Responding to God and Loving Well

Last night I presented the first half of a women's Bible study at my church, and a couple of people have asked me to post the text here. Here you go:

A couple of months ago Gina came to me and said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about this one verse in Exodus and I feel like God’s really put it on my heart to work with you to do a Bible study about it.” And so she gave me this verse: Exodus 3:12.

Here’s a little context on it. Moses has seen the burning bush and God has just told him he will be the one to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. And Moses is thinking God has made a mistake and has chosen the wrong guy; he’s saying, “Nonononono, you don’t want to talk through me. I’m no good at this.” You know, like we do. And in the midst of his hesitation God offers this reassurance in Exodus 3:12:

“And God said, “I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.”

Gina and I talked and talked about this verse and the ideas that it brought up for each of us, and we both ended up focusing on the idea of worship, but in different ways. It got me thinking a lot about what worship is, and how we do it as individuals and as a church.

We use the word worship all the time, but what does it even mean? How do we worship? How is worship defined?

[Our answers included tuning in to God, breathing, being still, praising Him, recognizing His love and goodness, and others.]

Those answers get at how well rounded this idea of worship is, and it is that way in scripture, too. When I think about “worship” in the Bible there’s one verse that comes out as I think my favorite Worship verse. It’s Psalm 100:1-5:

Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth.  Worship the LORD with gladness; come before him with joyful songs.  Know that the LORD is God. It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.  Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name.  For the LORD is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.

Our translations of the Bible use our word “worship” in a lot of different ways. There are apparently more than 50 Hebrew words that are commonly translated in English as “worship” in our Bible, and also a good number of Greek words translated that way. But they all have slightly different meanings.

Here are some of them.

Hallal: to boast, to rave, exuberant praise, to be foolish [this is the root of the word hallelujah]

Barak: knee, to kneel in thankfulness or reverence, to have a continual consciousness of God

Shachah: to bow, stoop, prostrate oneself in submission

Yadah/Todah: hand, to hold out hands in thanks or reverence, or in confession, surrender or sacrifice

Tehillah: praise and celebration through a spontaneous overflowing of song

Zamar: touching strings, to praise with instruments

Shabach: to shout or address loudly

Other words not in this list have meanings like jump for joy; one specifically means dance; and then there’s my favorite “to spin around under violent emotion.” You’ll notice from these verses too that the words are sometimes translated worship and often also translated praise.

Singing, praying, giving thanks, confession, surrendering, sacrificing, celebrating, serving, shouting out – these can all be worship. But only if they come from a recognition of and an acknowledgement of God’s worthiness. Because that’s what our word worship means – it comes from an old English word that means to ascribe or to give worth to something. If we sing or bow or shout or confess without in our deepest hearts acknowledging God’s worthiness by doing those things, then we’re not worshiping. So in other words, it’s not the action itself that is worship, it’s the state of your heart that is worship, and the actions, whatever they are, simply spring from that. Worship is responding to God so strongly and so clearly that you must have some action, some physical or emotional manifestation, to express it.

So the question becomes not just how can we show worship, but how do we get to that state of heart?

In our key verse, Exodus 3:12, God says Moses will worship again on the mountain. So of course I looked up what happened when he got back. How did Moses worship when he returned to the mountain?

Mount Horeb, where the burning bush happened, is another name for Mount Sinai, where the Ten Commandments were given to Moses. So in Exodus 19: 16-20, we see Moses returning to the mountain just as God has said. And here’s what happens:

On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, with a thick cloud over the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast. [vs19]. .. Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, because the Lord descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, the whole mountain trembled violently, and the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder… [vs20] The Lord descended to the top of Mount Sinai and called Moses to the top of the mountain, so Moses went up.

When I read these verses the first time I scoured them for any note of what Moses was doing. God had said Moses would worship him on the mountain, and so I was looking for something like, “Moses bowed down,” or “Moses sang praises to God.” And then I realized I was missing some important points.

1) Moses obeyed. That was his worship. God called him, he came, and he spoke for God to the people. Moses showed that God was worthy by obeying God’s call.

2) In scouring these verses for what Moses was doing, I completely missed what God was doing. God was showing his worth. He had brought his people out of slavery, but it was hard for them, and it took a long time. They had been out of Egypt for three months and they had been wandering, afraid they’d go hungry or thirsty, fighting amongst themselves, they had been attacked by the Amalekites. Now, in each of these situations God had sustained them. He gave them food and water and he protected them, so you could say he had been revealing his worth all along. But in his great goodness on Mount Sinai, The Mountain of God, He gave them a show they couldn’t possibly miss or deny. He is inviting them to worship, directly. He is revealing himself to them. He is yelling down to them, I LOVE YOU! I AM WORTHY! CONNECT WITH ME!

