Experiential Worship: Encountering God with Heart, Soul, Mind, and Strength (Paperback)

Chapter One

Loving God

Twenty years ago, I woke up in a hospital bed, trying to figure out why I was there. My face was covered with cuts, my hands were swollen, and my leg was encased in massive bandages. Gradually, as the fog cleared, I came to understand that I had miraculously survived a head-on collision with a semi at sixty miles an hour. Lying there, pondering the fact that logically I should be dead, questions of purpose and meaning took on a new relevance for me: Why am I here? What is my purpose? When all is said and done, what will really matter in my life? It's easy to go through life unconcerned about such issues when you assume things will go on as they are forever. But when naive assumptions shatter on the rocks of reality, every human being begins to search for deeper meaning.

It is no surprise that Rick Warren's book The Purpose-Driven Life was an instant best seller, because he directly addresses these questions. Who among us has not found himself asking these questions at different times in his life? And who among us has not marveled at the spiritual power and simple beauty of Jesus' answer: the Great Commandments? To love God with all we are and love our neighbor as ourselves (see Mark 12:28-34) - Jesus captures everything that matters in life with a phrase so simple a child can remember it.

Yet hearing and marveling are not enough. What does it really mean to love God? It is easier to imagine how to apply the second commandment because our "neighbor" is a tangible reality that we can see, touch, and love in concrete actions. But what about God? How do you love the invisible, ineffable, almighty Creator of the universe? At least the disciples had the historical Jesus - the fishermen could leave their nets to follow him (see Mark 1:18), Mary could wipe his feet with her hair (see John 12:3), and Peter could cut off the ear of a slave in Christ's defense (see John 18:10). But how are we to love the God we cannot touch or see? Jesus said that loving "one of the least of these" was a way of loving him (see Matthew 25:40), but that brings us back to the second commandment again.

Loving God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength can be expressed in anything we do that serves Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God. This encompasses all of our lives, from the simple and ordinary to the extravagant and sublime. Hopefully, we are all learning indirect ways of loving God by the way we live our lives every day. However, there is a way that we can express our love to God directly and specifically: worship. The beauty and wonder of worship is that it is the only thing we can give to God that he does not already have. Worship is the one thing we do exclusively to express our love to God.

People use the term worship to mean many things, including singing, programs, strategies, liturgies, and musical styles. However, true worship in the spirit of Jesus' Great Commandment is something much deeper and more profound. God comes to us through his Word in the power of the Spirit and offers us - among other things - love, truth, conviction, grace, forgiveness, comfort, exhortation, and guidance. When we see God for who he is and experience all that he offers, we respond in humility, gratitude, and faith with such acts as confession, repentance, commitment, adoration, thanksgiving, intercession, and celebration. Worship leader and songwriter Matt Redman describes worship as "revelation and response." Notice that worship does not begin with us but finds its source in divine initiative: God reveals himself to us, and we respond to God. The intersection of these two dynamics is true worship, a transforming encounter in which God loves us and we love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength.

This kind of biblical worship moves us far beyond the singing we do on Sunday morning into a holistic encounter with God that engages all aspects of human experience. Thus, we begin to see that real worship - loving God - encompasses everything that happens in our weekly gatherings and overflows into everything we do the other six days of the week as well.

Some will object to the whole premise of Experiential Worship, pointing out that biblical worship calls us to focus our attention on giving to God rather than getting from God. Rick Warren writes, "The most common mistake Christians make in worship today is seeking an experience rather than seeking God." Warren is right to point out that the attention of the true worshiper is always focused on God, not on self. However, to stop there is to offer only a partial understanding of worship. While genuine worship is always seeking to give to God, paradoxically we are also recipients of all that God is when we genuinely offer ourselves to him. This is what it means to say that worship is a bidirectional encounter with God.

Worship planners and leaders are responsible for facilitating experiences of God while directing people to focus on the God they are experiencing. Worship innovator Sally Morgenthaler captures this balance when she writes, "As a young worship leader, I focused on creating worship experiences, on making sure people felt they'd met God before they left. As a worship planner, I still ask the question How are people going to encounter God in this time of worship? But increasingly, I'm focusing on the God of our experience, not the experience itself." The more we help people experience God in authentic ways, the more they will be empowered to respond by worshiping him with heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Our Design and Destiny

It is no coincidence that Jesus, when asked about the most important commandment, pointed us to loving God, because from the very beginning, the Bible tells us this is why we were created. The opening chapters of Genesis show us that Adam and Eve knew perfect joy in the Garden of Eden because they loved God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength. But when God's sorrowful call "Where are you?" first echoed through the garden, we lost that intimate connection with our Creator and still struggle to recover the complete worship that was the very substance of paradise.

Just as the opening chapters of the Bible help us regain a vision for our original design, so the closing chapters give us a glimpse into our ultimate destiny in Christ. In the Revelation to John, we get a peek into the very throne room of God, where we find the four creatures, the twenty-four elders, and myriad angels all continually worshiping God as they sing, "To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!" (Revelation 5:13). In the midst of all our speculation about the mysteries of heaven, there is one thing that is crystal clear: God has shown us our destiny in his eternal kingdom, and we discover it is glorious, extended worship!

The Priority of Worship

What is most important in your life? Priorities matter in a temporal existence because we only have a certain amount of time. Our priorities end up determining what we make time for and what we don't. I sometimes find myself frustrated at the end of a day because I realize I didn't make time for the things that mattered most. Unfortunately, there's no rewind button or "undo" command on the pull-down menus of our lives.

We were made to worship. No wonder the authors of the Westminster Confession wrote, "Man's chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him forever." When we love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we are the closest we will ever be in this world to life in God's eternal kingdom.

This is why there is nothing that has a bigger impact on the people of your congregation than what happens in your weekly worship gatherings. Of course, Christian community and discipleship encompass much more than corporate worship, such as spiritual disciplines, small-group fellowship, ministry teams, missional service, and relational evangelism. However, it is encountering God together in worship that will shape and define the rest of those expressions of the body of Christ more than any other experience will.

Like the easily distracted Martha, we are being called to rediscover "the better part" that we have sometimes forgotten, to spend more time with Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus (see Luke 10:38-42). If worship is what we were created for, the most explicit expression of our love for God, and the most important aspect of our ministry, it becomes clear that authentically biblical worship will always invite people to encounter God and respond, as Jesus said, with all of their heart, soul, mind, and strength.

(Continues...)