Gasping in Worship
I don’t do it a lot but I have heard a couple of things recently that have made me gasp. It’s the only word for it. The first was the discovery that there is a seabird, the sooty tern, that is able to fly without a break for ten years. Ten years! It puts people’s complaints about the length of the flight to Australia into perspective! And then I was hearing some more about space. Space always blows my mind but it was the information that our own back yard, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light years in diameter. To spell it out if you could travel at the speed of light, which travels at about 671 million miles per hour, then it would take you 100,000 years to complete the journey. And, wait for it, our wonderful galaxy is believed to be one of 80 billion galaxies in the universe. If you are not gasping at this moment, then try reading the last three sentences again!
Baptists have acquired a name for encouraging intimacy and warmth in worship. There is much that is excellent about this. The miracle of the Incarnation is that God became man and lived here on this earth, experiencing the full human range of joy and disappointment. We worship a God who, in the Lord Jesus Christ, has entered our world in the most intimate way and it is absolutely right that our services of worship should reflect this. But if we fail to gasp at the greatness of our majestic Creator God then we are missing out on so much.
Both insights must be held together - the majestic awesomeness and the loving intimacy of God. Our public worship must surely reflect both. We need to encourage and pray for those who have the huge privilege of leading worship. This is not a task that should be put into someone’s hands simply because they have learnt a few guitar chords. It is a responsibility which needs to be taken with delight and great seriousness. No one should dare to lead worship until they have first of all worshipped for themselves. They need to have experienced both the encircling arms of a loving Heavenly Father and the mind-blowing greatness of their Creator God.
But these wonderful insights must not be restricted to public worship. They need to inspire and challenge us in our daily living. For the God who meets us with our Christian brothers and sisters on a Sunday, is the God who meets us in our homes, our places of work, our places of leisure and our communities. Day by day we should expect to find evidence of both his intimate nearness and his awesome greatness.
May God bless you – and set you free to gasp more and more!
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