that is going on in heaven, in God's dimension,
all the time. The question we ought to be asking is how best we might join in.
Because that is what we are supposed to do.
And
let's get one thing clear before we go any further. There is always a suspicion
that creeps into discussions of this kind, a niggling worry that the call to
worship God is rather like the order that goes out from a dictator whose
subjects may not like him but have learned to fear him. He wants a hundred
thousand people to line the route for his birthday parade? Very well, he shall
have them. And they will all be cheering and waving as if their lives depended
on it -- because, in fact, they do. Turn away in boredom, or don't turn up at
all, and it will be the worse for you. If it has crossed your mind
that worshipping the true God is like that, let me offer you a very different
model.
I
have been to many concerts of music ranging from major symphonic works to
big-band jazz. I have heard world-class orchestras under world-famous
conductors. I have been in the audience for some great performances that
have moved me and fed me and satisfied me richly. But only two or
three times in my life have I been in an audience which, the moment the
conductor's baton came down for the last time, leaped to its feet in
electrified excitement, unable to contain its enthusiastic delight and wonder
at what it had just experienced. (American readers might like to know that
English audiences are very sparing with standing ovations.)
That
sort of response is pretty close to genuine worship. Something like that,
but more so, is the mood of Revelation 4 and 5. That is what, when we come
to worship the living God, we are being invited to join in. What happens
when you're at a concert like that is that everyone feels that they have grown
in stature. Something has happened to them. They are aware of things in a new
way. The whole world looks different. It's a bit like falling in love. In
fact, it IS a kind of falling in love. And when you fall in
love, when you're ready to throw yourself at the feet of your beloved, what you
desire, above all, is union.
This
brings us to the first of two golden rules oat the heart of spirituality.
#1.) You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and
wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character
of the object of your worship. Those who worship money eventually become human
calculating machines. Those who worship sex become obsessed with their own attractiveness
of prowess. Those who worship power become more and more ruthless.
So
what happens when you worship the creator God whose plan to rescue the world
and put it right has been accomplished by the Lamb that was slain? The
answer comes in the second golden rule: #2) Because you were made in God's
image, worship makes you more truly human. When you gaze in love and
gratitude at the God in whose image you were made, you do indeed grow. You
discover more of what it means to be fully alive. Conversely, when you give
that same total worship to anything or anyone else, you shrink as a human
being. It doesn't, of course, feel like that at the time. When you worship part
of the creation as though it were the Creator himself (in other words, when you
worship an idol) you may feel a brief "high." But like a
hallucinatory drug, that worship achieves its effect at a cost. When the
effect is over, you are less of a human being than you were to begin with. That
is the price of idolatry.
The
opportunity, the invitation, the summons is there before us: Come and worship
the true God, the Creator, the Redeemer, and to become more truly human in
doing so. Worship is at the very center of all Christian living. One of the
main reasons that theology (that is, trying to think straight about who God is)
matters is that we are called to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and
strength. It matters that we learn more about who God is so that we can praise
him more appropriately. Perhaps one of the reasons why so much worship, in some
churches at least, appears unattractive to so many people, is that we have
forgotten, or covered up, the truth about the one we are worshipping.
Yet
whenever we glimpse the truth, we are drawn back. Like groupies sneaking off
from work to see a rock star who's in town for just an hour or so, like fans
waiting all night for a glimpse of a football team returning in triumph (only
much more so!) those who come to recognize the God we see in Jesus, the Lion,
and the Lamb, will long to come and worship him."
Wonder
is at the heart of all true worship. And wonder is what arises in the heart
when God's Spirit begins to reveal to us that He really does exist and what He
is really like. It happens when we come to see and experience (in greater and
more undeniable ways) God's holiness, power, love, grace, and life-altering
presence. We come to taste and see that He is good. We become gradually
more and more aware of the reality of an invisible Being pursuing, revealing
and breaking in upon our lives in tangible and sometimes overwhelming ways. A
Being whom we can't help but sense is seeking to enter, possess, indwell,
disarm, make Himself known to us, and make us His own. A God who we
discover (much to our surprise) has a plan for our lives, and is working
out that plan -- at times with our approval, and at other times without our
approval. At times clearing obstacles out of our way, and at times
placing them immovably in our path to redirect the trajectory of our lives.
Those
who have experienced this (myself being just one) testify it was at times
overwhelming, and made them feel as if God had taken control of the wheel and
was steering them to a destination that fit into a plan ordained for them prior
to their existence, but worked out in their present when the time was just
right.
Of
course, as those who are (for the most part) comfortable with and captive to
the temporal, running into the reality of Him who is eternal can be a hair-raising and even fear-spawning experience. We see this in the lives of the
prophets and apostles, Isaiah 6 and Revelation 1 being just two of many
examples. Discovering God is actually real, and not just a nice idea, can
be both a frightening and life-altering experience. Yet, when the initial
fear subsides, and we discover He is not out to harm us, but save us; that He
is for us, and not against us -- then what seemed so frightening becomes
mesmerizingly beautiful, and it's His beauty that drives us to want to worship
Him.
That
is my prayer. That like the beings in Revelation 4-5 we would find ourselves so
overcome by the beauty and majesty and worth of God, and the wonder that is
Jesus, that we would ceaselessly yearn to praise, adore and worship Him -- and
in doing so, as Wright points out, become more like Him, and at the same time
more truly and fully human.
In
the Bonds of Christian Affection, Pastor Jeff
