Category: Theology

Worship from the place of brokenness

At its heart, worship is a response – one in which we respond with everything we are to everything God is and has done. The logical challenge with that understanding of worship is that at our core, we are sinful and broken beings, so it would seem that all we have to offer God is tainted by the ugliness of sin. Yet scripture is clear that God loves it when we praise Him from the place of our brokenness.

In Isaiah God says,

I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.
Isaiah 57:15

David is probably the favorite example of an undone, broken worshiper. In Psalm 51 he laments his sin and cries out to God for repentance after his murderous affair with Bathsheba has been exposed. In this heartfelt psalm David reveals several things that I find comforting and helpful as we seek to worship God out of our brokenness.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
Psalm 51:17

David recognizes that what God desires more than wont obedience is a genuinely honest heart. In verse 6 he confesses that God desires “truth in the inner parts” which naturally leads to him to ask God to cleanse him, wash him, and give him a pure heart. When we are truly honest with ourselves and God we can’t help but realize the stark contrast between our humanity and His divine holiness – and become undone. But then, David says something which blows me away in its insightfulness.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.
Psalm 51:12

“Restore to me the joy of your salvation” – this is perhaps one of the most profound requests we could make to God! If you really think about it, why do we sin? We sin when we choose ourselves over God, essentially bowing to the prideful idol of self. I share Paul’s frustration in Romans 7 over the very fact that we would ever continue to sin once we have truly experienced the power of God’s love and Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice, yet it is when we have lost the joy of our salvation – the joy of realizing that we don’t have to experience God’s wrath for our sin, the joy of being freed from the guilt of condemnation, the joy of fullness of life in Jesus – that we choose the idol of self. When we begin to drift from the childlike wonder and humble, awestruck joy of our salvation and begin to take advantage of or take for granted God’s grace – it’s then that we sin. That’s why I love this prayer of the man after God’s heart. He is in the midst of utter shame, yet he knows exactly what he needs in order to get back on track. He asks for God to restore an awareness of how he felt when he first experienced God’s radical forgiveness. Once we find ourselves in that place of awareness, it’s then that we will want to live in obedience through the Spirit.

Getting to that point requires us to begin in the place of utter honesty with God, and in our worship this is exactly the place where God wants us.

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Consider the cost

A friend sent this article to me this morning and I found it to be pretty interesting.  On the one hand I REALLY feel for this church, partly because I’ve had my own share of dealing with an unpleasant neighbor at home whose tone and demeanor strikes me as eerily similar to the neighbors quoted in this article.  Add that to the fact that the church has probably had to deal with their own share of internal complaining about style, volume, etc. and I can only imagine how tiring and frustrating this must be for the church staff.

On the other hand, it raises an interesting question – when it comes to being missional, at what point do our practices begin to undermine our principles?  I don’t know anything about this church other than what I read from the article, but it seems that they are passionate about reaching people and are effectively doing so in creative and relevant ways.  Yet when you begin thinking missionally in order to reach people, there will almost certainly be a cost – in this case, it comes in the form of a lack of respect from (and potential to reach) a handful of neighbors (and of course now that the local media is running the story there will be a whole new set of polarized opinions about this church…some positive, others negative).  And as frustrating as it may be, this church needs to be (as I’m sure they already are) weighing the cost of whatever methods they choose to use in order to spread the Gospel.

Now with that said, while I don’t think He would have gotten into an argument with anyone over 1st Amendment Rights, Jesus didn’t really seem to worry about losing anyone’s respect.  He actually pretty consistently offended people by His teaching and actions.  Yet his goal was never to offend, but rather to convict, to teach and to show.  So I guess maybe that needs to be the metric or the filter through which we run our methods and practices in order to determine whether they are still serving our principles – does whatever it is that we are doing still effectively display Gospel priorities by imitating Christ?  If the answer is yes, then by all means we must soldier on, understanding that we will get opposition that we will simply have to patiently and lovingly manage.  If the answer is at all a no, then it’s time to rethink our practices.

Here’s the article: Seattle Times – Loud music at sheriff’s church rocks neighbors

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The presence of God in worship

This great post by Joel Brown, one of the worship pastors at Mars Hill Church (who I actually got to hear with his band Kenosis on Sunday night), has been shaping a lot of how I think about worship for the past couple months.

I think so often as worship leaders we feel like our job is to take people into this elusive place – “God’s presence”, as if was somehow hidden from us and we have the magical secret to how to get there.  Apparently it seems that this secret usually involves melodies, beats, and emotion.  And music does serve the church well when it does what music does best – drawing people together in shared creative expression, revealing truth about God and testifying to His glory, providing a vehicle by which we can declare our love and adoration to God, and moving the soul in ways that words simply cannot.  However, it ultimately falls short if we expect it to somehow serve as our means of entering into the presence of God.  As much as I love music and as great a tool as it is, it can NEVER take me/us/anyone into the awe-inspiring, life-transforming, culture-shaping presence of God.  Only Jesus can do and does that through the work of the Holy Spirit.  He alone is our mediator.

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