Re-ordering Worship [part 1]: Choosing Life
I love the mess of gatherings when amidst the declarations of God’s goodness, the sound of voices singing, or even the silence of hushed adoration, stuff happens. And to be honest I’ve seen a lot of stuff happen when the church gathers like this: shaking, and roaring and flipping and falling and crying and laughing and barking, and even occasionally people getting out of wheelchairs and dancing. Dramatic or gentle, noisy or silent, when the Spirit is moving and we are being changed, what’s not to love?
Yet although these times can have lots of messiness, bizarrely, it is God’s order that is being re-established.
People understand Genesis 2&3 in a variety of ways. I personally see a deep resonance between the story of Adam and the Garden Sanctuary with the story of Solomon and the Temple Sanctuary, and so for me Genesis 3 is not so much the historical account of a one-off event where sin came into the perfect Genesis 2 world. Rather, the whole Genesis 2&3 story presents a choice that God presents his people throughout the bible, and continues to present to us today.
In Genesis 2, humans are created to surrender to the kingship of God and his sovereign rule, experiencing intimacy with God, and living life abundantly with God. They understand their own royal identity and dominion over creation, and in exercising that dominion they care for and work the earth extending the order and abundance of the garden beyond it’s boundaries. This is the way of life.
Yet in Genesis 3 Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This was expressly forbidden and was sin. Yet this is far more than just a momentary lapse: it is a rejection of God as King. Adam and Eve believe they can exercise dominion over the earth without surrendering to the sovereignty of God. The result is catastrophic. Instead of them having dominion over creation, creation itself takes control of them: work becomes toilsome and childbirth becomes painful. This is the way of death. It’s death, not primarily because they fail morally, or even because they are making a choice between ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’, but because they turn away from their human identity and purpose.
So the choice that the Genesis 2&3 narrative presents me with is the choice between the way of life — where I continually re-establish God’s kingship over me, see the chains of idolatry broken and step into my royal identity and all that it empowers me to do; and the way of death — where I let things in creation (often potentially very good things like money, sex and power) become idols, controlling and stifling me, robbing me of my royal identity and purpose.
If we are brutally honest, most of us probably tend to live with one foot planted in Genesis 2 and one foot planted in Genesis 3. Sometimes through intentional choices, sometimes because so much rubbish gets thrown at us every day that we don’t seem able to stop some of it sticking.
So when we gather together, declaring the goodness of God, becoming increasingly aware of his presence in and amongst us, we make a choice to step back into life, to surrender to his kingship once again, to re-order our lives around his presence and his purposes.
Whether unintentionally or through weakness or through our own deliberate fault, where we have handed power to things that were never designed to be powerful, we take that power back, and place it once again where it belongs.
And as we do this, idols that have held us begin to lose their grip. And that’s probably why things can look messy in our gatherings: idols don’t like having their power over us broken.
But as we declare ‘Great are you Lord’, we find that, in a very real way, he brings hope and he restores. It’s real in the moment, with the potential to change the everyday reality of our lives.[1]
And when we surrender once again to the kingship of God, insecurity and fear take flight and leave, and tears of relief well up and pour down our faces as we become aware once again of our own royal identity and purpose, and we sing ‘I’m no longer a slave to fear, I am a child of God’. [2]
Of course, this unravelling of the chains that bind us can happen any time, anywhere, as the ever-present Spirit within prompts and guides and convicts. Thank goodness we don’t need to rely on a few people standing on a stage on a Sunday morning for any of this to happen.
And yet those times when we gather as family are such a gift to us. It’s often in those times when our fellow royals add their voice and their gifts to the proceedings. Their prophetic insight sometimes supernaturally sees those chains we ourselves cannot see. And as those royal brothers and sisters lay their hands on us and pray we step back into what Dallas Willard calls ‘the safe place’ between the kingship of God and our purposes in the world.
We may choose to call these times “worship”, in which case we probably also understand why Dallas Willard says that “worship is the single most powerful force in completing and sustaining the spiritual formation of the whole person.”[3]
But whatever we call them, these are times that we are compelled to choose life, because we choose God’s order of things.
(I want to acknowledge my friend Neil Drake in this post — one afternoon recently he sat in a coffee shop moving salt-shakers and sugar pots around on the table explaining it. I haven’t yet thought of a way of using the same illustration when I teach in larger groups)
[1] Great Are You Lord David Leonard / Jason Ingram / Leslie Jordan; [2] No Longer Slaves Jonathan David and Melissa Helser [3] http://www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=120
