When I get in the car, and turn the ignition, the radio blasts. I look at the station and I know who drove it last. My kids have music on all the time when they're home. They don't understand how I can like music and love quiet. I like to listen to music. But if my head is already full of other things (which is most of the time) I don't put music on. It competes with what's in my head and I like listening to lyrics.
I had opportunity to try out a top of the line CD player this summer when my kids were home from college. I donned the earphones, inserted the worship cd and bounced around the house oblivious to the rest of the world. Needless to say, my kids were dumbfounded then oddly amused. They didn't invite their friends over that day and I don't think the discussion about playing music will come up again any time soon. But they know I like music, they know I love worship, and maybe someday they'll appreciate the quiet.
Doing makes something more alive than just watching - doing the walkman experience, doing the worship experience. Worship isn't empty words. It isn't something imposed on me from the outside. No one can worship for me. It isn't technical or mechanical. It isn't something I can just talk about because God will require that I do what I say to Him - another mystery.
How much of worship is leadership and muscianship? How much depends on planning, prep and presentation? How much is a group of people actively seeking God with a heart to please Him? How much do we do? How much does God do? Is it enough to worship God because He calls us to, or do we have to come away having "experienced something?" Is it enough to include our children in our worship because God is calling us to or do we have to justify it? Do we have to prove something? Well, God will come looking for fruit...
To bring our children to worship with us requires that we draw them into what we're doing. The experience may be something shared but it will also be something personal. There are elements of mystery, life, impartation that we have no control over and in this day and age that's a tough thing to get your head around. Hurricane Katrina, for example.
How we think about all these things affect what we teach children about worship or rather, how we worship with our children. Complicated? Think simple. We come to bring our thanks and praise and offerings and to tell an awesome God how wonderful He is. We come to listen to His stories. We come to draw near to Him, we expect Him to draw near to us, and we bring our children. We don't have to explain it.
We think simple, maybe mult-sensory but simple. What's important? In it's simplist form what does it look like or sound like or feel like or taste like or smell like to worship God? No, a better question – what does He look like, sound like, feel like, taste like, smell like? We worship Him. But maybe we don't have to know these things. Maybe we don't have to know how. Maybe the how and maybe the impartation comes with just doing.
The growing consensus is that worship and doing is more formational than instruction. If you worship the Living God of the Universe and if you do the things He says, you will come to know Him better and you will become more like Jesus. How? It's a mystery.
We have an hour, 90 minutes, a lifetime. What's important? A visitor or a family comes one time to experience what it is to be part of a people worshipping the Living God and we hope God will meet them (through us or despite us). Our children follow us around all day and we hope God will meet them (through us or despite us). God does what He does, we do what we do and where the two cross is a mystery.
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