Good Enough Worship

 

Hey, Cobblestone,

     You’re in the garage. It’s late. There’s only one light on, over the workbench. For the past two hours you’ve been tooling away at a stubborn chunk of steel, calling on the better angels of your benchtop lathe to whip this project into shape. Metal chips are on the floor; finer shavings cling to your shirt. The fact that the “project” is a silencer for your favorite handgun doesn’t bother you at all. Your name is John Clark.

     Apologies to you, Church – and to the estate of Tom Clancy – for plugging you unannounced into one of Clancy’s best-selling novels. I used to gobble up all his cloak-and-dagger and high-alert military stuff – couldn’t wait to see what adventures he would invent next for John Clark or Jack Ryan or some other robustly fictional character. I’m sure it wasn’t all good for my soul, but the culmination of the scene I began describing in the preceding paragraph has actually served me very well in many aspects of life – including my walk with Jesus. I’ll do my best to commend it to you. So, back to the garage, and I’ll put the story into the third-person where it belongs…

     Clark takes a cut on the outside diameter of the silencer, which brings the dimension onto spec. But he notices some unsightly tool marks on the workpiece – nothing to hurt its functionality, but clear evidence that a mere machine operator was at work here, not a craftsman. He could take another five thousandths off the OD, slowing down the feed rate to make the finish better; he could file and polish the piece by hand. He decides: Sometimes good enough really is good enough, and perfect is just a pain in the butt anyway. He unchucks the piece and puts it into service.

     You’ll ask: How, pray tell, would this benefit someone’s walk with Jesus? Fair question, given this is a letter from your pastor. The operative phrase isn’t “silencer for your favorite handgun,” but rather, “good enough really is good enough.” And if you’ll give me a minute or two, I’ll prove that the phrase can justly be applied to the worship of the LORD God Almighty.

     I admire dancers. I don’t have to imitate dancers, and you don’t want me to try. Dancers who worship the Lord through dance I admire even more. Don’t have to imitate them, either. Some folks say we should all “dance like nobody’s watching.” Problem: somebody’s always watching. Bigger problem: I’m no dancer. I admire musicians, especially those who worship the Lord with their musical talents. But so far, the only instrument I’ve learned to play is puckered lips: I whistle. Imagine having me in the row right behind you in worship service this Sunday. Some say I can sing, and a few have even paid me to – but never a cappella. You’ll want to have at least one musician involved. Maybe some dancers, too.

     Books have been written about the heart of worship. To be honest, I haven’t read any of them. But I think I could write one – not because I’m a great writer but because Scripture already gives a simple and surprising glimpse into why a redeemed heart is even able to worship its Redeemer:

    Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Romans 5:1-5).

     Hope does not put us to shame. God poured his love into our hearts; he knows what to expect back from our hearts. He is not ashamed of or disappointed with true worship in any form. Authenticity is the one and only qualification: his own love received back from the overflow of love poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. How good is good enough worship? Whatever the believer and the indwelling Holy Spirit collaborate to offer up to the Father and to his Son Jesus Christ.

     Be careful of the word “should,” especially as it appears in these two renderings: “I should worship like the best worshiper I’ve ever heard of,” and “I should offer worship that matches the majesty of God.” Yeah, good luck with either one of those. Worship-as-production is a losing game, says one who has played it. And worshiping to match the majesty of God is like trying to give a nice belly-rub to an F-18 Hornet thundering overhead at arm’s length. Either one of those mindsets will con us into not worshiping at all – and that, exactly, is the peculiar deception to be avoided.  

     God’s love poured into our hearts is what produces adoration of him. From adoration springs a song, a shout, a dance, a concert… or a single tear. “Should” is more than what we would come up with on our own. “Should” is more than we would allow, given the limitations of talent and propriety. “Should,” by its best rendering, is a quantity that can only be rightly set by the Lord himself, his Holy Spirit confirming or denying whether we’ve met it in worship.

