The Risk of Un-Apologentic Worship

“Music is the chorus of the unsung heart, the healing for the wounded soul, the wings in a world lacking any melody of its own.”

The winds rise high, air thick, stress levels taunt before hearing the chord strum, from my son playing upstairs.

His sister rises soft, a little uncertain, in her resurrected youth.  Her voice, the echos of some heavenly angel.  Neither one of them know I am listening…but I don’t care.

Spirits lighten, I hear it in the melodic rhythms, the un-stagged presence of a God that makes beauty in so many ways.  And I am lifted from these circumstances, from the gravity of this weightiness, from the confusing state of lists taunting its hold on me…

And why is it, songs lighten the spirit?  Why do we soar far away when notes play in perfect rhythm?  Have we lost our chorus….been looking for our own song…but find the journey to it’s free flowing sounds, sometimes too hard…too long?

And in a world that looks so hard for “holy”.  People seeking “happiness”.  Striving for “glory”.  I wonder why in heaven there is music all around us.  But yet, we settle for silence for our searching souls, here in this fallen existence….when we were made to sing.

In steeples we hide our reverence, saying it’s arrogant if others notice us when we praise the King of Kings.  And yet, David….the King after God’s own heart…danced wildly, irreverently careless of anything…or any one.

Because when hearts lighten, His Spirit comes, our lives get small in the presence of a big and glorious God.  And we can’t help but worship…Regardless of who might see.

Yes, we praise football, and soccer, our kids sports teams, even our own achievements….but when it comes to God, we stay silent as if somehow that is being “respectful” or “reverant” to a God we can treat like an ogre who just might slay us.

But true worship doesn’t draw us away from the glory from God..it draws us to Him.  It shouldn’t separate people…it was made to drop the walls, like that of Jericho.

Until we walk away and discover we are more free than when we came…

And I don’t know what it is. I can’t say I am any expert on much of anything…but I do know, when I am lost in the cloud of His glory like the Israelites on their way to the Promised land….yesterday or tomorrow, Egypt or Israel doesn’t matter….nor does what I have or don’t have…

All that matters is God.

And didn’t scripture tell us, “If we are ashamed of Him in front of others, He will be ashamed and not acknowledge us?”

And yet, we do church, and devotions, and personal communions with the Lord….and what can consume us is what WE look like, what OTHERS think, and if somehow we are offending others or are cohesive with an establishment or group of people….

But my healing has always come through worship.  The enemy can’t stand, when we rise in unified  

praise to a God we see as bigger than any enemies attempt to slay us.

Yes, doesn’t His word clearly tell us, no man can have glory in the fullness of His presence?  So why do we care about pleasing man more than God when we praise?

I listen to them play upstairs.  Voices dancing across each other in harmonious worship…

And I can’t help but know, I have done many things wrong as their imperfect mother. But above all I rejoice that my children are fully free to worship.  That they have found their own songs….that they
can hear the God who created them and has placed “Eternity in their hearts”.

For we can have the whole world, we can do the right things, we can impress everyone with our “right
rituals of goodness”…..
But if we have lost our song.  If we have stiffled The Creative One.  If we can’t breathe and feel suffocated because our lists are too long…

What have we earned?  What have we gained?  How full have we lived….if we can’t hear The One who dances and sings over us….

For the angels worship Him night and day, they bow, they worship, they exonerate the King of Kings….The Alpha and Omega….The First and Last….The Beginning and The End…

So as flawed, carnal, selfish human beings….

How much more should we, lay our lives down to Him, willingly and freely giving it all to praise Him?