Worship as Confrontation
Before We Gather by Zach Hicks
| Scripture
Read Psalm 115:1-8
| Devotion
Worship is a place we go to have the sense knocked back into us. Why in the world would we need to sing a song like “not to us, O LORD, not to us, but to your name give glory” unless we actually entertained crazy thoughts like, “I should receive glory”?
Monday through Saturday knocks us around and fills our minds and hearts with all kinds of competing truth claims, distorted identities, and false promises. We begin to think lies are truth and the truth is a sham. Think, for instance, about how counterintuitive Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom of God is. When he says things like you must receive the kingdom of God like little children (Matt. 11:25; 19:14) or the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed (Matt. 13:31-32), it is so shocking, so opposite of what we think of when we think of kingdoms. When we think of kingdoms, we think of forceful power. We think of military might. We think of conquest.
But think about it. Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom of God shouldn’t be surprising or counterintuitive. His kingdom is the creation God intended-the way it should have always been. That it is so shocking to us should tell us something both about our broken world and about the sin-distorted way we often process it. And this is where worship steps in. Weekly, gathered worship is, in a sense, an embassy of God’s kingdom. It’s heavenly soil on earthly territory. It’s a place where the future is present for the experiencing.
Worship is like smelling salts, waking us up from our delusional swoon state, turning what we think of as our world upside down so we can see things the way God created us to see them- right side up.
Psalm 115:4-6 has us singing some right-side-up truth:
Their idols are silver and gold,
the work of human hands.
They have mouths, but do not speak;
eyes, but do not see.
They have ears, but do not hear;
noses, but do not smell.
One of the jobs of worship is to confront our idolatry and call out the silliness of it all. In the ancient Near East, people were fully convinced that faces molded from silver and gold had special power to do godlike things for them. And so their idolatry needed to be put in its place: “It’s just metal. And metal can’t save you.”
But we too come into worship having placed our trust in all kinds of things that can’t save us. Perhaps we’ve poured our hope into our intelligence, thinking that our intellects will provide us with better jobs and more prestige. Perhaps we’ve poured our hope into our money, thinking that it can offer us lasting safety and security. Perhaps we’ve poured our hope into a key relationship that we either possess or wish we had, thinking that it can offer us the love and peace that have been so elusive.
And worship steps in to say, “It’s all metal. It can’t live up to the job description of Almighty God.” You see, we come to worship to be arrested by a vision of God so glorious that it obliterates all the other vain pursuits and calls them out as idolatry.
This all sounds pretty harsh, doesn’t it? Who wants to participate in something so brutal? But thankfully, when the idols have been torn down, the God we find on the other side is a tender, loving Father. He’s not wagging his finger or saying. “I told you so.” Instead, in Christ, he’s extending his arms with a loud “I love you” and a warm “welcome home.”
This journey-from idol obliteration to divine embrace-is the journey on which every weekly worship service should take us. It’s the journey of repenting again, believing the gospel again, returning to God… again. This is a journey so complex and so deep that only the Spirit can lead us. We can’t manufacture it or plan for it. We can only yield to it. And so we go to prayer, inviting, asking, begging the Spirit to do what only he can do.
| Prayer
Aim your prayers in this direction:
- Pray that worship would feel like a safe space for people to let their guard down and be honest before the Lord and one another.
- Pray that God would graciously confront your idols, both individually and corporately, in gathered worship this week.
- Pray that God would send his mighty Holy Spirit to make Jesus more appealing and his kingdom more compelling than all the other lesser things onto which you hold.