From Praise to Worship

 From the rising of the sun to the place where it sets,

  the name of the Lord is to be praised. (Psalm 113)

As nice as church services can be, as helpful as it is to have a time and place to gather with other Christ-learners, it is a disservice to this passage to think of a constant church service. Church services are potentially very helpful, but they are not life. Unfortunately, they are often places to identify with a certain ideology rather than walk with others with Jesus. Worship is identified as a church service will end up poisoning this text.

The other problem is that God may receive praise, but he is looking for worship. More specifically - he is looking for worshipers. We know mouths praise, but hearts worship. Jesus criticized some who drew near to God with their mouths while their hearts were far from him. This is the problem. How do we draw near with our hearts, worship him in spirit?

This may seem to contradict what was just said, but we can draw near with our mouths. When I was in high school, I could cuss the wallpaper off a wall, espcially at the video game arcade (what is that?). I wanted to stop cussing, so I began with my mouth. I changed the words into something less offensive. Then I began to just cuss on the inside. Then I just would get angry. Then I started dealing with my anger.

What happened? Well, when I cut off the automatic flow of anger that spewed out of my mouth, I became much more aware of its presence inside. I realized I was an angry person. I did not think that was inevitable because of Jesus and his teaching and his life and his words to me. So with his help I began to deal with my anger, my fear, and my distrust of God.

Similarly, in the opposite direction, if a person praises God all day long, and not just in front of other people, he will likely become aware of what is on the inside. Is there worship? Is there gratitude? If not, the praise will ring hollow and empty. Then that person is in a position to change. . . or give up. This is where to grace of God comes in: strength for change, mercy for failure.

Discipline is what you can do with your body to bring about change in your heart and soul. It's good to think about it, but not enough. It's good to talk about it, but not enough. Discipline is the nest where the Holy Spirit can roost in our lives. Without it, our relationship with God remains abstract and distracted. Our hearts end up far from him.

So the Psalmist emphasizes a moral imperative of God's worth and our need: worship and praise. Yet he also is speaking wisdom about how life is best lived. Discpline will destroy your life witht God if it becomes righteousness instead of wisdom. That is the trap of legalism, externalism. Instead of allowing discipline to eat you alive, learn how to be nourished and strengthed by your discipline. Become a Christ-learner more than a Christ-pleaser. He will be pleased with your learning. He will grow you from the inside out.

Strengthening Ourselves in the Lord

And when David and his men came to the city, they found it burned with fire, and their wives and sons and daughters taken captive. Then David and the people who were with him raised their voices and wept until they had no more strength to weep. David's two wives also had been taken captive, Ahinoam of Jezreel and Abigail the widow of Nabal of Carmel. And David was greatly distressed, for the people spoke of stoning him, because all the people were bitter in soul, each for his sons and daughters. But David strengthened himself in the Lord his God. (1 Samuel 30:3-6)

Give ear to my prayer, O God,

    and hide not yourself from my plea for mercy!

Attend to me, and answer me;

    I am restless in my complaint and I moan,

because of the noise of the enemy,

    because of the oppression of the wicked.

For they drop trouble upon me,

    and in anger they bear a grudge against me.

(Psalm 55:1-3)

Two Roads

All too often weeping and grieving turn into bitterness.  Bitterness turns into blame and blame into abuse.  Abuse often begins with the leadership.  This is the road that David's people took.

Quite simply the story shows something entirely different in David from his people.  The words "but David" is the story of a good leader, but even more importantly, a good person.  "But David" indicates that something else was at work in David that moved him from weeping and distress to strength and encouragement.  "But David" most remarkably shows that he was prepared in the midst of trial and trouble and persecution to do what his people were not prepared to do: seek God.  David was ready; his people were not.

David found his strength in God.  He did not have a series of religious activites that he would drop when he got stressed or when difficulties came.  He found encouragement in what he did.  Whatever practices David had were not stressful or "just one more thing to do";  they were life-giving.  They relieved his stress.  Spiritual practices when rightly practiced provide strength, encouragement, and relief.  They open up a pressure relief valve in a life well-trained in them.

Because of the many different influences around us, the idea of David strengthening himself probably brings up the wrong sort of picture.  If it's like most movies, David got mad and powerful enough to get even.  If it's like most self-help, David found his own truth and was "himself" in spite of everyone else.  If it's like most workplaces, David found someone to complain about or blame.  Such actions seem to bring a certain sort of strength from anger, but lead down a more dangerous road: pride and self-justification.

The Easier Way

David did strengthen himself, though.  Plainly, he could not deal with his situation on his own or in his own way, but he did have to take action.  He could not get pulled down into bitterness with his people.  Here is where soul-strengthening practices come in.  David strengthened himself because he knew he was weak and vulnerable and through practice knew what to do about it.  David strengthened himself because he knew no one would do it for him.  The easy yoke of life with God is not easy because it takes no effort, but because God always lifts the heavier load.

