Archive for October, 2007

Talking through worship

October 17, 2007 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , , , ,

For some reason I got thinking about worship this morning… I love worship music, and find that it really helps me to get focused and grounded… I know others who get really distracted and frustrated with newer praise choruses and worship music… but for me I enjoy it…

But, I am not really wanting to talk about music; I want to talk about worship… I was thinking through the song, “Made to Worship” by Chris Tomlin… an interesting concept that I had not really thought through until this morning is that, whether we like it or not, we are worshipers…

We were created to worship.

What becomes the issue is what we allow to become the object of our worship; for me it is often times myself, I also end up worshiping money… I know this because I can feel myself bowing and making time and holding in high esteem both of these things…

One of my favorite words used for “worship” in the greek is “proskunevw”

1. to kiss the hand to (towards) one, in token of reverence

2. among the Orientals, esp. the Persians, to fall upon the knees and touch the ground with the forehead as an expression of profound reverence

3. in the NT by kneeling or prostration to do homage (to one) or make obeisance, whether in order to express respect or to make supplication.

I love the imagery of coming “towards” it conveys the message of movement on our part… Worship requires work, requires movement, requires action…

I also love the idea of falling on bended knee… how many times do you see the image of someone who has been rescued… and they fall on their knees in reverence to their hero, savior? Do we not owe that to our savior?

I will admit that I had to use dictionary.com to find out what “obeisance” means… but it refers to a movement of the body in such a way to show respect or superiority…. huh… another reference to movement… all of a sudden worship doesn’t look like hands raised in a church… (not that it doesn’t have its place…)

I guess where I have come to in my thought process is that I am a worshiper… like it or not… I am created to worship… I am in a constant state of worship… my greatest job is to constantly be moving towards directing my worship on my savior.

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Clothing v. Appearance

October 15, 2007 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , , , , , ,

I just got back in the office and am getting myself acclimated to what the four walls look like again. I had a little time off, traveled a little bit and feel refreshed.

I missed one week at my church, and it hurt… I was visiting another church last Sunday, and I really really missed being at my church. So, I was excited to get up and go yesterday morning. It was great for several reasons. We are in a new teaching series and even though I missed the first message, yesterday’s message was great on its own.

One of the things we talked about that got me thinking was the issue of Spiritual Clothing and Spiritual Appearance. My pastor used a term that really blew me away… saying there is a great difference between a “bogus alteration and an authentic spiritual transformation”…

Having grown up in the church, I have witnessed many of what I would consider to be both… but, at the core of it… It isn’t my place to judge… It isn’t my place to try to diagnose… My responsibility lies simply in what is happening in my spiritual condition….

I like the imaging of talking about Spiritual Clothing and Spiritual Appearance… for me… I get that I can go out and put on clothing that is going to make me look a certain way to others… I could go and get a uniform with the proper hat and a fake gun, and people would think I am a cop, but I am not a cop, I am just dressed like a cop. I can dress myself in many different ways to lead people to believe that I am a certain type of person… and I believe there is a ton that we could get into here about what we wear saying a lot about us, but that is another topic altogether…

I can’t use myself for this example… but, as I just spent time around beaches and pools, I can say, that when someone is walking around with the shirt off… it isn’t hard to figure out that they must work out to look that way. The difference between wearing a uniform and looking fit, is a matter of discipline and it is an authentic transformation from the inside out. If I were to change inside my head and get myself in a disciplined routine of eating healthy and working out, people would look at me and see a changed person, someone who has had an authentic transformation…

I think that often times we are looking for the easy way out… and we want to fit in so badly, that we will go for the easy way out… if there were a special shirt I could put on to make me look like I work out when I don’t, I might be tempted to do so… BUT, that doesn’t mean that I am leading a healthier lifestyle, and at that point I am involved in a bogus alteration… (as I just typed those words I started thinking about all the fascination with plastic surgery in our country… and the use of the term, “alterations”… )

So, for me the challenge is to look at my life and see if I have truly pursued authentic transformations, or have I copped out and thrown on a coat… am I wearing Spiritual clothing or am I changing my Spiritual appearance?

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Jesus has been wrecking religion for a while

October 1, 2007 · Filed under Uncategorized

Yet another amazing message that has me pondering many different things…

I have been stuck on this concept since I read it somewhere else… I have been turned on to Dan Kimball who is a pretty big deal in what they call the “emerging church” movement… He wrote a post called “don’t be a “christian” It is an interesting concept… and for as much as I am a lover of semantics and word study… I think we can sometimes go a little too far…

The church I go to had a billboard that declared ” a non-religious way to find God ” I was getting prepped for an outpatient surgical procedure, nothing major… (I will tell you it was a witch-hunt for a tiny calcium deposit with a very tender entry point for the hunt… ugh… I wouldn’t opt for that one again…)

Anyways… as I lay in my paper gown reading whatever magazine they had given me to keep me occupied… I overheard the nurses talking about the billboard… Their discussion brought me to realize that the billboard had brought about confusion… If anything the billboard probably speaks more to the people who understand certain terms that we throw around in church circles… and some of it is for shock value to get people interested, but I question whether it works…

All that to say we were looking at the story of Lazarus in the Bible… I am going to breeze through this story… basically… Lazarus was a friend/follower of Jesus… and he got sick…

All the people around Jesus were like “do that miracle thing and make him better”… (gross paraphrasing)…

and Jesus basically says… “I am working on something here…” (again, my version of the story)…

Lazarus died.

Which brings us to Jesus going to the grave site where Lazarus was buried… This part requires a little bit of a cultural lesson… There were a lot of particular rituals that were required to be carried out when someone passed… some of them were medical, some were religious…

So when we get to the part of the story where Jesus is standing in front of the grave and says, “take away the stone” the stone that was covering the cave where Lazarus had been buried… It was a pretty big “no-no” for the religious types… I am trying to think of a great analogy… for me it would have been like Jesus showing up to a church service and telling them… “don’t do the Lord’s Prayer or Apostle’s Creed”… the people in the church I grew up in would have been pretty perplexed by why Jesus would be going against a healthy religious practice…

Jesus calls Lazarus to come out… and like that… Lazarus comes out… looking all dead… but not dead at all…

He says…”Didn’t I tell you if you believed, that you would see the glory of God?” I would like to think that it was something along the lines of… “what is it going to take for you guys to get that it isn’t about the stuff… it isn’t about the rules… it isn’t about the rituals… they are all good things, but, it is really about believing… and it is all about me and my Dad” (my version again)

I think that it is important to realize that God wants for us to be in the practice of doing things that bring us closer to Him… but He doesn’t want us to get so caught up in the practice or the doing that we lose sight that it is all really about Him…

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