stereotypes

I recently searched a stock image site using the keyword “worship.” I got what I expected: white men photographed from behind, their hands upraised. The only thing that changed was the background: a sunset, a church, a white void.

It pains me that a gesture I find personally significant–raising my hands to my Father–has become a cliché. Of course, I didn’t need these images to tell me that worship can become clichéd quite easily. What better thing for the enemy than to make what is an intimate expression of love and honor and reverance into what is mundane, trite, expected?

I’m not just thinking here about raised hands, either. All of our worship expressions–whether it’s the traditional hymn sung from a hymnal with shaped notes (what I grew up with), contemporary praise and worship with a full band, private quiet times, the whole range–all of our worship expressions can quickly become trite if we miss the point. Or rather, if we miss what worship is really about.

As usual, Oswald Chambers is like a slap upside the head, a swift kick elsewhere, a much needed jolt to reconsider my perspective. In today’s Utmost Daily Devotional, Chambers writes that “Our Lord’s teaching was always anti-self-realization. His purpose is not the development of a person–His purpose is to make a person exactly like Himself, and the Son of God is characterized by self-expenditure. If we believe in Jesus, it is not what we gain but what He pours through us that really counts.” Such a perspective runs counter to much of what I hear from Christian teachers today about becoming all that you can be, much like a spiritual version of the old Army jingle “Be all you can be.” And I should be honest: Chambers’ perspective runs counter to much of what I’ve been thinking about lately, what I’ve been focusing on for myself. I want to “be all I can be”; I want personal development.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not rejecting teaching that calls us to develop our giftings for God’s service, that draws us toward fulfilling God’s vision for our lives. For too long, I thought going to church and being a nice guy was the vision; I’m glad to move beyond that. What I have here in Chambers is a counterpoint, a teaching the weight of which helps balance the self-seeking that can come with “be all you be.”

Chambers goes on to use the example of Mary pouring out the perfume, concluding that “Our Lord is filled with overflowing joy whenever He sees any of us doing what Mary did–not being bound by a particular set of rules, but being totally surrendered to Him.” He links this to John 7:38, “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” Chambers adds, “…and hundreds of other lives will be continually refreshed.”

What made all this so striking to me was that as I was reading Chambers, I was listening to Christine Dente sing “Here I am to Worship”; it was this juxtaposition that made me see how radical Chambers is. I believe that “Here I am to Worship” is getting at the same thing Chambers is–laying down everything before God, surrendering self, following the example of Jesus in giving Himself. But it seems that something gets lost in the singing of it. At my church, and likely at many others, when this song is sung, hands are quickly raised and the thought becomes that the singing is the act itself. What’s missed–but what Chambers makes clear–is that the singing is just the start, not the end. Raising hands in surrender is great–but it must be followed up with living. It’s not by accident that Paul tells us to offer ourselves as “living sacrifices” in Romans 12. We take “living” here to mean “not dead,” that we don’t have to die as Jesus did. And that’s right. But it occurs to me that “living” also means “active” as in “living it out.” Worship is not just honoring God and humbling myself, it’s living out those words in specific and tangible ways.

Tagged as: Christian music, Oswald-Chambers, stereotypes, surrender, worship