As many families “get back to school,” I wonder if we will also get back to God. Israel had gotten away from God and the glory of the Lord departed as the Ark of the Covenant was lost. After the Ark was returned, David wanted to bring it back so the people could get back to God. What can we learn from David’s worship that day? Is there room for reverence and awe in our worship? Are we rejoicing? Is our worship whole-hearted? If somebody watched us worship would they say that we did so with “all our might”? Who is our audience today and every day? Message based on 2 Samuel 6:9-23.
Quotes:
Soren Kierkegaard: In worship we think we are the audience, the people on the stage are the performers and God is the prompter. . . But God is the audience, all of us are performers; and we in front are the prompters.
Eugene Peterson: It is fatal to take charge of God. Churches may need a sign: Beware the God.
G. K. Chesterton: The angels can fly because they take themselves so lightly. But they never take God lightly or for granted.
Duane Brooks: When Jesus turned over the tables in the Temple courts, it was confrontation – was it comfortable for the people there? No. But it clarified their thinking. We want celebration without confrontation, happiness without holiness. It does not exist.
Nancy Brooks about Elizabeth Brooks: I never saw her enter or leave church but that she was a shoutin’.
W. G. Blaikie write, “There are doubtless times to be calm and times to be enthusiastic. But can it be right to give all our coldness to Christ and all our enthusiasm to the world?
T. Grant Malone: Unless and until we give, we have not worshiped
Annie Dillard writes about the missing side of worship in one of her books: Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? … It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
Jack Hayford: I will never dance before the Lord.
Kenneth Caraway: There is no box made by God nor us but that the sides can be flattened out and the top blown off to make a dance floor on which to celebrate life.
Ian Pitt-Watson: We profess and preach another and much greater kind of grace. It comes to us when we get together the truth thought, felt, and done. We've got to know the book. And we've got to do what the book says, follow in Christ's steps. But we can know the truth and even do it and still be awkward, inadequate, graceless. That is when we need to remember that it is not meant to be a solo dance. Christ wants us, his church, his clumsy bride to try it with him. When it happens: we share in his grace! Jesus is the partner: He invites us to join him in the dance.
In the 1960's Sidney Carter wrote a song about Christ called, "The Lord of the Dance!" John Michael Talbot has revived it in recent years. In it Christ says:
'Dance then wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance,' said he,
And I'll lead you all wherever you may be,
I'll lead you all in the dance,' said he.
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