How can we respond to God with anything but praise and total worship.
It's interesting to me to watch people in a worship service. Sometimes I look around and wonder, "How is everyone standing so still right now?" In my heart, I want to jump and dance and move wildly about the room, but fear of how that would be received restrains me. I wish it didn't.
But I do wonder, how is it possible to sing these things about the awesome power of the living God, about His amazing love and grace, about the way He's SAVED us, and not be moved Him? Do we not hear the things we're saying? Where is the passion in our praise? Or have we not yet learned what it means to truly worship? Worship, as I understand it, is a state of being. We live worship, not sing it. Music is an expression. To worship means that we recognize the object of our worship as being so high above us and us as being completely and totally dependent. To worship God is to humble ourselves, to submit to Him, to recognize Him as being so high above us. There should be some sort of fiery passion on the inside. We should not be able to stand or sit, half-engaged, mumbling words from a screen. Even raising our hands and singing more loudly, is not an adequate response in my opinion. We're talking about a God who is perfect and holy and owes us NOTHING who decided to give us EVERYTHING while we were in the process of disobeying and hating Him (Romans 5:8). How can we respond with anything but an overflow of love and gratefulness? How can cries of thankfulness not spring forth with every action, every song, and every word? I think we don't understand.
I was in church Sunday and watched the people around me. I remarked to myself how dry it seemed. Some would say it's a cultural thing. But honestly, I don't really think that has a lot to do with it because there are some things that supersede culture. Like when someone you love tragically dies, we all cry the same. When our favorite team wins the championship, we all cheer the same. There are some things that are just human. I believe that if we truly understood what God has done for us, it wouldn't matter what culture or background we were from, passion and gratefulness would erupt from our hearts in a way that we can't control and wouldn't really want to.
Sometimes I believe I'm called to minister to the body of Christ. That seems to be where my passion lies- in mobilizing and encouraging the church to live as the Church. I see the ways we fall short and it really grates on me. I believe that God is GOD. That He is all powerful and that there is absolutely NOTHING to difficult for Him. That being said, I have to ask myself why the American church looks so shabby, why we don't see a lot of miracles or even a lot of visible activity on the spiritual level. I believe we've gotten away from some fundamentals. It seems we've become so overun with wealth and material goods, that it becomes harder to see our need for God and easier to stop relying on Him which I think draws our attention away from Him and limits our effectiveness in the world as we stop immersing ourselves in the Father. Sometimes I feel like I want to just leave the American church and go and be a Christian somewhere else in the world where life is not so easy and where I'd really have to learn to depend on Him. Sometimes I feel like that's what I want- to put myself in a situation where I don't have the comforts and ease of home but instead have to rely on God for everything. I already do, it's just harder to see when it feels like everything is in front of me.
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On a completely different note, it's been an interesting few weeks, filled with freedom, bondage, pain, conflict, joy, sadness, and more. It's come after spending a couple of months feeling really depressed and losing a positive outlook on life. It was so bad after awhile that it seemed I never felt good. Even when I was happy, I wasn't really happy. I recognized it as a happy face with a lot of pain and other ugliness on the inside. But God is faithful and He showed me some perspective a few weeks back. It's really helped a lot as it seems since then I've been on this upward trend of gaining wisdom and undestanding, of feeling close to my Father again, etc.
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