WonderfulWorship in a Nutshell

I found this great site called wordle.net that lets you enter any amount of text and it will create a “tag cloud” for your text.

I copied the entire text of the WonderfulWorship discussions and let Wordle go to work. I ended up removing a lot of extraneous words like user names, “link” “post” and things that weren’t relevant to the topic. I also cut the number of instances of “worship” and “God” in half, because those two words were so large you couldn’t read any of the others.

I love looking at the words that were present enough times to make the list. Things like “think”, “feel”, “kneel”, “submission”,”experience”.

Take a look, and try it yourself. Link to any creations you make. Here’s my del.icio.us tag cloud.

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Several months ago MrPages and I started a WonderfulWorship discussion, and then it dwindled off. We feel we owe an apology of sorts to those who joined in.

We started off asking what worship in the Sunday morning congregation should be. The discussions were awesome. We began to passionately search out information that would help answer this question.

What we found was an answer that has completely terrified us.

We wanted to know what worship should and could be.

God asked us, instead, what His church should and could be.

The answers we’re finding are disturbing.

The ramifications could change the very nature of our comfortable suburban lifestyle.

And we are scared. And excited. And scared.

[[MrPages note: to see the end results of our quest, check out the "Home Church" category!]]

Okay, not chocolate. But if it were chocolate, that would be the only way it could be better than this: Free worship stuff!

Sovereign Grace Ministries recently opened their entire resource library for free download.

Many of the conference messages also have a PDF of the notes handed out by the speaker. If you like, you can buy the messages on CD as well.

Sovereign Grace hosts an annual worship conference, so there are dozens and dozens of great sermons about worship, and practical discussions about being a musician and writing songs to check out.

The conference I was talking about in my last post is here.

WonderfulWorship is a discussion on worship among a number of interested bloggers. Want to join in?

I’ve always had a fascination with the Psalms. The psalmist seems to have gone through just about the entire range of human emotion. You can’t discuss worship at all without referencing the Psalms. You want to talk action? Passion? Heartbreak? Faith? Love? Disappointment? Joy? It’s all in there.

Discussion Point #4 - Tell us about your favorite Psalm.

Is one particular page of the Psalms in your bible a little more worn than others? Paraphrase it in your own personal version. Talk about why a particular Psalm is meaningful to you. Tell us what a Psalm means exegetically. Tell us about a song you love (or that you wrote) based on a Psalm. The sky’s the limit, as long as it has something to do with a single Psalm helping your personal worship.

Pray about your responses, and post them next week (but before Thursday, July 26th). Send me the link to your post on your blog and I’ll create an entry here on Thursday, July 26th with a list of them all. If you wish to include a quick bio or introduction, feel free. This may be some people’s first visit to your site.

Sorry for the delay, things have been pretty busy around here, and for some of you as well. Rather than stress anyone or make anyone feel that they couldn’t participate, I bumped it a week.

timheerebout, who writes the newly created Unceasing Worship blog, has taken up the challenge of answering the difficult first question of the WonderfulWorship series.

His post can be found here.

Thanks timheerabout! I love the passion, and the focus on continuous action. I look forward to hearing more from you.

Okay, I’m late with my submission, but I have been having a great amount of difficulty figuring out what to write about.

Every time I thought of a “great” worship experience, it was in a corporate setting. That wasn’t the assignment. Thinking back through my memories, I couldn’t recall a moment of personal worship.

Then I started wondering about how worship actually feels! Somehow, in my mind I’ve connected praise with worship. Worship is that “feel good” emotion I have about the good things God is doing in my life.

Yet, that’s not what we’ve been talking about here at WonderfulWorship. Worship is about prostration and obedience. Worship is how we humble ourselves before a God who knows all about us and still desires to have us by His side. The God of the universes desires us to serve alongside of Him.

So in that light, my most profound worship experiences have had nothing to do with praise. On the contrary, my most profound worship experiences have me groveling on my knees in utter humiliation, accepting that I am incapable of creating anything on my own that has lasting significance.

I have fought with depression for many years. While I am mostly an overcomer in this area, the war has never been won, and probably will not be until He calls me home.

As I look back at my most meaningful personal times with God, they usually occur in a dark bedroom, as I wrest with evil thoughts that have no place in a believer’s mind. Tears and anger, angst and shame, thoughts of death and endings filled my mind. And then in a moment of divine care, I have cast my self down on the floor (literally) and cried out to God to release me from all that haunts me.

And He has never failed to surround me with His presence!

He has not usually removed the problems. Satan’s minions, or my own mind, still continue to whisper the horrid doubts. Yet, among the turmoil, I have clung to my Maker and found peace. I have dried the tears and turned away from the evil thoughts. I have opened the Word and forced myself to believe that it is true for me.

I am here writing this today, because in the darkness moments of my life, I have somehow found the power to worship Him, and He has carried me through. He has been so gracious to me. I am alive today, because He cares for me.

I humbled myself in the dark on my knees and He lifted me up. (James 4:10)

We continue WonderfulWorship this week with the topic “Tell us about your personal worship.”.

In response:

• Ash answers a Tough Question.
• Barbara thinks This Topic Is Too Hard.
• MrPages pulls worship Out of These Stones.
• MrsPages with her late entry about Worship in the Dark.

Please feel free to comment on these posts and ask questions, even if you didn’t submit an entry!

If you have a late entry, feel free to submit it using the Contact Us link and I’ll post it or add it here!

Also, make sure you check back to the older posts in the series, there are some fantastic comments happening.

Next Thursday (July12th, 2007) the next topic for discussion will be posted if you want to join in!

