Year: 2018

Categories
Worship

Are you trying to “get the feeling again” during worship?

man standing with uplifted hands during a sunset - symbolizing our search for a feeling during worship

Sometimes (maybe even too often) when we come to worship, we have come looking for an emotional experience… some aspect of having a specific feeling. Is that what worship is supposed to do – to give us an emotional high? Are you coming to worship in an attempt to have your heart-strings pulled?

Alistair Begg discusses his thoughts about those who say to him something along the lines of: “I’m just trying to get the feeling again.”

…I meet with people every week who think this is the answer to their spiritual impoverishment – if only they could get the feeling again.

…If you come to church on a Sunday for the feeling, I guarantee you that 9 Sundays out of 10, you’re going to go away disappointed. We have to acknowledge that we come to worship on the Lord’s Day in all kinds of conditions of heart & life.

…If you came hoping for your favorite instruments to get the feeling back again, then you might be disappointed; If you came hoping to sing your five favorite songs, you might be disappointed; If you came for anything other than truth to transform, then you may wait for a long time. And only the truth transforms and stays, because the feeling goes as the music dies.

When you attend worship with your church family, is it to experience some elusive emotion or feeling again, or is it to meet with God’s people as a family and hear the truth that has the power to transform your life? As we grow in our maturity, we should realize that our primary concern in worship should not be to have our emotions stirred, but for us to better know the truth of God’s Word. And what we will find is that if we better know God’s Word and embrace the truths there, then worship will automatically affect our emotions because we will be in awe at the grace of Jesus to rescue sinners like us. God’s truth is sufficient to impact us powerfully and to transform our lives.  

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Categories
Worship

Awe Problems Are All Around Us

“You don’t have to look very far to see awe problems everywhere around you.”

photo of person standing on mountain looking into a lush valley symbolizing the fact that our awe problem can cause us to find delight in the wrong things

My last two posts were connected to Paul David Tripp’s book, Awe. (You can read them by following these links: Post 1 and Post 2.) Today, I want to share what he says about Awe Problems – how looking for awe in the wrong places will lead us into sin:

In the heart of a sinner, awe of God is very quickly replaced by awe of self. This is the great war of wars. You don’t have to look very far to see awe problems everywhere around you.

Adultery is an awe problem. To the degree that you forget God’s glory as the Creator of your body and his place as owner of every aspect of your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual personhood, to that degree it is easier to use the members of your body to get whatever pleasure your heart craves.

Debt is an awe problem. When your mind is blown away by the thought that God provides everything you have, that every good gift really does come from him, you are predisposed to be a good steward of the things he has provided.

Obsession with the collection of possessions is the result of an awe amnesia that makes you ask of things what you will only ever get from the God of glory, who alone can satisfy your searching heart.

Living for power and control is an awe problem. When you live with the rest and peace that come from keeping the power, authority, and sovereignty of God before your eyes, you don’t need to work yourself into control over the people and situations in your life.

Gluttony and obesity are awe problems. When you forget the glory of the satisfying grace of the Redeemer, you are susceptible to letting things like food and drink become your temporary replacement messiahs.

Fear of man is an awe problem. When I forget that God’s glory defines not only him but who I have become as his child, I look to people to give me meaning, purpose, and identity.

The awe war is everywhere. So I know that in ministry I will be preaching, teaching, and encouraging people who are awe forgetful, awe discouraged, awe empty, awe deceived, awe seduced, awe kidnapped, and awe weary. My job is to give them eyes to see the awesome glory of God—his glorious grace, wisdom, power, faithfulness, sovereignty, patience, kindness, mercy, and love.

I hope that today, your eyes will be open to see how awesome God is, so that you can replace your own awe problems by looking at the glory, grace, and might of our wonderful Savior!

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Categories
Worship

Awe Shapes the Direction of Your Life

Where you look for awe will shape the direction of your life.

My last post indicated that the awesome things of this earth are signposts pointing to our awesome Creator.
grand teton mountain range at sunset to symbolize awe-inspiring things that provide direction as to what we care about
Today I want to share a bit more from Paul David Tripp’s book, Awe.

It just makes sense that your source of awe will control you, your decisions, and the course your story takes. For example, if you live in awe of material things, you will spend lots of money acquiring a pile of material stuff. To afford your ever-increasing pile, you will have to work a lot. You will also tend to attach your identity and inner sense of peace to material possessions, spending way too much time collecting and maintaining them. If material things are your awe source, you will neglect other things of value and won’t ever be fully satisfied, because these material things just don’t have the capacity to satisfy your awe-longing heart. Yes, your house will be big, your car will be luxurious, and you will be surrounded with beautiful things, but your contentment in areas that really count will be small.

Awe stimulates the greatest joys and deepest sorrows in us all.
…When you say, “If only I had _______,” how do you fill in the blank?

What are you willing to make sacrifices for, and what in your life just doesn’t seem worth the effort? Look at your highest joys and deepest sorrows, and you will find where you reach for awe. Take anger, for example. Think of how little of your anger in the last couple months had anything at all to do with the kingdom of God. You’re not generally angry because things are in the way of God and his kingdom purposes. You’re angry because something or someone has gotten in the way of something you crave, something you think will inspire contentment, satisfaction, or happiness in you. Your heart is desperate to be inspired, and you get mad when your pursuits are blocked. Where you look for awe will fundamentally control the thoughts and emotions of your heart in ways you normally don’t even realize.