David's strengthening was "in the Lord."  He needed to reorient his focus to the Lord.  The beginning of David's practice is not with making the situation better, but refraining from making it worse.  Before he did something, he did nothing.  He retreated to God.  He knew that in the Lord he was safe and strong because he knew the Lord, so he pulled away from the situation and drew near to God.  David was warrior enough to know when he was threatened with defeat, so he found refuge in the Lord.  Such knowledge and ability does not usually come during trouble without some level of training.  Battle is not the time to learn to use your sword.  Prayers for help and guidance are important, but without the context of an interactive relationship with God, they are often abandoned.

Finally, David did not just find strength in the Lord, but "in the Lord his God."  It was not in the Lord Abraham's God, or in the Lord the priest's God or in the Lord Israel's God.  On this all spiritual practice stands.  Fundamentally, we cannot approach or depend on the Lord as someone else's God.  Perhaps the people wanted to stone David because they had come to rely too much on him and he failed them.  Perhaps they idolized him too much, so they sought their strength in David rather than God.  Perhaps one way of knowing who we have as our God is watching ourselves when we go for strength and encouragement in the midst of trouble and persecution.

David's Practice

We find a lot of information about the right practice of soul-building exercises in this little phrase about David: "But David strengthened himself in the Lord his God."  We find that such exercises prepare us to face grief and distress without falling into bitterness and blame.  We find them to be relief and strength rather than more stress in out lives.  We find them to be necessary effort we put out in response to God's ever-present grace

and strength.  We find them to be based in the knowledge of the Lord as a refuge and the source of our strength.  We find them to be effective only in the context of a personal relationship with the Lord our God.

We wonder what David actually did to strengthen himself.  Quite likely, he did what he had practiced so often.  He sang and worshiped and prayed.  What calmed Saul in his madness may have also calmed David in his own distress.  No wonder we are encouraged to do the same.  "Let the word of Christ dwell richly in you. . . as you sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God." (Colossians 3:16)  Perhaps the word of Christ is not only what we might read in our Bibles, but also the praise of God we find coming from our own mouths, truly dwelling richly in us and breaking out in gratitude from us as we daily practice our trust in the Lord.

Spiritual Exercises as Part of Jesus' Yoke of Grace

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

In my last post, I wrote about the means that Jesus gives so that people might come to know God.  Certainly, these means provide for a great beginning to knowing God, but they are also the places where friendship with God can really take root.


Strangely, I hesitated to bring in prayer as one of those means.  One reason is that I do not consider myself a really great pray-er.  I do not find myself asking for a lot.  I kind of have to make myself ask.  I have been given much, but I think that more of that comes from an ingrained sense of self-sufficiency that makes the humility of asking foreign to me.  I am working on it.

Another reason for not involving prayer in the introduction to knowing God is that prayer is so easily misconstrued for other things.  Although scriptural meditation and contemplation have their places in the realm of prayer, prayer is most fundamentally asking.  Prayer without request is not Christian prayer.  Certainly asking can be simply directed toward the fulfillment of my desires, but it also encompasses interceding and confessing.  The point is that it is directed to God and not merely to a state of mind.  The many fashions and misunderstandings of prayer make it a minefield when seeking God at first.  Not everything "spiritual" is good.

Also, prayer is so common and subjective that it is difficult to hear God initially amid the many other inner voices and feelings.  My prayer needs a lot of help from the outside.  I need the Bible, the church, and the creation in order to find and hear God.  Without them, I would find prayer to be very confusing and disheartening.

That being said, without prayer, the Bible, the church, and the creation are extremely limited in their own ability to present the knowledge of God.  They may present many facts and even truth, but without prayer, they are a table set without a feast.  Jesus sets the table that I might be nourished and filled, yes.  Even more, though, he sets the table that I might be filled with the company of God himself.  Such a feast is designed to be shared, not merely hoarded or admired.

This sharing of the feast is what spiritual exercises are about.  They are the ways in which each person can partake of the means that Jesus has provided for our friendship with himself and the Father.  In essence each spiritual exercise is one of prayer and one of practice.

Spiritual exercises are all prayer in that they are yearning for God.  Without the yearning and asking for God and his good gifts, spiritual exercises are useless and possibly harmful.  Whatever is done is done for the sake of knowing God and Jesus, whom he sent.  This is the fundamental reason for Christian spiritual exercises.

The "classic" exercises of solitude, silence, fasting, study, worship, etc. are the tried and true methods with thousands of years of practice behind them.  They are the means for feasting with God.  Each can be used to serve other purposes which can widely be understood as looking good or feeling good.  These are covered in the Bible by Jesus when he says, "Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness to be seen by men.  If you do you will have no reward from your Father in heaven."  (Matthew 6:1)  James covers the other aspect of incorrect motives by saying, "You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures."  (James 4:2-3)

This does not mean that spiritual exercises are all drudgery.  They are feasting with God and should be understood that way.  On the way, a person may find that they "look good" or "feel good," but these are not the primary motives.  When they take the place of seeking and knowing God and his goodness, then they become diversions and shows for other people.  Jesus' advice on prayer can be used with spiritual exercise in general: "Go into your room and close the door and pray to your Father who is unseen.  Then your Father, who sees what is unseen, will reward you."  and "Do not keep babbling on like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.  Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him."  Talking about spiritual exercises is dangerous if it does not lead to practicing them.  Doing spiritual exercises for the sake of reporting to them instead of seeking God is dangerous.  What is exciting is that God rewards those who seek him and he knows my needs deeply and intimately, so that I so not need to try to secure rewards and pleasures from other people or my own impulsive desires.

