How the birds remind me, the goal of all things
I had another post on expectancy written for today.
It will have to wait.
I spent time this afternoon on my face. Katie’s life crumbles me. Amazing, beautiful Katie who’s only 21 and has adopted fourteen African orphans and feeds 1200 mouths every weekday. What am I doing? I struggle just to take care of these two kids who have colds and I’m wiping noses and bottoms and counters and I have six teaching sessions to study for this upcoming conference and I’m staring at this blank screen saying, “GOD! Where are you?” and it pours down rain outside and it’s June. But like Anne I feel so small, crumpled, deflated — we all have immunizations and medical care and the pouring rain doesn’t touch us and my kitchen counters are filled with bowls of fresh organic fruit and for crying out loud I just had diapers delivered to my door.
What, dear God, am I doing?
The tears come. Lots of them.
I read my passage, Psalm 27:6:
I will offer in His tent sacrifices with shouts of joy; I will sing and make melody to the LORD.
Worship.
And then it wells up in my heart and rises up to clear my eyes and even as I type these words I look outside and the clouds have parted and the sky is clear. The rain stopped. A bird sings, is actually singing this very moment as I type this sentence.
Even the rocks will cry out.
That bird keeps singing. The bird that’s neither holding orphans nor speaking at conferences.
Is anxious for nothing.
Because we cannot worship and be anxious simultaneously. And worship is the only spiritual discipline which is an end in and of itself.
Missions exist because worship doesn’t. We storm the 10-40 window because in it there are worshippers of God who are not yet worshipping.We sponsor children in Africa, orphans ravaged by the effects of AIDs, not simply to give them a better life but so they can see the goodness and mercy of our glorious God and rise to their feet in worship. I pick eight dear women to mentor for the next 10 months not because we need more meetings but because I see in them the capacity to become radical and influential worshippers of the One True God.
And the tears keep flowing, ones of joy now, because I’m seeing this is freedom. The pure and holy fire of desire is that all creation would worship our Great and Glorious God. That they would see Him as the most beautiful, most faithful, most worthy, most captivating.
But if our motivation is anything less the flame will be dirty.
My flame has been dirty.
I confess I want this book I’m writing to be published. What’s the point of pouring out all these words if no one reads them?
But that bird sings whether I’m listening or not.
Because worship is an end in and of itself. What if that bird waited to sing until someone was listening?
She would be silent forever. Because we don’t listen until we hear the song. And the world won’t listen until you sing your worship.
You have worship in your heart, a joyful sacrifice to shout to your King.
Your worship will be different from Katie’s, from Anne’s, from Beth’s. From mine. It will be yours and you’re the only one who can sing it.
But we have to sing it, friends. And we have to remember that worship is our goal. Fellowship isn’t the goal, Christian education isn’t the goal, financial stewardship isn’t the goal, even evangelization and world missions isn’t the ultimate goal. Worship is the goal.
Everything we do must serve that end.
Remember: Worship. The goal is God glorified.
John Piper on Enjoyment
It’s late and I’m too tired to comment on this presently, but will tomorrow… Great thoughts from John Piper on Enjoyment and Idolatry. This should give us some good discussion tomorrow:
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Most of us realize that enjoying anything other than God, from the best gift to the basest pleasure, can become idolatry. Paul says in Colossians 3:5, “Covetousness is idolatry.”
“Covetousness” means desiring something other than God in the wrong way. But what does that mean—“in the wrong way”?
The reason this matters is both vertical and horizontal. Idolatry will destroy our relationship with God. And it will destroy our relationships with people.
All human relational problems—from marriage and family to friendship to neighbors to classmates to colleagues—all of them are rooted in various forms of idolatry, that is, wanting things other than God in wrong ways.
So here is my effort to think biblically about what those wrong ways are. What makes an enjoyment idolatrous? What turns a desire into covetousness, which is idolatry?
- Enjoyment is becoming idolatrous when it is forbidden by God. For example, adultery and fornication and stealing and lying are forbidden by God. Some people at some times feel that these are pleasurable, or else we would not do them. No one sins out of duty. But such pleasure is a sign of idolatry.
- Enjoyment is becoming idolatrous when it is disproportionate to the worth of what is desired. Great desire for non-great things is a sign that we are beginning to make those things idols.
- Enjoyment is becoming idolatrous when it is not permeated with gratitude. When our enjoyment of something tends to make us not think of God, it is moving toward idolatry. But if the enjoyment gives rise to the feeling of gratefulness to God, we are being protected from idolatry. The grateful feeling that we don’t deserve this gift or this enjoyment, but have it freely from God’s grace, is evidence that idolatry is being checked.
- Enjoyment is becoming idolatrous when it does not see in God’s gift that God himself is more to be desired than the gift. If the gift is not awakening a sense that God, the Giver, is better than the gift, it is becoming an idol.
- Enjoyment is becoming idolatrous when it is starting to feel like a right, and our delight is becoming a demand. It may be that the delight is right. It may be that another person ought to give you this delight. It may be right to tell them this. But when all this rises to the level of angry demands, idolatry is rising.
- Enjoyment is becoming idolatrous when it draws us away from our duties. When we find ourselves spending time pursuing an enjoyment, knowing that other things, or people, should be getting our attention, we are moving into idolatry.
- Enjoyment is becoming idolatrous when it awakens a sense of pride that we can experience this delight while others can’t. This is especially true of delights in religious things, like prayer and Bible reading and ministry. It is wonderful to enjoy holy things. It idolatrous to feel proud that we can.
- Enjoyment is becoming idolatrous when it is oblivious or callous to the needs and desires of others. Holy enjoyment is aware of others’ needs and may temporarily leave a good pleasure to help another person have it. One might leave private prayer to be the answer to someone else’s.
- Enjoyment is becoming idolatrous when it does not desire that Christ be magnified as supremely desirable through the enjoyment. Enjoying anything but Christ (like his good gifts) runs the inevitable risk of magnifying the gift over the Giver. One evidence that idolatry is not happening is the earnest desire that this not happen.
- Enjoyment is becoming idolatrous when it is not working a deeper capacity for holy delight. We are sinners still. It is idolatrous to be content with sin. So we desire transformation. Some enjoyments shrink our capacities of holy joy. Others enlarge them. Some go either way, depending on how we think about them. When we don’t care if an enjoyment is making us more holy, we are moving into idolatry.
- Enjoyment is becoming idolatrous when its loss ruins our trust in the goodness of God. There can be sorrow at loss without being idolatrous. But when the sorrow threatens our confidence in God, it signals that the thing lost was becoming an idol.
- Enjoyment is becoming idolatrous when its loss paralyzes us emotionally so that we can’t relate lovingly to other people. This is the horizontal effect of losing confidence in God. Again: Great sorrow is no sure sign of idolatry. Jesus had great sorrow. But when desire is denied, and the effect is the emotional inability to do what God calls us to do, the warning signs of idolatry are flashing.
For myself and for you, I pray the admonition of 1 John 5:21, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.”