Inadequate Worship

As you’ve probably heard already, this Sunday is Easter.  That’s a pretty big deal for us Christians since the Resurrection is the crux of our belief.  If it wasn’t for Jesus walking out of that tomb, we would have no hope or joy.  In fact, we would have no salvation and our faith would be in vain (1 Corinthians 15:14-17).

Because of the immensity of the Truth that this day represents, Christian churches all around the world put a lot of time, energy and, hopefully, prayer into the planning of their Easter services.  I know this is true of the services at First Baptist.

I have been given the amazing privilege and responsibility to preach in our church’s contemporary service, DOXA, while our pastor has been recovering from heart surgery.  Since he’s still trying to take it slow, I’ll be preaching in DOXA on Easter.  I’m really excited about this, but I’m also a little overwhelmed by the nature of this Sunday.

During the past 2 months,  I’ve meet weekly with our DOXA Worship Pastor, Mike Williams, to plan each Sunday’s worship service.  This morning the schedule was no different.   We met at 9am at a local coffee joint to pray and seek God’s wisdom and creativity as we began to sculpt worship for this upcoming Sunday.  What was different, though, was how inadequate our plans for Easter Worship seemed!  Our heart is to clearly present the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the amazing, indescribable, unimaginable TRUTH of the resurrection!  In our desire to build a service that equips the believer and brings glory to God through the celebration of Easter it became abundantly clear that we couldn’t do it.  We could not plan a worship service that would adequately present the total amazingness (not a word) of the resurrection.

Here’s what’s so cool about this.  During our planning time, I started to get frustrated!  I wanted everything to be “just right” but everything we planned seemed to be lacking.  It was at this moment, though, that my frustration turned to worship when I remembered a phrase from Francis Chan’s book “Crazy Love.”  In the first chapter, Francis wrote,

Many spirit-filled authors have exhausted the thesaurus in order to describe God with the glory He deserves.  His perfect holiness, by definition, assures us that our words can’t contain Him.  Isn’t it a comfort to worship a God we cannot exaggerate?

Our corporate worship times, no matter how much energy, effort and planning we put into them, will ALWAYS be inadequate!  This isn’t just true for Easter Sunday, but for every Sunday of the year!  Every worship planning session I’m apart of should be filled with awe and wonder as we are continually reminded that we can never do or say enough to completely glorify God the way he deserves.

Thankfully, his glory doesn’t depend on my vocabulary.  Nor is it based on the song list Mike develops.  It’s not even diminished or increased by the videos we use.  God’s glory just is.  It’s here.  It’s big. It’s truly indescribable.  And I think this understanding is what God desires from us; understanding that we can’t define him.  We can’t design a worship service that completely demonstrates his glory.

So, this fact that we are incapable of giving him the complete glory he deserves, should be exactly what draws us into true worship – the kind of worship God desires.

My prayer for DOXA and every other Christian worship gathering this Sunday (and every Sunday!) is that we will be overwhelmed by the greatness of  God, aware of our inability to describe him and, therefore, fully drawn into the worship of the One who defeated death.

~ by joshephillips on March 29, 2010.