     I’m eager to see what corporate worship of the Lord could be like when every believer breaks out of non-worship, when each believer engages in worship properly scaled. Do you think we could attain such a thing this side of heaven?! We wouldn’t all be doing the same things. Maybe that’s where we get stuck, and snookered into not worshiping – trying to get a couple hundred people doing all the same kind of worship at the same time. How sweet it would be to break free, and for the Holy Spirit to bear witness with us individually and collectively, “There you go… now you’re trackin’!” Meanwhile, and at all times, our Father sees in secret, just like Jesus said he does. Good enough is good enough – and he will build us up for better. Remember: we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

     In 1Corinthians 15 lives a little term that intrigues me greatly: spiritual body (verse 44). I can pick up some meaning from the context, but I’m still not clear. One Bible teacher helped by saying that the natural bodies of believers are partially animated by the Holy Spirit, while the spiritual body, in the resurrection, will be fully animated by him. I can’t say for sure if he’s completely right, but I sure like to think he is. Imagine: every movement in accordance with the will of the Father. Hey – maybe I’ll dance… and you won’t laugh!   

     Whatever it looks like, it’ll be good enough.

 

 Grace and Peace (to call forth worship),

 

John

 

Working Worship

 

Hey, Cobblestone,

     Why is it that so many of Jesus’s parables involve working – tending a vineyard, building a house, harvesting grain, and so on? Not every one, but a solid chunk of his teaching moments give voice to some level of necessary exertion, from kneading bread dough to hacking down barren trees. What are we to learn from the preponderance of labor in the Savior’s stories of what the kingdom of heaven is like?

     One of my favorite theories runs like so: Work and worship are inextricably linked, woven together so’s to be completely inseparable. I’ve never heard anybody say that floating around in heaven on a cloud forever, playing a harp for the Lord, sounded like a rockin’ good time. Yet we know that praise will continue throughout eternity, loudest and most vibrantly among the redeemed who are experiencing the full fruit of redemption. Does that leave work out? Is there nothing constructive to do in heaven? That sounds awful.

     Though it’s technically not a parable, a snapshot from “the days of Jesus’s flesh” serves the same purpose for we who are twenty centuries removed from the day of the event:

One Sabbath, when he went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching him carefully. And behold, there was a man before him who had dropsy. And Jesus responded to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?” But they remained silent. Then he took him and healed him and sent him away. And he said to them, “Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?” And they could not reply to these things (Luke 14:1-6).

     Why couldn’t the lawyers and Pharisees reply to Jesus? Surely they had plenty of words; they had attained high standing in the use of words. If I were a betting man I’d say they had at least two to three dozen responses to the Master’s question. But sitting atop the stone wall they’d laid up between the sacred and secular, they couldn’t give an answer without dismantling the very wall on which they sat. What would your answer be?

     I’ve never once pulled an ox from a well. Can’t be easy, especially using First Century equipment. But I did once work with my bride to pull our young son from an Atlantic riptide, using nothing but our wits and bodies. Was it on a Sabbath? I don’t remember. As if it would have mattered. We simply appealed to the maker of the riptide to make us smarter if not stronger than the riptide, and convey us to the shore. It still ranks as the most worthy physical effort we’ve ever put forth. And yeah, we had a more recognizable kind of worship service on the beach.

     The writer to the Hebrews posits four phases of Sabbath: one that began on the seventh day of creation, one offered to our forbears in the wilderness, one called “Today,” and another yet to come. The phases will, in God’s good time, circle back on each other; the fourth will be just like the first, in which God took his rest and great joy in his work. But I have to ask: Does that mean God doesn’t create anything anymore? Surely it doesn’t mean that! Living the life of Christian faith is glorious precisely because our God is intimately involved in the work of his hands. Imagine, if your soul is able, God as the master craftsman and us as his apprentices, and then worship the one who calls us into glorious work.

