Finding True Reality
Before We Gather by Zach Hicks
| Scripture
Read Psalm 73:1-5, 13-17
| Devotion
For the people of God, it is often the case that even just one week of living, Monday through Saturday, has the power to beat the reality out of us. Christians believe that reality is ultimately what God says. Deepest reality – the deepest truth about the way things are isn’t ultimately what others say it is or what we feel it is. It’s popular these days to talk about “my reality” or “my truth,” as if reality is something personal and impenetrable. God contests the idea of “my reality” and “my truth” not because he doesn’t care about how we experience our lives but because if our reality isn’t grounded in his, we are living in a delusion that is unhealthy for us and ultimately will be our undoing.
But again, Monday through Saturday has a way of beating reality out of us. In response to threats that squelch human flourishing, culture can’t help but flip into hysterics. And this frenzied activity, peddled and chronicled on social media, reported in news cycles, and buzzed about in coffee shops, phone calls, happy hours, and office chit-chat-it all has a way of turning reality upside down. We get confused. We call good “evil,” and evil “good.” We lose our grip on Cod. Given all this craziness, is God really real? Is God really good? Is God really as powerful as he says he is? Is God really working? I don’t see it. I’m struggling to believe it.
That doubt about God’s reality can sometimes move from the cosmic to the personal. We notice the unfairness of life when we compare our experience with others’. We perceive little injustices in our own worlds. Why is it that people doing the wrong thing seem to have all the privilege and power? Why am I, desperately trying to do the right thing, always struggling, straining, hustling, scraping? It’s not fair. God, if you are who you say you are, and if reality is what you say it is, why can’t I see it? Why does reality seem to contradict what you say are your ways?
Psalm 73 is the prayer of someone who feels all of this, maybe more. In the psalm we find a bold, audacious doubter splatter- ing all that jumbled mess of thoughts, emotions, and heartache onto the floor and saying, “Sec, God, look at this!” The psalm’s complaint sounds much like what we described a second ago: “God, it seems like all the bad people, the people who don’t care one bit about following your ways, have all the happiness, all the peace, all the money, all the ease, all the prosperity. I thought life in you was supposed to be a life of blessing, God! Why?” And the psalm even moves beyond complaint to despair: “All in vain have I kept my heart clean” (v. 13). “It has all been for nothing, God. Why do I even try?”
But then a crazy turning point happens. An unexpected one. The psalmist (Asaph) stops and prays: “But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God” (vv. 16-17). His turning point came when he stopped trying to figure it out and simply went to the place of gathered worship, the place where God’s Word can set right all the false realities that spin us out of control during the week.
Worship, in this light, is like a decompression chamber for human beings who have been suffocating in the atmospheric imbalances created by distorted realities. Whether it’s the world perpetuating those realities (as in social media) or it’s our own flesh (as in the psalmist’s temptation to complain about good things happening to had people), we have a hard time breathing in these compressed realities because our lungs were designed by our maker for a certain atmosphere-a Holy Spirit atmosphere–where God is the air we breathe. We weren’t meant to live on false realities; we were meant to live by every word that comes from the mouth of God (Matt. 4:4). The big “aha” moment of the psalm comes when the psalmist says, “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (v. 26).
Worship should be, and is, the place where true reality-the way things really are gets reestablished. Worship is the place where God’s Word is reopened, where the values of his kingdom are reasserted, where his promises of what will be are respoken, and where our orientation in and around those things is realigned. But it isn’t easy or formulaic. It’s hard, gritty work. It’s the work of faith, prayer, and praise, all of which ultimately are gifts of God. And so we go to our knees and ask God to do what only he can do, for our own sakes and for the sakes of our brothers and sisters who will be gathering to worship with us.
| Prayer
Aim your prayers in this direction:
- Pray that in all the elements of worship – praying, singing, preaching, sacraments – God’s Spirit would send forth his Word in such power that all our false realities would be addressed and undone and God’s reality would be reestablished.
- Pray especially for individuals who are on the brink of losing control because their reality has so disoriented them. Pray that they would be addressed by Cod in worship and connected with another believer before they leave.