And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength….You shall fear only the Lord your God; and you shall worship Him and swear by His name. Deuteronomy 6:5
Therefore I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12:1-2
One of the pieces of my inner work this last year or so has been a shift in my ideas about worship. While I don’t recall praying specifically about this, I believe this refocus has been an answer to some conscious seeking—wanting to know Him for Him instead of what I think Him to be, to know what it means to love Him—something like this. So I’m trying on these concepts like a new outfit, checking my reflection in the mirror and turning to see what there is to see in the light. I don’t conclude that there’s anything new here. It’s just that I’m understanding things with deeper implications.
I would never tell you that worship is just 45 minutes on Sunday morning, or a CD playing in the background. Nor would you agree with such a statement. Those things are only a fraction of what worship is. Going to church, time devoted to praise and singing to God, returning our financial gifts, fellowshipping with the body, of course these are worship. But it’s more than that. Worship is a lifestyle.
Worship is turning my internal face toward God with a continual impulse of gratefulness and deference.
It occurs to me how compartmentalized my instincts and habits are. I can think Godward while I’m still dozing thinking about getting up and praying for John and the day. But not too long into soap and water and coffee, I’m a million miles away. I can be careful about my mumbling resentments when I’m driving, but when I’m walking around in the stores or watching TV, my brain is snapping off judgments and criticisms with no effort. I don’t automatically see people as individuals God loves, whom I, too, can love; I see them as objects I must negotiate in order to obtain my goal.
I know, this is how it is for everyone, to greater and lesser degrees. We pigeonhole our energies, go on autopilot. It’s how our minds are able to process everything coming at us so that we can even respond. Nobody can do 100% of the time God-aware, God-oriented. Because we’re fallen. Righteous by the blood of Jesus Christ, but still imperfect in the working it out.
It just recently seems glaringly obvious to me that this percentage of directed attention can and should be enlarging. The greater my cognizance of what exactly Jesus Christ has done for me, the more I comprehend the ways God extends love and compassion and forgiveness and grace to me by the truckload—the more I understand how my whole life should be pervaded by an active, moment-by-moment response of gratitude and loaning myself back for His purposes in the here and now. It should be more unforced lifestyle than something I remember to exhibit at important moments throughout the day.
This is nothing new. You’ve pondered it just like I have. What’s my big deal? Let me see if I can articulate it.
As I said last week, I understand with frequency how often I am about me, how little I am about God. At the same time, more and more deeply I recognize the magnitude of the claim God has on my life. The reality is that the ultimate obedience of Jesus Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit has restored my ability to live 100% Godward.
And so, the more my personal identity should be subsumed in Christ Himself. The less I should hold to my own plans, hopes and “rights”.
My right to earn a good living without enduring drudgery, abuse, or danger.
My right to live the way I want, in the kind of culture I approve, under the kind of government I prefer, according to the kind of laws that suit me.
My right to be satisfied by the kind of relationships I want, and to express those relationships the way I feel is best for me.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with these preferences and hopes, and God will bring to pass the ones that serve His eternal purpose. But some of these preferences and rights are only relics of the temporary, and they have the power to bind me to less than full submission. The problem is when I begin to organize my internal fortitude and resources around maintaining them. The problem is when I forget to be willing to give them up to God upon my realization that my will might be the exact opposite of what He really wants, as bewildering as it may seem.
I see a hundred subtle ways my comfort zone is king. I see a hundred scary ways that what I think is good and reasonable might need to be put on the chopping block. Everything I consider to be what makes up ME, all my identity, is subject to the identity I should now be putting on in Christ.
None of this is a mystery to those of us who have been around the sanctuary more than a few times. What difference is this making for me—really?
Well, four things, off the top of my head.
This idea of worship has fine-tuned some Bible passages that are majestic and uncompromising, but to me were always a bit fuzzy as to practicality. This is how I love the Lord my God with, heart soul, mind, and strength and worship Him only. This is how I present my body as a living and holy sacrifice. Everything as consciously and rightly toward God as I can make it.
It’s has helped me see enduring the pain of a hard relationship as a sacred sacrifice that I can offer to God—perhaps the way Abraham’s heart was intent on offering Isaac because he was convinced God would make good of it for Himself one way or the other. I find consolation that even if nothing changes here, loving my neighbor still means something to God.
Also, in my mind, the idea of a whole-life, Godward intent creates a place in which dissention and division in the body of Christ can be diffused. We have Scripture to inform and guide, and at the point that we read the same text differently, we still have the ability to lay aside our need to have the last word. We preserve the relationship and our witness by upholding agreement on the basics of the gospel, of faith. Loving my brother can be done without hypocrisy.
And, not lastly, I have a richer sense of the shape of who I am and the gifts God gave me. My tendencies and preferences and skills become less about achieving specific goals and more about moving my whole life in the direction that my wiring and giftings take me, as I heed God’s leading. Conforming to the image of Christ is less vague, easier to comprehend in its many discrete increments.