     Worship and work flow together with nary an objection from either. Resting from our labors involves resting from strife, not accomplishment. As God would have it, strife is part of the experience here in a creation not fully restored – “In the world you will have tribulation,” Jesus said in John’s Gospel (16:33a). Likewise, he gives relief from the strife – “But take heart; I have overcome the world” (the rest of verse 33). That’s an Already thing, not a Not Yet. The lawyers and Pharisees of Luke 14 were stuck in Phase 2 of Sabbath, not entering into cooperative rest with God. Jesus has made a way for the people of God to live freely in Phase 3, as we anticipate Phase 4, which circles back on the original Sabbath instituted by the Creator. As Jesus took joy in doing the will of his Father, smack-dab in the middle of his work, so may we.

     I pray a working worship for you, Church, a spirit-level manner of praise that honors the LORD our God and erases frustration, cancels the aching need for quitting time. May you find such satisfaction in the work of your hands, your brain, your body, that your soul must needs magnify the Lord! Now may the God of peace make you holy in every way, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ comes again. God will make this happen, for he who calls you is faithful (1Thessalonians 5:23-24).

      

Grace and Peace (from the Lord of the Sabbath),

 

John

 

Carving Canyons

 

Hey, Cobblestone,

     In the midst of reading Psalm 150 out loud, this happened: Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him (lightning!) in his mighty heavens. Praise him for his acts of power; praise him… (thunder!) for his surpassing greatness. Call it a responsive reading, a thunderstorm and me.

     It’s early Thursday morning and I’ve just come in from my east-facing front porch, shelter from the rain but front row seat for the flashes and rumblings. This is January, I have to remind myself. How could this happen? Simple: the LORD our God said to a warm, wet air mass in the South, “Go north.” And it went. “Baruch atah, Adonai Elohim (blessed are you, LORD our God), King of the universe – who stirs the storm.”

     In my neighbor Matt’s yard, the dainty solar powered lights, off for the past few hours, awaken with each lightning flash: “Oh… what? Hello! Good morning! Um… morning?” And off again. Repeat, at the Conductor’s command: on together, off separately. And then the ground shakes. I’m expecting the very rocks to cry out. Maybe they did, in chorus with thunder, and my ears couldn’t tell the difference. On it went for a certain time, followed by the still small voice of a slow soaking rain. “Baruch atah, Adonai Elohim, King of the universe – who stills the storm.”

     If I could snap my fingers and make one single verse of Scripture known and believed in all mankind, it would be this one:

    Know that the LORD, he is God!

            It is he who made us, and we are his;

            we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture (Psalm 100:3).

     Why that one? Let me count the ways. Whose pasture? His. Whose people? His. Meaning of life? As the old catechism says, “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Sanctity of life? What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor (Psalm 8:4-5). Any more questions? One verse of Scripture, known and believed, can open the door to every answer.

     You must understand this, Church: Every particle of creation answers to the LORD our God. There’s not a hurricane or an earthquake or the twitch of a sparrow’s eye that happens aside from his command. Every drop of rain – every drop, mind you – surely achieves the purpose for which he sent that drop. Is it outside the realm of possibility that one random son of God, with his feeble predawn voicing reading the one hundred and fiftieth of one hundred and fifty Psalms, could have been written into symphony with the power of the heavens? Oh, not outside the realm at all. Because here’s the thing: There’s no such thing as random.

     The King of the universe will engineer your next breath and your next heartbeat. Repeat – or not. He will cause his rain to fall on the just and the unjust. As our departed brother, R.C. Sproul, was fond of saying, “If there is even one maverick molecule in all the universe, we may not expect that any one of God’s promises will come true.” And he would follow, of course, with, “But there isn’t.” Does that make God worthy of praise? Care to bet your life on it? Your eternity? Relax… it’s not a bet.

     The only moral agency being exercised in all creation is happening right here on earth, right now, by God’s image-bearers. Sun/moon/stars, elephant/eagle/caterpillar are, each and every one, locked into the intricacies and immensities of God’s plan. Only we humans are given space and time to choose whatever. (Please don’t miss the operative word: given.) So, what do we do with that?

