Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 0-215

ENCOUNTER AND ADORATION

From ‘Sunrise Sunset’ (HarperCollins/Harper San Francisco), Rowland Croucher’s book of daily meditations. Feel free to use or adapt it.

O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker! For he is our God… Psalm 95:6,7.

We worship as whole beings: our ‘self’ is psychological, cultural, biological. We worship with mind and heart and will. We involve the emotions, genuine feelings of joy and desolation, exaltation and bereavement. Worship ought to be a living event, to which we bring our human, frail, brokenness.

The Spirit helps us in our infirmities… so we can come to God with our fears, joys, guilt, anger, affirmations, tensions and loneliness. In his presence we renew our lives which are mixed up in work, conflict, love and creation. We worship with ‘all that is within us’ and ‘all that is around us’ (the wonders of creation too are an incentive to praise the Creator: see Psalm 19).

And we worship with our bodies. However, we need to be careful we don’t call more attention to the body than to him who redeemed that body. The essence of Baalism, the worship of local gods in biblical times, was its deification of the sex instinct. Worship is not just a subjective, ecstatic, ‘feeling’ experience. It is more than ‘self-expression’. Corporate worship ought not to be an emotional tool for producing ‘conversions’. The Bible does not use the word ‘worship’ as simply a description of experience. Worship is something you do, it is a reponse to God’s word and God’s ways and God’s will, however you feel about it (although this does not mean there is no place for feelings and sensory experience).

I lift my heart to you, Lord Christ, and pray for your help to worship the living God in Spirit and in truth. Amen.