Called to Worship

I don’t blog often enough about my own spiritual journey. This weekend has been a time when God has especially called me into fellowship with him through worship, though. That sounds very churchy… “called me into fellowship with him through worship”. However, I believe that’s exactly what happened.

Since I work for my church, I tend to be in task mode when I’m there or resting from the craziness of working for a church… and admittedly tuned out more than I should be. This weekend, however, our church services were cancelled so that we could perform an act of service for our neighbors. It was named, “Good Neighbor Weekend.”

Ironically, on a weekend when we did not have church services, this has been a weekend when I felt especially called into a connection with God. It wasn’t something I sought; it was more like a conviction of something that’s been lacking in my life.

Saturday was spent listening to worship music on Pandora and watching some worship videos of Hillsong United online. It was great, but I didn’t really feel all that connected. Something wasn’t quite jumping the synapse between me and God, but the mechanics of worship were there.

Tonight, however, through a movie called Leap of Faith (Steve Martin), I was called into the presence of my Creator and convicted. It was kind of like Matt Redman’s song, “The Heart of Worship”, we’re offering shallow, or even artificial, stuff up to God as a “sacrifice” of worship. However, when God decides to move in us as we worship, there’s nothing that can stop him.

In Leap of Faith, there’s:
– A crook of an evangelist
– A location not on the schedule
– A list of desperate needs gone unmet in the hopeless community
– A community that, on the brink of destruction, has nowhere to turn, but God
– A kid who steps out of his good reasons to be skeptical, and goes passed the evangelist to the cross where he finds genuine healing
– A miraculous rainstorm that ends the community’s literal and figurative drought
– A crooked evangelist destroyed internally by the awesomeness of God

Here’s worship as I was drawn into it:
– God uses a flawed person like me (or even a flawed Hollywood movie like Leap of Faith) to worship him and lead others into worship
– God enables us to worship him and even calls us into it
– God moves as he sees fit and when he chooses in spite of me
– God is always the rightful object of worship
– God is amazing – sometimes we need to be spiritually dry and restless to be in a place where we are ready to worship. It’s at that time God is praised not only through worship, but for enabling us to worship and draw close to him because of his calling.