     Praise is the key to exercising moral agency that aligns with God’s glory and commissions us as co-regents in his creation. What – you thought it involved being smarter or better or gritting your teeth harder? Nope. Praise. It starts there or it doesn’t start at all. The theme runs throughout the history of our people. In his ugliest moment, Adam didn’t praise God, though he could have. In their better moments, Noah and Abraham and Miriam and David did. And when they didn’t… well, the record is there for all to see. Paul wrote, For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out… Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Romans 7:18-19, 24). Thankfully, he was able to follow these gloomy exclamations with praise: Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (verse 25).

     Through a convoluted plot, the 1991 movie Grand Canyon brings a widely diverse group of people together at the rim of the title character, where their separate problems melt away in the vastness. Really? It’s a hole in the ground. Science tells us of a canyon on Mars that makes our “Grand” the same as a back-alley pothole. But know this: One and the same God carved both. In the opposite direction, the spires of the great cathedrals are designed to draw the eyes of men upward to God. I’ve stood on the plaza in front of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Savannah, Georgia – my eyes are drawn upward, for sure, and then I start wondering what it was like for the stonemasons who climbed onto rickety scaffolding every day for years on end, only to set some frilly detail no one would ever see up close again. Spires are nice, but let us please show preference for the praise offered up by the saint himself, John’s declaration concerning Jesus: He must increase, but I must decrease (John 3:30).

     The human heart is designed to praise; it’s a well established fact. What or who is praised is up to the human heart – also by design. What better theme than to praise the designer? The human intellect and physical strength make wonderful companions to a heart full of praise to their Maker. Are you stuck? Praise God! Are you lost? Praise God! Are you so full of joy that a cartwheel seems the only right response? What else can I say? Praise God! On one particularly glorious day, I paced back and forth on the front porch of our church building, playing what could be called a “praise game.” I would start by reciting, “Baruch atah, Adonai Elohim, King of the universe…” and try to remember one of his praiseworthy deeds by the time I said, “who…” It went on for, um, I don’t know how long. It was a while. If you’re assuming no one else was at the building at the time, you’d be right. But hey, if you come by sometime and see me pacing the porch, reciting a scant piece of Hebrew, by all means, jump right in!

     So far I’ve only seen the Grand Canyon from high in the air. Later this year I hope to get down into it. My boots, along with the Colorado River – which runs crazy or lazy at God’s bidding – will do some of the carving. But I promise not to forget who the real sculptor is.

     If possible in this moment, read aloud – and with gusto – the closing words of the Psalm I opened with:

Let everything that has breath praise the LORD!

Praise the LORD! (Psalm 150:6).

    Now what do you hear?

 

    Praise is the way – Hallelujah!

 

 Grace and Peace (from the one worthy of all praise),

 

John            

Right-ness

 

Hey, Cobblestone,

     And now a few words from an older brother none of us has met, Mr. Aiden Wilson Tozer:

“A fairly accurate description of the human race might be furnished to one unacquainted with it by taking the Beatitudes, turning them wrong side out and saying, ‘Here is your human race.’ For the exact opposite of the virtues in the Beatitudes are the very qualities which distinguish human life and conduct.

“In the world of men we find nothing approaching the virtues of which Jesus spoke in the opening words of the famous Sermon on the Mount. Instead of poverty of spirit we find the rankest kind of pride; instead of mourners we find pleasure seekers; instead of meekness, arrogance; instead of hunger after righteousness we hear men saying, ‘I am rich and increased in goods and have need of nothing’; instead of mercy we find cruelty; instead of purity of heart, corrupt imaginings; instead of peacemakers we find men quarrelsome and resentful; instead of rejoicing in mistreatment we find them fighting back with every weapon at their command.

“Of this kind of moral stuff civilized society is composed. The atmosphere is charged with it; we breathe it with every breath and drink it with our mother’s milk.”

                                                                     (A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God, Chapter 9)

 Welcome to 2023, by way of 1948.

