Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 0-242 Sunday 10 Dec 2000

Reading: PSALM 40 – BODY LANGUAGE

(From ‘Encounter with God’ Bible Reading Notes)

What we call our worship may in fact be an evasion of true worship; something we offer in order to escape full selfoffering. ‘I desire to do your will, O my God’ (v 8).

‘The gesture of worship is generous and beautiful. Henceforth anything that takes away the gesture of worship stunts and even maims us forever,’ wrote G K Chesterton.

First, receive from God the gift of spiritual listening, the ‘opened ear’ (v 6). The Psalmist listened and received an astonishing revelation: it seems that our story is already ‘written in the scroll’ (v 7 – see also Ps 139:16). God has seen and willed our story the from all eternity (See Rev 5:15). If so, then true worship is nothing less than the do radical orientation of all our powers towards obeying his will (see Eph 1:35).

Not that we arrive in the world programmed for a particular set of experiences. Think of the will of God written in the scroll as music. Music has the mysterious power both to hold the player under its discipline while at the same time releasing him to interpret and play to the utmost limits of his skill. Your ‘instrument’ is your ‘body’, the totality of your being, which is uniquely and wondrously designed, gifted and Godbreathed, for communion with him in a relationship of love (see 1 Sam 15:22).

Therefore when the writer of Hebrews applied these verses (vs 68) to Christ, he quoted from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Old Testament, which reads ‘a body you prepared for me’ (see Heb 10:510).

‘Sacrifices and offerings’ will not for they are less than our human nature. If you desire to do the will of God (v 8) it must be by the free, glad, full offering of your bodily life. Now Christ with all the Goddelighting achievements of his life plays among us, his beautiful music lifting ours and, in symphony, is offered as one performance to the Father.

God’s will for us too is written ‘in the scroll’. So let our response be the same as our Lord’s: ‘Here I am’.

– Dennis Lennon

Copyright Scripture Union, 2000