Category: Worship

How Great is Our God?

How great is our God, sing with me
How great is our God, and all will see
How great, how great is our God 

from “How Great is Our God” by Chris Tomlin

As I listened to a grade-school aged girl with special needs sing those words tonight, I realized that they are perfectly true.

God is great.  His greatness is not seen in our greatness, or goodness, or adequacy.  His greatness is seen in that he loves us and makes us part of his family even though we are not great, or even particularly good, or adequate for much of what would seem to be the stuff of being in God’s family.  This is true of even the most impressive and important of human specimens.  Which means God’s expansive love is also the best possible hope for those of us who are clearly not the archetype; and, the farther away from the “perfect person” that God is still willing to reach to invite people into his family, then the more amazing is his grace.

So, as I was listening to this girl who is just a little bit off in the eyes of the world, I realized that her singing, and my singing, and our singing together (and understand that this gathering of disabled persons got a little bit chaotic, perhaps especially in our praise) in fact shows the world how great our God is: he’s so great, he accepts us.

And may the world look at me, and at my sons, and at countless others who aren’t easy to see, and may they see that God loves us, and that we love him, because he has shown us who he is, and promised never to leave us or forsake us, and we are living lives of endurance and victory even in our brokenness.  Because our God is great.

And if your God doesn’t quite have enough extra energy for the physically, mentally and emotionally broken, how great is he, anyway?  And how can you be sure that he’ll still be willing to be “your God” if everything falls apart?

The reality is that the greatness of God, in the human realm, is most evident and undeniable when the least of these are part of the party – whether they are the homeless, the poor, the smelly, the noisy, the unable to control their bladders and bowels, the crazy, or any other unpleasant label you might be able to slap on them.  And if your worship party, your congregational life, doesn’t have enough room for the lowest and the losers, how do you know your invitation to the party is permanent?

Revival

I’m heading home after two days of participating in “A Conversation on Revival”. The event was intended to bring together a variety of church leaders to think about what revival is and what it has to do with the present church in America.
You might have started wondering as soon as you saw the word Revival. People (even the people at this event) define the word in very different ways. Revival as “special annual service” or ” summer nights in a tent with a sawdust floor” doesn’t grab me very much. However, revival as a season when the Lord gives his people a special awareness of the presence and power of Christ (which J.I. Packer called awakening the “slack and sleepy” church) is far more exciting to me, and this was largely the focus of the event.
What causes such a season to occur? How can we prepare for it? What can we expect to come from such a season? These were some of the questions on our minds.
There are two things that particularly stand out in my mind. First, a season of revival is a time when the supremacy of Jesus Christ becomes the focus of the people. Many of us would like to believe that Christ is at the heart of our life and ministry already, but the reality is it just isn’t so. The church is so often self-centered,  and is deluding itself into thinking it is Christ-centered. In revival, the church becomes Christ- consumed.
Second, we must pray more. If we actually want any of what we say we want as the church, we must seek the Lord much more intensely. And, the truth is that when we do we will see that what we wanted even then in our intensity of prayer was far less than what Christ is delighted to bring.

Worship Wars Wisdom

I’m almost through reading Transformational Church by Ed Stetzer.  Specifically, read the chapter on worship this afternoon, and even as it affirmed some of the directions I have been thinking about, it challenged others, including some of my long-standing thoughts about blending worship with elements from a variety of eras and traditions.  I’ll say more about it in the next couple days, but for now, this was one of the points Stetzer and Thom Rainer made that I was already on board with: reverence is a more important measurement than relevance when evaluating your worship service.  Of course, part of the reason for this is that God is relevant, and does not need us to make him seem so.  When we are focused on making worship relevant, we are often overlooking that reality; if we were approaching  mindful that the transcendent and imminent God is already completely present and engaged with this moment, we would be in awe of him, and our worship would therefore be more reverent.