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