Currently Reading/Read:

Finding Favor with the King by Tommy Tenney

 Jesus for President by Shane Claiborne & Chris Haw

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Some things in life never seem to match up to what we’d like.  Luckily though we always have a Father that we can fall back on.  It is astonishing how breathtakingly absolute His promises stand.  How ginuine His faithfulness.  How eternal His love.  If you could be spoiled by one gift from such love what would you want?  Wisdom such as Solomon’s?  Faith like Abram?  Passion like Joshua and Caleb?  A heart like Davids?  Or would it be a broken heart that miriorrs God’s?  Would you want to move in healing like Peter?  Have the boldness of Paul?  Speak face to face with God like Moses? Or wold you simply want to walk with the Lord the rest of your days like Enoch?  In honesty I dont know which I would choose either (Come on, I dont even know where this post is coming from or going) .  But what I do know is this:  God wants us to want Him.  He wants our worship.

I’ve been reading this book: Finding Favor with the King, and in it he tries to lay out some of the ‘protocal’ of our King’s Kingdom.  The rough outline falls as such:  In the Old Testament (OT) there was this thing called the tabernacle*, it was divided up into 3 parts:  The outercourts, the Holy place and the Holy of Holies (to keep it visually simple).  only certain people could go into certain parts of the Tabernacle. People could enter the courts;  only the priests could enter into the Holy place and only once a year could the high priest enter into the Holy of Holies, and only then under certain and strict protocal.  Psalms 100 seems to parallel for us a similar protacal for the King of Kings…

“Enter His gates with Thanksgiving; / Enter His courts with Praise”

Thanksgiving gets us in and praise gets us even deeper.  Giving thanks isnt always an easy thing, but I can assure you there is plenty to give thanks for.  People by nature focus on the darker, the sadder, the more hurt, the wrong. We highlight the ugly;  someone could do everything flawlessly and they would be appreciated, but most likely it was what everyone else expected… people expect excellence.  Yet when someone messes up?  When they fail once?  It can become a big deal, and remembered for a long time.  We focus on failure.  Yet even among failures, everyone has successes.  We are created in the image of God, each and everyone of us.  That means even the worst have good within them, they were not a waste, therefore we all have something to be thankful for.

Yet praise is even harder.  Thanksgiving is a response to something that we have, or something God has done, or anything else in w.e way it came to us, Thanksgiving is a response to something.  However, praise?  Praise doesn’t require a response, it just is.  Praise is something that we do, despite our circumstances.  Praise is something we just give to God because we love Him.  Yet, we read that praise only gets us into the courts… I don’t know about you, but I’m not satisfied with the courts… Are we going to be content when we get a few little healings in our church service?  I love what Bill Johnson says on ‘The Finger of God’ (a movie), he is talking in regards to this concept of contentment and says somthing along the lines of “are we going to be content with barely reaching Nazerath?  Many people our content with just reaching Nazerath, the city of unbelief.  It was only here that Jesus only performed some signs and wonders.  When we start to get healings happening we are just starting to reach Nazerath, we are just starting to reach the level of the city of unbelief.” Now I know that I slaughtered the quote, but I think I get his point across to very well (So Bill if you end up reading my blogs, I’m terribly sorry, can you forgive me?).  If not here it is plainly:  I believe someone said once upon a time that ‘only in his hometown is a prophet not accepted.’  Well Nazerath was His hometown, and He wasn’t very popular there, people were always reminising and trying to demystify Him, to them He was simply the son of a carpenter… However He still healed people!  Healing was what came forth when people rejected Jesus… So when will we settle for the courts, or will we push in, will we push in to the Holy of Holies and see the face of God just as Moses saw Him, or John, are we longing for that sort of encounter?

Well what if we are?  What takes us there?  Worship… Unashamed, untamed and oblivious worship.  God has this idea that worship is all about Him (Honestly, I tend to agree), and in so He asks us to focus on Him.  We know He is a jealous God, He wants us, and our undivided attention.  God wants unashamed worship.  He wants us to be bold, He wants us to love Him, and not be afraid to show that love to others.  He wants us to dance before Him in the grocery store, or get down before Him and humble ourselves when were at Starbucks… God wants untamed worship.  We’ve all heard and read the story of when David moves the ark of the covenant into Jerusalem. He dances all before it (Unashamed) but also untamed.  He even declares that he would become even more undignified.  He literally presented himself like a fool before God (and they say he was a man after God’s own heart… think about that next time you think someone looks silly dancing or waving a flag in worship).  God wants oblivious worship.  Not to Him, but to everything else.  He wants us to be so focused on Him that everything around us melts away into nothing-ness.  He longs to be the sole center of everything in our lives.  It is through this form of worship that we are able to enter even deeper in with God.

When Jesus died the curtin in the temple (setting apart the Holy of Holies) was ripped from top to bottom… Jesus ripped open the way into the Holy of Holies.  It was left open to everyone.  Jesus pretty much said ‘come on in, I’ve made you that clean.’  When the high priest went into the Holy of Holies he had to be blemish free, or he would be struck dead by God Himself.  Well now we can enter into the Holy of Holies, because our God has made us blemish free (that will mess you up)… But the way we get there is through worship.  Unashamed, untamed and oblivious worship, it’s what moves heaven.  God is longing for our worship, it is all He wants.  It is what we were created to do.  (Side note, worship isn’t always in the form of praise songs and musical sabbaticals)  Heidi Baker talks about to her, everything is holy. “Holding a kid is holy… sweeping the floor is holy… being in a staff meeting is holy” (FInger of God)  She talks on how we, as the western church compartamentalize church, and that we need to let God into everything we do.  Everything is to be holy, she unlocks that this is how we, as Paul instructed, ‘pray without ceasing.’  Everything we do just becomes holy, because God just wants to be with us.  When we do everything with the mindset of it being holy, it becomes an act of worship.

This is why we were created.  To worship, what is the result, God…  There are a lot of results, but the one I feel led to highlight right now is this:  We begin to shine.  Jesus said that we are the light of the world, we all know that.  We, me you us, we are the light, but I guess if salt loses saltiness, then lights can grow dim.  Jesus never says that salt cant become salty again, He just asks ‘how does it?’  and then talks about salt that has lost it’s saltiness.  Maybe we can change the lightbulb, or become salty again.  Jesus doesn’t seem to ever come out and say we can’t, again, He just goes on to talk about someone who never even tried.  Worship brightens our light.  I know this because I read about a guy named Moses.  This Book said that He would go in and spend time with God and come out and He would glow…. they’d cover him… eventually it would fade… and then He’d go back in and hang out with God and start to glow all over again.  Worship causes us to shine brighter.  Well, intimacy causes us to shine brighter, but worship ushers in intimacy (Im just not going into that in this post, it’s already wicked long as it is… I wonder why I don’t post everyday… Oh yah, cause it takes me like an hour and a half to post).  Worship invites God to step down out of heaven and invade earth.  It brings His very presence down to us.  Worship takes us past the gates of thanksgiving and through the courts of praise into the Holy of Holies, the presence of God Himself…

 

 

 

*Tabernacle:  Big moble temple made out of tents.  The Israelites carried it around with them while they were in the desert for forty years.  God lived there and physically manifested His presence there.  Pretty epic.

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