Sometimes we are like the Israelites. We have little salvations, little invitations in front of us every day and we simply don’t see them. We get caught up in our complaints or just in ourselves and we don’t look at the world with God in mind. We look at our children and we see they’re smart or beautiful or charming, but we don’t always look at them and see how sacred they are. We may briefly thank God for the weather, but we may not see His love in the sunshine.

In John 4: 23-24 Jesus says God desires worshipers who worship in spirit and in truth. In Romans 12:8 Paul urges the church to offer themselves as living sacrifices to God, “for this is your spiritual act of worship,” he says.  To me that says we can be worship walking. That’s what we ought to want to be, and we can be that, all the time, everywhere.

God is in all things. Every needle on a pine tree is an invitation to worship. Every woman in this room is an invitation to worship, if we can just look for God in each other. He is yelling out to us, I LOVE YOU! I AM WORTHY! CONNECT WITH ME!

Whether we’re walking around or meditating, listening or talking, worship happens when we’re singularly focused on Him; when our hearts and minds are trained on God.  That’s what worship services are for, right? For us all to gather together and focus on Him. And yet, I’d bet many of us have more stories of private moments of worship than church service moments of worship.

I think we often have a harder time worshiping together here in church than we have worshiping alone anywhere else. Here’s why I make that assumption.

We’ve said worship could manifest itself in all sorts of actions – raising hands, shouting, violently spinning, kneeling, spontaneously singing, playing music. Some of these actions are pretty loud and might be looked at as just disruptive. Now I’m not lobbying for every church to become a violently spinning church, I’m just saying, there are some of these things we rarely see or do on a Sunday morning. Right? Let’s be clear, this isn’t to say that those who worship loudly have it all over those of us who don’t. I was a member of a church once that was really vocal during services, a hand raising church, a going up to the altar church, and these same questions apply there, too. People just get so used to “worshiping” or really, “doing worship services,” a certain way, that they do it all out of familiarity rather than genuine worship.

So whether the church is wild or calm, I always think it’s interesting that individual worship styles in any given service are so homogenous. Because we’ve said that the worship in any individual’s heart could come out in any of myriad ways, so surely every once in a while somebody would feel a spontaneous desire to show the worship of their heart in a way that doesn’t neatly fit into the order of worship. Why doesn’t that happen?

Worship requires a singular focus on God that allows us to see when He reveals himself and invites us to worship. Do we have that singular focus on a Sunday morning? I think quite often we don’t. I know quite often I don’t. There are lots of reasons for this. We hurry on Sundays. We worry about our kids getting where they need to be. It’s hard to come down from that getting-ready rush to really focus on anything. Plus, some of us do a lot of business at the church. I am usually running around trying to catch nursery volunteers, and many of you are preparing to sing in choir or play piano, others of you are on committees and thinking about whether this or that person will stick around to talk to after the service.

So it’s hard for us to focus for those reasons, but even when we get past that stuff and the service is going on, and during a song or a reading we do feel that focus lock into place and we do want to raise our hands up, or speak, or kneel, or even just close our eyes or cry – we seldom do it, because right then, we start saying “but …” I want to raise my hand, but nobody else is. I want to go down to the altar, but then people will think there’s something wrong. I want to say amen, but that’s just not something we young women do. 

The heart of worship is there, but as soon as we start walking down that road of “but”s, it’s gone. The focus shifts from God straight to us. What will people think of us if we do that, if we express ourselves in those ways? What this comes down to, for me, is that we don’t love each other well enough to worship or to allow one another to worship in front of each other. 

And before I go any further I want to make sure nobody is thinking I’m up here because I’m good at loving or because I’m good at worship. I heard a guy on the news the other day say that the people who write the self help books are the people most in need of help. That’s certainly true here. To be frank, I suck at loving people. I suck at worshiping. But I feel like those are the two things God wants from me. So I think about them all the time.

I have no good reason for not being able to free myself to love others or to worship in church. I don’t have a sob story about the church betraying my trust. That’s probably because I have never offered my trust to a church. Not completely. I have seen bickering and nastiness in churches and instead of walking into it with love and forgiveness I stood outside of it and watched. It’s much easier to judge when you do that.

I shut myself off from the bad, stood apart from it, not realizing that that’s an unkind and unloving way to be, and also not realizing that by standing apart I myself would never be able to gain the full measure of blessing God offers through community with His people, His lovely, imperfect people. So I know what not loving well means. I’m preaching this to myself. And I know everybody doesn’t have these same challenges. But I’m confident everybody does have their own barriers to worship, and I also know I’m not alone in this particular one.