Therefore, we need to stop looking for awe in the created things, and allow the wonder of the created things to lead us to look for awe in Him.

What are some things that create a sense of awe in you that point you toward the Creator?

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Categories
Worship

Developing Your Heart Involves Increasing Your Awe

To follow up on my previous post about developing your heart, I want to share with you a few excerpts from Paul David Tripp’s book, Awe. I find that I connected with his introductory remarks about himself, as it well-described both where I am and where I need to be:

I wrote this book for me because, at this point in my life, I am more aware than ever that I have a fickle and wandering heart. I wish I could say that every moment I enjoy some created thing initiates in me a deeper worship of the Creator, but it doesn’t….

I wrote this book for me because I am aware that I need to spend more time gazing upon the beauty of the Lord. I need to put my heart in a place where it can once again be in awe of the grandeur of God that reaches far beyond the bounds of the most expressive words in the human vocabulary. I need awe of him to recapture, refocus, and redirect my heart again and again. And I need to remember that the war for the awe of my heart still wages inside me.

I wrote this book for me because I came to see that I was wired for awe. …But I wasn’t just wired for awe. I was wired for awe of God. No other awe satisfies the soul. No other awe can give my heart the peace, rest, and security that it seeks.

…The war that rages in my heart rages in yours as well. Things in the creation not only capture me, they capture you too. Like me, you need to spend more time gazing upon the awesome beauty of your Lord so that your heart will remember and, in remembering, be rescued.

God intentionally loaded the world with amazing things to leave you astounded. The carefully air-conditioned termite mound in Africa, the tart crunchiness of an apple, the explosion of thunder, the beauty of an orchid, the interdependent systems of the human body, the inexhaustible pounding of the ocean waves, and thousands of other created sights, sounds, touches, and tastes—God designed all to be awesome. And he intended you to be daily amazed.
sunset over lake to point out that awe of creation should point to the Creator
But remember – Every created awe is meant to point you to the Creator.

…No awesome thing in creation was meant to give you what only the Creator is able to give. Every awesome thing in creation is designed to point you to the One who alone is worthy of capturing and controlling the awe of your searching and hungry heart.

As it is true of a street sign, so it is true of every jaw-dropping, knee-weakening, silence-producing, wonder-inspiring thing in the universe. The sign is not the thing you are looking for. No, the sign points you to what you are looking for. So you can’t stop at the sign, for it will never deliver what the thing it is pointing to will deliver.

Created awe has a purpose; it is meant to point you to the place where the awe of your heart should rest. If awesome things in creation become your god, the God who created those things will not own your awe.

Horizontal awe is meant to do one thing: stimulate vertical awe.

May you “deepen your awe of your Redeemer, and may your heart be rescued, satisfied, and glad.”

May this become true of me – that I deepen my awe of my Redeemer!

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Categories
Christian Living

Is Your Heart Big or Small? Is it Growing or Shrinking?

C. S. Lewis is one of my favorite authors. His book, The Abolition of Man, talks about the failure of society in making a “good man” due to fact that we aren’t developing men with “heart.”

(As we are entering the Christmas season, let me point out that The Grinch was said to have a heart two sizes too small!)
a picture of The Grinch showing his heart was two sizes too small

It is interesting that Lewis is talking about this 75 years ago, and yet we still have the same problem today. And perhaps it’s even gotten worse.

Lewis indicates that [The heart of man is between one’s mind and one’s gut] “…between cerebral man and visceral man.” And that “by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.” And so we need men with “heart.”
I agree. We need men with a passion for God and a passion for people.
We need people with hearts of love for their fellow man.

His critique is that the way society educates people is by only dealing with their intellect. By doing so, we produce “what may be called Men without Chests.” Men without heart.

Again, I agree. We are not producing people with heart and passion. One of the clearest examples that I regularly encounter is when I hear people speaking about the disappearance of patriotism. I hear people discussing the fact that people used to love this country and volunteer to go off to war because of their heart for this nation. Certainly there are many reasons why this has changed, but it is clearly true that we don’t have the same “heart” and “passion” for this nation as was once found among the people.

We are still teaching math, but we no longer do much teaching in regard to character. We don’t seem to be teaching a love for God nor a love for people.

Lewis indicates that our problem is “not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion.” While it seems to us that their brains are very big which provide them with what seems to us as large heads, in reality, “Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.”

Ha Ha! He is so good with words — pointing out that the reason their heads look so big to us is simply that their chests (their hearts) are so small.

But here is what I think is most important and so very true for us today:
       “The tragi-comedy of our situation is that we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible.” Wow. That’s exactly what we were dealing with today. We have comedic movies and TV shows about men who treat women poorly, and then we are surprised when we find Hollywood filled with men who abuse women. We haven’t helped people develop the right heart.

“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect them to have virtue and enterprise. We laugh at the idea of honor and then we are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

When we remove God from our midst, when we tell people that character and heart isn’t needed, then we enter a losing battle regarding morality. We have educated people who do not know why they should live in a moral manner.

How well are you developing your heart? What are you doing to improve the size of your emotion, your heart, your chest? My next post will post a bit of instruction on the need for the awe of God to expand our hearts and chests.

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