What I’m trying to say is that by preferring myself less and preferring God more, more of my day-to-day becomes a whole-life God-facing endeavor.
Less compartmentalized.
Much, much more than 45 minutes on Sunday.
Worship in my street shoes.
Toward the promise,
Lana
P.S. These four books have been instrumental in shaping these ideas. I’d recommend them to anyone who wants to examine how they put the rubber to the road in practical terms of loving God and loving people.
A War of Loves by David Bennet
Worship: The Ultimate Priority by John MacArthur
Frequency: Tune In, Hear God by Robert Morris
Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion by Rebecca McLaughlin
There has also been a bunch of articles and essays by people who are wrestling with the tenets and postures in the sexual, racial, political, evangelical, and other identity conversations. Get in touch if you’d like me to forward some of these voices for you.
This will not interest everybody, but I do want to share an alternative to mainstream media COVID reporting. Alex Berenson, a former NYT reporter, has been shut down on Twitter, hence the Substack account. You have to interpret some snark and sort through some miscellanea, but over time, the links to original data and notices form quite a picture.
The Busy Writer’s Lazy Cookbook
Dead Easy Christmas Sugar Cookie Bars (in case time is short)
John regularly thanks me for excellent cooking, and quite honestly, sometimes I have to thank him for having low standards. [To which he responded yesterday, after getting a handful of these cookies, “But I have very high standards—I picked you!” Ah, thank you, my love.]
I made sugar cookies, but I didn’t even use my own recipe. This time it was a bag mix from Aldi. And I didn’t smash up candy canes or mints—it was a packet of crushed peppermint candy bits someone gave us this spring. So—low standards? Or smart?
Anyway, if you need a quick plate of cookies for a get-together or something, you can use the sugar cookie recipe I posted in March (below), which requires no refrigeration or rolling and cutting. Or buy a 3-dozen yield bag mix at the store. You can either press it all into a pan or drop them by a spoonful if your soul still really needs round cookies with the golden brown crisp outside the gooey inside.
Come to think of it—that plastic wrapped chub of stuff from the dairy case works, too. But better for cutting than pressing into a pan.
Last year’s candy canes work just fine, I promise, as will that handful of Sonic mints crammed into your glove box. Sturdy zip baggie and a hammer. Go ahead, let out some of that stress.
The recipe from March
Preheat that oven to 375 degrees.
Cream together
½ cup butter (one stick), softened
1 C granulated sugar
1 large egg
½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
2 TBSP milk
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp lemon extract
Stir in 2½ C flour until the flour disappears. This gives you a crumbly dough.
Press into 9x13” baking pan. Use your hands or one of your spatulas that doesn’t stick. I put my hand into a sandwich baggie to mash it around, then smooth it over with the back of a spoon.
Sprinkle evenly with your crushed peppermint candy. Or your holiday colored sugars.
Bake until just turning golden on the edges. Cut when cool.
Warning: Potentially addictive. Hide from mindless grazers if they must make it to the party.
Through the Bible in a Year Reading Plan and Challenge
Colorful is a good term used to describe Ezekiel as a prophet. This man had a 20 year stint as messenger to the inhabitants of Judah who had been exiled to Babylon. He used many very graphic visuals to get his hearers’ attention: packed his belongings and dug through a wall—day after day, cooked his bread over human waste, laid on his left side for over three years, drew the city of Jerusalem on the pavement and played army to demonstrate laying siege, and when his beloved wife died, he refused to participate in the traditional mourning his people generally observed.
He was also given visions of bizarre creatures and disturbing events to further depict God’s transcendent glory which the people were trampling in their apostatic depravity. To a greater degree than other prophets in the Old Testament, Ezekiel spoke of individual responsibility for one’s own sins in addition to the guilt being accrued on the national level.
Strange reading to be sure. I wonder what the people made of it. Did they think he was just mentally ill and laugh him off, or did some of them know exactly what he was saying and just didn’t care? The hindsight is sobering!
I remain behind. Further than I was a month ago. But I persist. I encourage you, too. Persist! Getting through the Bible in a year is not so important as getting through it in its entirety.
Sunday, November 21 Catch up and reflect
Monday, November 22 Ezekiel 15-16, Hebrews 13
Tuesday, November 23 Ezekiel 17-18, James 1
Wednesday, November 24 Ezekiel 19-20, James 2
Thursday, November 25 Ezekiel 21-22, James 3
Friday, November 26 Ezekiel 23-25, James 4-5
Saturday, November 27 Ezekiel 16-31, 1 Peter 1
Question for this week’s reading: What three Old Testament characters get a mention in the book of James?
Here’s the link to last week’s issue, 70 x 7, and the week earlier, in case you want to look back.
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