So when I say we don’t love each other well enough to worship or to let each other worship, I’m talking about a specific, very high-dollar brand of love. Christ-like love, the love we’re called to, is more than feeling affinity for others, it’s more than making an extra effort to be nice, and it’s even more than treating others with kindness and generosity. Christ-like love is about freely giving your whole self to the people around you, even when they’re standing there with their knives drawn. It’s not reciprocal. It’s not sensible.

This love is a surrender to God but also to the people around us. It is baring ourselves to one another. This tends to be a problem for every single one of us, because in order to live in society, we have all forged armor for ourselves. We have long ago learned that trust has limits and that broken trust is grounds for revoking love. Other people hurt us, so they are to be feared or at least treated cautiously. We forge armor to defend ourselves from others without fully withdrawing from them. So we learn to stop caring what the people around us think. We learn to look down on others to protect our own self image. We learn not to pick up hitchhikers and not to go to certain parts of town. We learn which types of people we shouldn’t even bother talking to. We learn to hide our eccentricities and our opinions in order to avoid conflict.

Christ-like love requires us to remove that body armor we’ve worked so hard to create. Our heavily armored self says, “If you approach a homeless guy in the street just to talk to him or to ask if you can help him, he might attack you.”

Christ says, “Yep. Do it anyway.”

Our heavily armored self says, “If you give money to a family in need, they might end up stealing from you and using the money for drugs.”

Christ says, “Yep. Do it anyway.”

Those are examples of Christ-like love. They may sound idealistic, but they’re not. Christ-like love means sacrificing yourself for others, whether they have earned your trust or not. Christ-like love is emotionally and physically dangerous. It is. And yet, there’s nothing in the Bible I can think of that exempts us from loving dangerously. In fact, that’s sort of the point. Love costs.

We’re asked to love dangerously outside the walls of this church community, and it sounds pretty much impossible, right? It’s frightening, and I imagine few people would say it takes less than a lifetime to learn. In my opinion, though, one of the purposes of this body of Christ, the church, is to work out that love, to learn and to practice it in a safe environment of trust so we can then take it outside when we go. This would mean checking our armor at the door of the church.

Instead, though, many of us have invited our defenses inside these walls. We have taken our shame of differentness, our concern with propriety, our fear of conflict, our self consciousness – all of these things we’ve built our armor out of – and we’ve invited those feelings into the church. Outside these walls we may feel uncomfortable expressing ourselves, or disagreeing with people, or sharing our thoughts, joys, sadnesses. That sort of fear and discomfort doesn’t belong in here. We are the Body, we are one in the Spirit, we are family. We should not have to feel inhibited by a barrier to love inside these walls. We should be comfortable crying with one another in here – all of us, not just some. We should feel comfortable sharing our struggles and confessing our faults to one another inside these walls. We should be willing to sweat off our makeup or sing badly around one another; we should be able to raise our hands in the air if that’s how we need to praise God, and do it without hesitating because we worry about whether it’s appropriate or what the person behind us will think.

We don’t always love poorly, you know that. We have little triumphs all the time. I’m a member of my church because I’ve seen the people of this church prove they have the hearts to love well. But there are still so many times when all of us, each of us, miss that opportunity to give ourselves to each other, in here. Christ-like love inside the church means not pretending we’re all the same but digging deeper to see God in our differences. And when we find them it means forgiving and working harder to understand one another.

And I want to make clear, I’m not saying that in the church we should not correct one another if we see each other making poor decisions or walking into what we believe is sin. I’m saying we speak the truth in love. That doesn’t mean, “Hey we’re in Sunday School together I can’t remember your kids’ names but I heard you were having marital problems and I saw you at Jefferson’s with a dude I didn’t recognize and it’s my duty as your sister in Christ to let you know what I think of that.” That’s not speaking the truth in love. Speaking the truth in love requires real Christ-like love as a baseline. If that love isn’t there, you’d best keep your truth to yourself, because chances are you’re only sharing it out of concern for yourself anyway.

We don’t automatically love each other just because we go to church together. We have to work at it. And we need it because we can’t worship together without it. When we’re here worrying about what people will think if our dress is riding up, or if the humidity has frizzed out our hair, or if our singing is off, or our kids are misbehaving, or if we’re not sure whether we can say “amen” without attracting too much attention – holy crap. That kind of anxiety is all about US. Fear of judgment is fear for ourselves, and that doesn’t belong inside these walls. That places our focus squarely on US, on self control, self censorship, self protection, and it doesn’t allow us to focus on HIM.

So we all have a responsibility to fix this. We’ve all got to bare ourselves. Each of us has to have the courage to take off the armor and say, Here I am. I will hide nothing, I will share everything, I will show you what I am so I can worship with you however God leads me to do it. And by the same token, we all have to respect each other, to withhold judgment, to embrace rather than attack when we run into difference. That will enable us not only to worship here together, but to love here better, and when we can love in here, we will love better and worship better out there, too.