What's Missing? Awe.

Good morning all … at least I think its morning. Maybe its my imagination, but this ‘morning’ seems darker than most! Here’s a big question all of us have been asking on and off in the past few years …. My professor asked it of us yesterday in class ….

Why does worship seem hard to get people involved, active, seemingly alive?

You can imagine that I sat up and took huge notice …. The ‘kids’ didn’t seem to have an answer, and I was certainly fishing for just one myself.

He went on to say, “Because its hard today to get people in ‘awe’ of anything.” He stopped so we could picture that in our minds eyes. My mind saw videos, flashing lights, ‘stuff’, then moved to the mundane daily grind before the ‘aha’ light went on. He went on to say, “We make God too familiar. Worship should take you out of the ordinary (it should be different than the everyday) and take you into the extraordinary.”

He left it right there and went on with “so what is the purpose of scripture?”

He didn’t wait for us to answer.

“Purpose of scripture is to draw us into worship.”

A lot fell into place with me, I’m sure its not the first time I’ve heard it from him, and honestly, I KNOW IT, but its often buried, so I took IT off the shelf and blew away the dust. This class has forced me to go beyond a daily routine of reading God’s word and worshipping … its like the top of my head has a new opening now … and I want to go outside of that box/skull. I want to know more. I want to know HIM more. Sound like a lyric line of a song?

“While we humans can never exhaust the complexity of God in whatever we say, nevertheless, on the basis of His self-revelation to us we can at least express what we do know of Him on that basis.” Shuta says this in every class in some form or fashion and at some point. Sometimes he stands there and says just two words, “exhaust, express” …. And we connect. And I think that we should ‘say’ those ‘words’ in someway, at some time, through our music and worship leading each and every week. Inspire awe.

I think I’m getting it. Five weeks, 15 hours of class time, the hours on homework is phenomenal, just 83 questions from this Tuesday to Thursday, and they ain’t just fill in the blank. Reading, reading, and reading some more. Then questions have five or six Bible verses to help you ‘find’ the answer, and the answer isn’t just one word. It’s a thought process. And well, you know what my thought processes are from experiencing Worship Updates often. It’s stretching me, I’ve gone from digging in, to frustration levels enough to want to quit, to digging back in, countless times, knowing it’s the Holy Spirit who is drawing me back in. So, I put my stake in the ground here and now and decided to stop counting and am working on getting ‘out of my head’ on this one … taking the journey.

I pray that you all, at some juncture of your life, decide to dig deeper. Ladies, there is opportunity right at your doorstep for two more weeks of Beth Moore study on Tuesday nights and Thursday mornings. Last night, I decided that I was truly designed for the Feast of Tabernacles. That’s all I want to say, other than Pastor and I are having discussions on something from this/like this for Lent. Men, work Adult Bible Class into your Sunday mornings when you are not scheduled and any other ways of connecting (www.allprodad.com). Team, let’s find ways of re-integrating the study of God’s Word into our ‘assemblies’ when we are together … let’s discover together how that can be best done. You won’t be sorry, oh, no. Not in the least.