Worship

I saw this in Godtube and found it hits the spot.

Kudos to floodgates production for making this for all of us.

I read this question yesterday: Why does God insist on worship?

Does he really need to have a whole planet full of creatures spending

vast amounts of effort and time dreaming up ways to tell him how great HE is?

Doesn't He already know?

Worship is not about fulfilling God's unmet ego needs.

God has made us so that when we experience

something transcendentally great,

we have a need to praise it. Our experience is incomplete until we can wrap words around it.

We are to worship God, not because his ego needs it,

but because without worship,

our experience and enjoyment of God are not complete.

We worship God not so much because He needs it

but because we do.

We need to worship God.

I need to worship God because without it I can forget that I have a Big God beside me and live in fear. I need to worship God because

without it I can forget his calling and begin to live in a spirit of self -preoccupation.

I need to worship because without it I lose a sense of

wonder and gratitude and plod through life with blinders on.

I need to worship because my natural tendency is toward self-reliance and stubborn independence.

I believe it is not an accident

that the story of Peter walking on the water ends the way it does. "When they got into the boat, the

wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, Truly you are the Son of God."

There is a pattern at work here that recurs

repeatedly in scripture and that needs to become a part of my life as well: God reveals himself. So we reflect on what God has done

and respond in worship. And our understanding of God grows.

We respond in worship

Responding in worship means more than just attending worship services on a regular basis. Sometimes when I think of

the "worship wars" of our day, I try to imagine similar arguments going on at the foot of Mount Sinai when the children had fled Egypt,

the waters had parted into a temporary expressway, Pharoah and his army had been drowned, the mountain was smoking and trembling

and the people were told to gather for worship.

--I don't like this worship. I liked the tambourine song that Mirriam sang after we crossed the Red Sea. How come we don't do that song anymore?

- This service is too long. 3 days is inconvenient. I'm going with the Hitites, they do 2-day theophanies.

-I like it when Aaron leads worship. How come Moses has to be the worship leader? His vetsments don't speak generation.

I suspect that when the Isrealites gathered for worship, they trembled and shook along with the mountain because they had risked

everything on this God.- left home, food and shelter. And he wanted to pass by.

I wonder occasionally if boredom in worship ( and boredom in general) is not in fact a function of song selection or

liturgical style, but rather sometimes, a function of spending too much time in the 'boat' or too much being comfortable in ones space.

When we encounter this God, the Lord over mountains and storms we tremble.

This brings us to the matter of "fearing" God. The bible says that "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom"

What does this mean to fear the Lord?

We have no need to to be afraid that God will do mean and destructive things. We do not need to be afraid that God's love is not fully

trustworthy. One of C.S.Lewis's characters expresses fear at the prospect of meeting his Christ figure, the great lion Aslan, and wonders

if he is quite safe. "Safe?" Who said anything about safe. Of course he's not safe. But he's good.

This fear involves reverence and awe, a healthy recognition of who God is. It involves a recognition of our fallenness.

But worship also reminds us that the day will come when our fallenness will be utterly healed. In that day we will fully realize

the truth of the saying "perfect love casts out fear". When we worship we look forward to the day when fear will be as defeated and destroyed

as sin, guilt and death.

Worship therefore, in reminding us of this powerful God who is for us, becomes one of the great weapons agaINST FEAR.

(Worship fundamentally is about the definition of reality)

(Thank you J. Ortberg for this wonderful words., Kudo's to Floodgates Production for this wonderful video)

to be continued - gotta do some errands be right back...will finish this

in the meantime Praise him today because HE is good! ;)

God bless from the AustinGRRL