Thoughts on worship

Years ago A. W. Tozer wrote something about how our need to worship is rooted and grounded in God’s choosing to love us and to embrace us to Himself.  Tozer said,

Sometimes I go to God and say, ‘God, if Thou dost never answer another prayer while I live on this earth, I will still worship Thee as long as I live and in the ages to come for what Thou hast done already.’ God’s already put me so far in debt that if I were to live one million millenniums I couldn’t pay Him for what He’s done for me.

Tozer’s words resonate with us, don’t they?  In this month of September our congregation is focusing on what it means to worship God together.  Surely we know that if we were to live one million millenniums we couldn’t pay God for all He has done for us.

There are a lot of ways to worship our God.  He is worthy to be praised and it is becoming to us to open up our live to express His worthiness.

We can praise Him with music, with words, with loving what He loves, and with the talents, skills, and treasures we have.  We can shout for joy or set in silence.  We can pray, serve, give, encourage, exhort, affirm, forgive, touch, and care.  We can bear one another’s burdens, feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, visit the sick and imprisoned, embrace the marginalized, love an enemy, and do good to one who hates us. 

This month we have been thinking about what it means to use all our senses to lift us into the presence of God so that we might offer Him worship “in spirit and truth” (John 4:23).  How can we take our gifts of seeing and hearing and touching and smelling and tasting, and through them draw near to God so as to say to Him with our lives, “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth” (Psalm 8:1).  How might we live so as to “Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his name?”  How might we “worship the LORD in the splendor of holiness” (Psalm 29:2)? 

Recently Pastor Dave reminded our congregation of the prayer of Psalm 19:14 where David says, “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.”  This leads to a “what shall I do with my life?” question.  This is the kind of prayer that gets us out of ourselves and into a greater story, the story of God.   This is the kind of prayer that stretches our imagination, gets us out of the box of our own little worlds and draws us into the life of God who continually stuns and amazes us by the countless expressions of His amazing grace. 

In one of A. W. Tozer’s prayers he says, “O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more.”  I get that.  I understand it.  Like you, I have experienced it.  It leads me to say to God, as did the worshippers in Revelation “HOLY, HOLY, HOLY IS THE LORD GOD, THE ALMIGHTY, WHO WAS AND WHO IS AND WHO IS TO COME….Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created” (vss. 8, 11).