This week’s question was much harder for me to answer than the last couple (so I probably won’t be as eloquent and definitely not as waxy), but I couldn’t quite figure out why it was so different. I’m not a terribly private person, so it isn’t the sharing of the intimate details of my life; and I’m not much prone to putting on a public face for people (not MUCH, let’s be honest!), so I don’t mind saying that I haven’t arrived. So, what’s the problem!?! What does my personal worship look like? Why can’t I describe
it?

The first thing I realized was that somewhere, not so deep down, I still think that real worship is supposed to be a primarily emotional experience. I usually don’t feel worship-y throughout my days, I don’t get that tingly feeling for the most part, and I rarely break into spontaneous singing. So, what part of my day is worship? All this talk and I still have old misconceptions hanging on. Rats. So, what does my personal worship look like?

And that’s it, my personal worship doesn’t LOOK like anything. My personal worship looks like me going through the motions of my everyday life. My personal worship IS the stubborn remembering that God is the reason that I’m doing stuff and He’s worth my best efforts in all the stuff that I’m doing every moment of every day. It’s trying to keep God in the forefront of my mind as I’m doing life. It’s having conversations with God in the bathroom (hey, everyone has their place!) about the deep things of life and His plans for me. It’s having short mental chit-chats about little things like the radio announcer or dishes. It’s the Holy Spirit reminding me, and me agreeing, that even when I don’t feel like it, I need to do my best at whatever God has asked me to do because that’s the very least that He is worthy of.

My personal worship is spending my days with God. Asking Him things and expecting Him to answer. Stubbornly remembering that He is worth me sticking to what He has called me even when it’s hard and I want something easier (or faster). It’s sensing and responding to what He wants me to do next. And saying sorry when I don’t. My personal worship is trying to live every step of every day as though God is with me.

Because He Is.

As part of WonderfulWorship, as discussion on worship among some interested bloggers, I want to talk about personal worship experiences.

I am a pretty visual/tactile person. I like having mental images of things to shore up an important concept.

The most powerful image I have is one that I recall when I am feeling unworthy or unwilling to worship God. It was created at a concert by a local Christian artist named Jon Buller, who ran free music nights every month at a local theater. I think it still qualifies as “personal worship” because I don’t think it had much to do with the rest of the crowd, it wasn’t a corporate experience, and there was no real “congregation” as much as a cheering crowd of fans. I felt like I was alone in the experience, and it has kept me worshipping personally for years, so I’m going to say it’s “personal worship”. So there.

The band was playing a song called Here By The Water by Steve Bell

Soft field of clover, moon shining over the valley
Joining the song of the river to the great giver of the great good

As it enfolds me, somehow it holds me together
I realize I’ve been singing, Still it comes ringing, Clearer than clear

And here by the water
I’ll build an altar to praise Him
Out of the stones that I’ve found here
I’ll set them down here
Rough as they are
Knowing You can make them holy
Knowing You can make them holy
Knowing You can make them holy

I think how a yearning has kept on returning to move me
Down roads I’d never have chosen, half the time frozen, too numb to feel
I know it was stormy, I hope it was for me learning
Blood on the road wasn’t mine though, someone that I know has walked here before

It was the first time I’d heard the song, and the lyrics just grabbed me. As the song went on, I completely zoned out. I had an incredibly clear image of being by a large tree by a riverside. It was pouring down with rain, and my loose, white clothes were stuck to my back and my hair was in strings, leading water to run down my face. I was scrabbling around in slippery clay mud, using my fingers to dig large rocks out of the clay. When I had one I would crawl over to a pile I had made and stack it up. Water and mud were everywhere, and I was cold and wet and my hands were wrinkled and sore, but I kept scraping away the clay and mud to get rocks to pile up to make an altar because it was all that I had. I just knew that this was exactly what God wanted, that this was what I was supposed to do. When my attention came back to the theater, there were tears streaming down my face and I was laughing out loud.

I knew, deep down in my being and with no doubt that wherever I was and whatever was going on, I could worship. Worship is about taking what’s around you and giving it to God, offering whatever you’ve got as a sacrifice, no matter how little or how much it might be. Trying to make a perfect altar is nothing but embarrassing hubris. My offerings will always be stacks of muddy rocks before my God, but He asks me to keep building them.

Whenever I get into my “I’m not feeling good enough to worship” or “this isn’t a good enough offering to bring” moods, I recall this vivid vision of being in the mud, wet and cold, stacking uneven flat rocks and *knowing* that it was a pleasing altar to God. I can go back to that place and truly worship in the real “get down on your face and acknowledge his power and mercy” sense of the word. And now I know that this is all I can ever do, and it’s all I ever need to do.

It isn’t me that makes the offering perfect. It isn’t me that makes the altar holy.

WonderfulWorship is a discussion on worship among a number of interested bloggers. Want to join in?

Okay, We discussed what worship is theoretically. There seemed to be common agreement that corporate worship is an extension of, a culmination of daily personal worship. Now, the rubber meets the road.

Discussion Point #3 - Tell us about your personal worship.

Tell us about your daily routine. Tell us about a single particularly important moment when you felt you were truly worshipping. Tell us about how you think you should worship even if you aren’t. Choose anything around this topic that you like, but tell us about your personal worship. We’ll talk about corporate experiences later, this is purely personal.

Pray about your responses, and post them next week (but before Thursday, July 5th). Send me the link to your post on your blog and I’ll create an entry here on Thursday, July5th with a list of them all. If you wish to include a quick bio or introduction, feel free. This may be some people’s first visit to your site.

If that deadline is too short, given the long weekend both in Canada and the US, please let me know, I may extend the deadline a week. I don’t want to stress anyone, and I do want to hear from as many of you as possible.