“I know now, Lord … You are yourself the answer. Before your face, questions die away.” -- C.S. Lewis, Until We Have Faces.
I have been thinking a lot about that song, “One day every tongue will confess You are God, one day every knee will bow… but still the greatest treasure remains for those who gladly choose You now.” God is God. He deserves all glory and all praise. He is ultimately the only one who is worthy of worship. And he does and will receive worship, even from the unwilling. His very nature does not leave us any other option. But in his great love and mercy, he has given us the opportunity to choose to rejoice in him and worship him.
“Rejoice in the Lord always, I will say it again: Rejoice!” Philippians 4:4
Here again, (as is the case so often with God), a command was given, not to make our lives more difficult, but for our own benefit. I am beginning to understand these days how this command/opportunity to worship that he has given to us is in itself a demonstration of His love. He knows that we are ultimately fulfilled and completely satisfied when we choose willingly to offer ourselves and rejoice in Him. There is no greater thing. God IS the treasure. God IS the fulfillment of every longing of our hearts. When we of our own choice give God what God is due, we receive that sweet fulfillment that he loves to give to those who come near to Him!
“If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water." John 4:10
I think I am not as thirsty as I should be. C.S. Lewis wrote a good description of this when he said that it is a tragedy for a child to continue “making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.” Our human problem is not that we reach for too much. It is that we settle for too little.
"Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, it will become in him a spring of water, welling up to eternal life.” -- John 4:14
I see a lot of "worship" going on here in Nepal. They call it "Puja." Lots of rituals: waving inscence, offering small plates of food and flowers, chanting prayers, ringing bells... kind of reminds me of Christians standing up and sitting down and standing up and sitting down and clapping our hands and folding our hands and raising our hands in church. Not that any of those things are bad. But in the midst of all the formality, are we worshippers? Where is my heart in all of this? Do I know and remind myself of the essential qualities of God and rejoice in those things?
Am I formally worshipping a god of my own imagining (that's not so different from all the idols lining the streets here), or am I worshipping from deep within my heart the God of Truth, knowing He is Everything to me?
Do I look at prayer as a means to another end, or do I rejoice in the time I spend with Him because He is the end? I am beginning to understand this: being with Him, seeing Him -- there is no other end; He is arrival.
“A time is coming, and has now come when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks.” -- John 4:23
