His Presence

May this advent season be our opportunity to reflect on his first arrival and rehearse for eternity.

Scriptures referenced in this episode:

John 3:16

I John 4:8

Romans 8:32

Jesus Christ is the Light of the World, and in a season that is more dark than light, more day than night, we look forward to that redeemed city whose light is the Lamb himself.

Scriptures referenced in this episode:

John 8:12

John 9:4-5

Revelation 21

I Thessalonians 5:5

In John’s gospel, Jesus Christ declares that he is the Bread of Life, and he came that we may have life to the full.

Scriptures referenced in this episode:

John 6:35

John 10:10

Exodus 16

We rarely celebrate well. Maybe it’s because we’re afraid of being seen as arrogant. Maybe we’re afraid of looking foolish. But giving God the glory for every blessing means celebrating our own weakness. And that is true worship.

The common thread the Holy Spirit seems to be weaving throughout this class is the idea that true worship requires humility and trust in the Lord. And I don’t believe the subject of grief and lament is any different. I fear that our desire to shut down negative emotions rather than let them change us is tangled up in our worship of our own comfort and a lack of trust that God will not leave us in the pit forever.

Lament is true worship when we acknowledge that we cannot soothe pain in our own and we join God in his sorrow over a broken, fallen world.

Rest is true worship because it requires trust that there will still be time and energy left to accomplish what needs to get done. It asks that we believe God really has given us everything and will continue to do so. It means we have to realize that we can do nothing on our own. We rest to recharge but also to remember. It’s hard to remember who God is, what he’s done, and what we are really here for if we’re too overwhelmed by our own to-do list. We have to create space on purpose. Rest has to be intentional. And it’s very hard to do.

From the life of King David, we learn that we cannot get by on the sacrifices of others and we cannot offer to God anything that costs us nothing.

Often, our appropriate responses to God are both acts of worship to our Creator AND ways that we become like him. Jesus Christ showed us the perfect examples of humility, praise, and thanksgiving. We sacrifice because the Father sacrificed his own Son, and the Son sacrificed his life, for us. We rest because God rested. We lament because Christ wept over the darkness and brokenness of a world that is not as it should be. We celebrate because our God is joyful. And we are faithful to God and to each other because he has shown us that faithfulness is love.

Once we realize that every good thing we have is a GIFT from God that we should simply posture ourselves to receive, we will be compelled to give thanks. Too often, the thing standing in the way of our worship is our reliance on ourselves. There’s no call to give thanks for things we think we have earned on our own. If we think we can handle it, we don’t need to give thanks to God. We have to realize our own need in order to truly worship.

The goal of this series is to explore what worship really looks like in the everyday, ordinary parts of our lives, trusting that God will meet us there. We’ve been looking at the life of David, seeing him Praise the Lord and submit to Him in Humility. This is a story of a time when David didn’t get it right, at least not the first time. It was his humility and praise of God as the Almighty, that led him to recognize his own sin and confess it. In Psalm 51, he brings his sin to the Lord, claims responsibility, and then asks God to transform his heart. He understands that the Holy Spirit brings internal change, not him. And he asks God to create in him a clean heart so that he can worship.

Scriptures referenced in this episode:

2 Samuel 11-12

Psalm 51

Exodus 34