     When Tozer first published his trademark book, his homeland was fresh off a resounding victory in the second of two World Wars he would see in his lifetime. You’d think he’d be more optimistic. Wasn’t it a vindication of the human spirit that the good guys won, again? Or maybe he was still stinging from the fact that, after the first World War – aka “The War to End All Wars” – there was another one anyway. And you might have noticed: the first edition of The Pursuit of God was published the same year as George Orwell’s 1984.  

     The snippet of Chapter 9 quoted above is not a fair representation of Tozer’s work. By and large, his writing is some of the most uplifting you’ll find anywhere, his go-to tactic being to turn the hearts of men and women to their Maker. Apparently, he was setting up a contrast. So am I.

     For two-plus years, these letters I write each week followed our all-church through-the-Bible reading plan… mostly. This year the letters will (mostly) follow the Sunday teaching plan that encompasses several genres, including topical studies, book studies, and spiritual formation. The January topic is worship. Just ahead of the first Sunday sermon of 2023, I’ll pry open the subject by asking – Why?

     Why do Christians worship the Lord? It’s not a rhetorical question; several good answers come readily to mind. Ex nihilo – the Lord God spoke all things into existence, “out of nothing.” That’s reason enough to worship him. Breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man become a living creature (Genesis 2:7). Well done, Lord. The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness… and in his temple all cry, “Glory!” (Psalm 29:8, 9). ‘Nuff said. Or maybe not: “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). That’ll work. Shall I continue? God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2Corinthians 5:21). Nobody else does that. And we haven’t even started on the Revelation, the “already” reasons to worship that are not yet manifest.

     For all the obvious reasons to worship, I’d like to propose one that the human spirit usually has to be jogged into: Worship the Lord because he is right.

     A.W. Tozer again: “Jesus never uttered opinions. He never guessed; He knew, and He knows… He spoke out of the fullness of His Godhead, and His words are very Truth itself. He is the only one who could say ‘blessed’ with complete authority, for He is the Blessed One come from the world above to confer blessedness upon mankind.”

     Right-ness has but one reliable source. You and I will stumble into rightness now and then; Jesus operates in rightness full time. Rightness exists because he exists. If there were no other reason to worship him, that would be enough.

     In the first week of this new year, I wonder if we’re ready to take on a challenge. Read Matthew 5:2-12 – the Beatitudes, as we’ve come to know them – and simply live them. Would your life look radically different? Of course it would, and so would mine. And before the wave of guilt crashes over us, just forget the challenge. I’m finally beginning to learn that when I try to received blessedness, or confer it on others, outside the terms Jesus put forth, it goes sideways in a hurry. Why? Because he’s right and I’m wrong. And so are you… wrong, that is. Or, as Paul put it to the Romans: Let God be true, but every man a liar (3:4).

     God has ordained that those who love him, who are called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28), will be conformed to the image of his Son (verse 29). Over time. On his schedule. Not all at once, but surely. Meanwhile, we worship. Oh, Church, worship the Lord in the beauty of his rightness. Worship the one into whose image you and I and all our brothers and sisters are being conformed. You might start as I started this morning, praying, “Jesus, you are right and I am wrong.” You might continue in prayer as I continued: “Father, whatever resemblance I bear to Jesus right now, let me use it to work your will in this world. And based on your promise, I may certainly expect to be more like Jesus tomorrow than I am today. Glory to you, Lord God!”

     Tozer’s description of the human condition was painful to encounter, but only for so long as he left out the remedy – two-plus paragraphs of darkness before dawn. True to form, he was eager, like another older brother, one John the Baptizer, to yell, “There he is, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!” I was compelled a few weeks ago – by the Father, I’m sure – to reread The Pursuit of God. Sadly, I had convinced myself that I had given away the last copy from my library. But rooting through the bookcases Tuesday night, I found not just any old copy, but the first one I had read, with notes and highlights going back almost twenty years.

     In other words, I was wrong – glory, Hallelujah!

  Grace and Peace (and Resemblance),

 

John