He Is All

"So place yourself in His presence and let Him move you forward."

WE’RE FLOATIN’ A BOAT down a river that ain’t got no water in it. Paddle as hard as we can and we’re just flingin’ dirt. Fit this analogy, now, into us seeking God and all those questions we spout in our frustration. “Why is God silent? Why am I still suffering? How do I get healed? What is faith?” God always hears, faith or no faith. He is not partially deaf until our faith-o-meter rises to the correct level. Communication with God is neither a slot machine, c’mon, baby, c’mon, give me aces … nor a balance that must be weighted just so and when it gets heavy enough then we get His attention. But back to that dry river analogy. A boat won’t float without water, and the water in the river is the Holy Spirit.

Now, the Holy Spirit does not do a vanishing act between faith bouts. He is always living in the temple, which is us, and He’s living there forever. But we get deaf to Him at times. Turn on five musical devices at once (I’d say radios, but did I lose you with that? “Mommy? What’s a radio?”), and put classical music on one, rock on another, country on the third, infomercials on the fourth, and good preachin’ on the last one, then you tell me what the preacher just said. In order to hear him fully, we need to focus and turn the other stuff off. Our distractions put us in the other room, and we might be ear-to-the-wall, but it’d be much easier to hear every word if we were close to it (that being, the radio).

Or better yet, in person. Now, this is not a lecture about staying home from church. You will not get that lecture from me. On the other hand, it is my encouragement for you to seek God in person. I’ve heard several people speak about worship recently, and I’ve heard some good explanations of what it is and how we worship. But what was missing from them was desperation. The man in the dry river, stuck in the heat and the dust, needs to worship. The woman swinging the boat paddle through midair needs to worship. Because here’s what’s happening — It isn’t that God doesn’t hear. It isn’t that He’s run dry and has no more water. It isn’t that He’s waiting for you to get out and walk.

When you worship, it’s not you trying to reach your scraggly arms out to reach Him, but Him reaching down to lift you up.

Worship opens the floodgates of God’s presence and suddenly the river’s wide and deep, and God’s the current sending us downstream where we need to be. There’s no more need for us to paddle because He’s in control. But to put Him in control, to be in the flowing river, requires us to surrender first. Surrender our emotions, we worship even if we don’t feel like it. Surrender our wills, we set aside what we’ve planned to do to give Him our time. Surrender our future. He holds the future. He is the future. So place yourself in His presence and let Him move you forward.

Worship is about honoring God, yes. But in God’s eyes, worship is about Him healing you. It’s not His ego that’s on the line, but ours. We get in the way of healing. We think too much. Worship turns our attention from our problems, our issues, to His greatness, His goodness and mercy. What you focus on will soon be all you see. All you love. And love is the heart of worship, but being honest, even angry worship, accusatory worship, gets God’s attention. He has infinite kindness and unending patience. He can handle whatever we fling at Him and knows how to reconstruct it to become what it should be in us. Our mindset should be, “Okay, I don’t know what to do, but You do. You love me and will never leave me.”

God is for us and not against us. He isn’t man’s idea of God, testy with a bent for revenge when we goof up. He’d rather die so that we could live, but the issue is God can’t die. So He became a human, letting go of all that made Him look like God and act like God, as He’d been for an eternity, and He relied on God to walk with Him on this earth every single day up until the moment He released His spirit to His Father. He who was God became man who worshiped God. Jesus has been in our shoes, and He’s never forgotten what that was like.

We worship from whatever’s in the depth of our being and let God sew up all the rips and tears that show up. It doesn’t have to be perfect and beautiful in our eyes because the fact that we’re worshiping is beautiful and perfect in His, and even an ounce of faith, say a mustard seed amount, is enough for Him to swoop down and place us in the river. Even mustard seed dust. God can count the grains.

He is all, and we need Him, and there is our worship.

Worship is not found in our enthusiasm, or vigor and strength, or our volume. It is our abandonment in His presence. We may crawl in, one hand to our forehead, but we walk out with hope, and what now fills us is Him. We rest in His abundant life, filled with His peace beyond understanding, surrounded by His everlasting mercy. The future is brighter because He is in it. We worship to show our gratitude. He hungers for it to show He is God.

“From here on, worshiping the Father will not be a matter of the right place but with the right heart. For God is a Spirit, and he longs to have sincere worshipers who worship and adore him in the realm of the Spirit and in truth.” (John 4:23 TPT)

“For the Lord’s training of your life is the evidence of his faithful love. And when he draws you to himself, it proves you are his delightful child.” (Hebrews 12:6)

Image by pencil parker from Pixabay


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Suzanne D. Williams, Author
www.suzannedwilliams.com
www.feelgoodromance.com