So if I practice silence, it is with the hope and expectation that God will be with me.  If I study the Bible or creation, it is with the hope that I will hear God and know him more fully.  If I serve other people, it is with the goal of them seeing what I do and praising God for it.  The only thing that enables me to get through the "dry" times is the goal of seeking the best for God in each circumstance (that would be his "glory").  If I slip into seeking pleasure or others appreciation, then spiritual exercises quickly fade.

Most importantly, prayer depends on God.  The Holy Spirit is who enables all actions toward God.  The "burden" of seeking God and knowing him is too much for any person to carry on their own.  Asking God through prayer for his help makes the burden "easy and light" because he is at the other end doing most of the lifting.  My task is small in term of lifting the yoke, but necessary in term of shouldering the yoke and putting in my own effort.  The yoke of spiritual exercise is "easy and light" because it is performed in and through prayer, but spiritual exercises are a yoke because they take genuine effort.

This effort component to spiritual exercise is practice.  The most dangerous kinds of "spiritual exercises" are ones that remain mere topics of conversation or interest.  It is tempting to remain a spectator in the sport of spiritual exercises.  People can talk about them, study them, and even admire them, but without practice they will not really be spiritual exercises, but only spiritual wall hangings in a person's life.

It is necessary to talk about them and think through them, but only as a precursor to doing them.  The talk and thoughts of a person intending on making a trip around the world is different from a person who just talks about going around the world.  The first one plans while the second one merely wishes or pretends.  Intention takes the vision of spiritual exercise and turns it into action.

Another part of practice is starting small.  While inaction is on the major causes for failure in the practice of spiritual exercise, not far behind is the tendency to do something "big."  It is not enough to be still five minutes in a day, I must try to spend eight hours in silence.  It is not enough to study and memorize Psalm 23, I must outline the whole book of Psalms.  Usually, this tendency to do "great" things stems from more pride than devotion.  This is not to say that moving toward eight hours of silence is not good, but it takes practice to do this successfully and usually, starting with what a person can do rather than what they think they should do.

My own experience in memorizing scripture demonstrates this.  When I started my kids on the task of memorizing Bible passages, I did not start with Romans 8 or the Sermon on the Mount.  We started with Psalm 23.  Just like when I first started to memorize scripture recently, I found one of my main difficulties was knowing that I could and that the effort was good.  I had been not merely saved by grace, but paralyzed by it, thinking that all effort was seeking to earn God's favor.  This came from a misunderstanding about spiritual exercises being merely works of the flesh or natural human ability.  I found that what made them works of the flesh was not that they were work, but when they were merely of the flesh.  Depending solely on my own abilities and talents when performing such work meant that I was not doing them in prayer but by sheer "willpower" or pride nor was I practicing them as much as performing them.

I return to Jesus picture of the yoke that is easy and the burden that is light.  Strangely enough, the yoke of spiritual exercises is best taken up by those who are "weary and heavy laden," more than those who sense and trust their own power and ability to accomplish things.  To practice them, I must first come to rest and stop doing what I have been doing to better myself and run my life.  Jesus begs the weary to come to him and find rest.  Spiritual exercises are all about that rest.  The passive part of them is releasing the results to Jesus, who carries most of the burden.  Ironically the release takes real effort.  Who would have thought that letting go could be so hard?  Yet this is the rest that Jesus invites me into that involves a yoke and real effort.

Rest is trust.  Rest is humility.  Rest is effort in the right direction for the right things.  Fortunately, rest is possible because God is always at work.  The heart of rest is prayer for grace, asking God to do what I cannot do.  Such rest only comes through practice, since even grace freely given must be received.  In this way when Jesus calls me to rest, he calls me to pray to him and practice life with him under his yoke of grace.

Wow.  I never thought that the yoke Jesus was talking about was grace, but now I see it clearly.  It is the favor of God that I might work with Jesus, learning to be gentle and lowly of heart through practice.    Also, it is taking on his burdens and resting from my own.  Finally, it is continually relying on and asking for the favor of his strength to do what I cannot, bear the yoke.  And so grace is the easy yoke of Jesus: resting from my work, practicing his work, and praying for his continual lift in the process.

Lord, please let me take this yoke and leave my own behind.  Let me shoulder your grace, which is your rest, your work, and your salvation for my hungry soul.  When I say, "Give me your grace" or "Have mercy on me," help me to remember taking on this yoke that you offer to the weary and heavy-laden.  That is what I am, so this is what I so desperately need.  Amen.