Devotions in Worship 1

Standing in the Presence of the Holy One (1)

I was given A.W. Tozer's book Knowledge of the Holy by a building maintenance engineer who was a regular in our shop when I worked for Starbucks in downtown Kansas City. Over the next year, together with a handful of other devotional books, the introductory thoughts in this book challenged and changed my world--the way I percieved the world, the way I lived in it, and the things I valued in it. [Aside: I didn't know this man especially well but this layman ranks amongst the significant ministers in my life.] The following quotations spoke to me.

“With our loss of the sense of majesty has come the further loss of religious awe and consciousness of the divine Presence. We have lost our spirit of worship and our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet with God in adoring silence. Modern Christianity is simply not producing the kind of Christian who can appreciate or experience the life in the Spirit. The words, ‘Be still, and know that I am God,’ mean next to nothing to the self-confident, bustling worshipper in this middle period of the twentieth century [and of today].”
“The low view of God [loss of religious awe and consciousness of the divine Presence] entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us. A whole new philosophy of the Christian life has resulted from this one basic error in our religious thinking.”
“The only way to recoup our spiritual losses is to go back to the cause of them and make such corrections as the truth warrants. The decline of the knowledge of the holy has brought on our troubles. A rediscovery of the majesty of God will go a long way toward curing them. It is impossible to keep our moral practice sound and our inward thoughts right while our idea of God is erroneous or inadequate. If we would bring back spiritual power to our lives, we must begin to think of God more nearly as he is.”

I think that most of what Tozer was saying 50 years ago that is valid for today. It is still very descriptive of many places where the Christian faith we see on a day-to-day basis does not reflect the character of the God described in the Bible. In worship we have to consciously revisit whether we are really aware of God’s holiness, of God’s character, and of God’s Presence.Some people clearly think that the reverence that this description of God requires is a “downer” in worship. The responses to this thought that have become evident in my own journey are (a) Who cares?—this who God is. Changing who God is so that we have a god we feel like worshipping is called idolatry. (b) When we acknowledge God’s holiness, God’s majesty, God’s infinitude it makes the fact that God pursues us in love absolutely astounding and “awe”-some. If “holy God, Creator of the Universe loves me,” then my life cannot be the same. If you say to me “God loves you” and describe God in the image of Oprah Winfrey then I might say “that’s nice” but it won’t change my life. Christians, Keep in mind that we worship a God whose concern for us changes our lives.

Practical Theology Oct-Dec

Here is an interesting thought. The best description of God that 2000 years of Christian thought has been able to form is that God exists in Trinity: one being and three persons. Some think that this is one of the most abstract doctrines of the Christian faith. But hold on—one thing that it means is that God is not primarily the divine individual but God is the divine community. God the Father has always loved God the Son perfectly. God the Spirit has always been the agent of divine love to others.

What does it mean to be a Christian? One thing it means is that we are adopted into the family of God. When things work as they should, children mature to resemble the good traits of their parents. A healthy Christian grows in the very character of God. God is the divine community. As we mature in the Christian life, we mature according to a certain model: God’s own character. We are given a new model for our relationships. Rooted in Jesus, we are invited to participate in the loving community of God.