hey guys!

i read this recently, and it really spoke to me:

‘I desire that, in my worship and in my praise,
more than anything else I am real.
I want to be real with God because God is real.
I don’t want to do things just because it’s expected of me.’

–Chris Bowater, Creative Worship p53

I think this rings true not just in our literal worship, but in everything we do. If we want to live our lives as living sacrifices, we have to be real with God because He is real. And ulitmately, this may mean obeying God or being true to Him even though it may not look so super-spiritual to everyone else around us. Because the point is to be true to God, not to others’ expectations. And it’s purely because we want to reflect a relationship with Him that may be flawed or tumultuous or expose us to vulnerability but which is real because that is the nature of a real relationship. So worship is stripped of being for show or exteriors or obligations, stripped to its bare essence of our spirit truthfully responding to God’s Spirit and His truth. And this is what endures above all things

Another thing: I was reading Psalm 8 on Tuesday. It was a beautiful morning, I was sitting on the swing downstairs, and the there was a gorgeous lotus flower deeply blooming. And I saw this lady from the condo office talking with a cleaner, and both were gesturing dramatically and I could figure out what they were talking about without hearing the words.

And I thought back to Psalm 8, which says that God has perfected praise out of the mouths of babes and nursing infants–God’s perfect praise does not need words or language in our own constructed sense. God inhabits the praise of the babe who cannot speak. His praise is beyond our capacity for language! And he places this wordless praise into the mouths of the infant, vs1 says, to ‘ordain strength’ and to ’silence the enemy and the avenger’. So even the wordless praise of the weakest infant becomes warfare on behalf of a mighty God! Isn’t that amazing? His license for us, from young, to wage warfare through praise stems from an inner capacity that our workbook talks about, the need in every human to worship! Even before we could speak, God intends us to worship, and so silence the avenger!

Furthermore, the heavens are the works of His fingers. Maybe, just as I could figure out what the office lady and the cleaner were saying just by their elaborate gestures, so some things about God are so far beyond anything we could understand in our limited earthly language, that He has had to express it elsewhere, visually, in His creation. It is the universe that declares His majesty, that declares who He is above all things. Maybe this is part of what the psalmist means when he speaks of ‘how excellent is Your name in all the earth’. God’s name is beyond our vocabulary! But He has manifested it for us in all the earth. And He has done this for His good pleasure and also, for us! That we may KNOW Him in the true, intimate sense of seeing his fingerprints across the sky–to know Him deep in our bones, in tangible ways that are beyond all words. This is the name of the Lord that we are blessing–not just words, but His name as expressed in the beauty of all the earth. So He made nature for us to admire and enjoy as a reflection of who He is. And to explain Himself to us because, ultimately, we are all babes in front of Him, and all our speech and words are nothing compared to who He is and the capacity He has placed in us to worship Him.

And so to worship is way, way, beyond words. Because spirit and truth and the God behind the Spirit and truth, is beyond words. inexpressible, incredible, infinitely beyond our capacity to comprehend just as a ladybird, a lotus, a leaf, an infant, is always beyond our capacity to truly comprehend.

wow this is an incredibly long post.

but there is so much to celebrate beyond words.

there is so much to learn to see.