What Happens When We Worship?

Yesterday, we talked about what happens when we let the love of God soak deeply into our hearts and minds. What happens is that we begin to have the same agenda for our lives that God has for our lives. And what is that agenda? It's worship. It's making everything we say and do an expression of our love for God. That's a radical change from the way life is lived by most people in the world.

Let's continue that discussion today by asking this question: What else happens when we let the love of God soak deeply into our hearts and minds?

The answer is that, as you and I worship God, our worldview changes profoundly. The term 'paradigm shift' is often over-used. However, what we're talking about here is a paradigm shift in the truest sense of the term.

"So. What's a paradigm shift?" you ask. Imagine what a little chick might see while he's still a chicken in the egg - if he could see at all. Not much, huh? Now imagine what he sees when the egg hatches and he can poke his head out of the shell. What he sees then, changes his whole frame of reference, doesn't it! That's a paradigm shift for the little chicken.

Likewise, when the love of God so permeates our hearts and minds that it changes our entire view of the world, we experience a radical paradigm shift. We begin to see the world around us more the way that God sees it. Does this mean that we walk around day after day with our heads in the clouds and a faraway look in our eyes? Not likely. Christ certainly didn't do that when He was here on earth.

We certainly need times of quietness and solitude when we do tune out mundane concerns. We need to focus on the Almighty One as we worship in church and as we commune with Him in prayer. However, lifestyle worship consists of more than that.

For most of the week we'll wear our "worship lenses," giving us a new look at those mundane concerns. We'll use our worship lenses to see our work, our world and ourselves.

"Worship lenses?" you ask. Yes, worship lenses. In Revelation 3, verse 18, God told the Laodicean church that they needed eye salve to see themselves and the world as God saw. He said, "I counsel you to.anoint your eyes with eye salve, that you may see." Today we use eye lenses to improve our ability to see. And that's what we need today: worship lenses to filter out the distractions and enhance the things God wants us to observe as we make worship a way of life. Those worship lenses will transform our worldview, and hopefully we will never again be the same as we were before we became true worshipers.

And what do you suppose we'll see with our worship lenses? Haddon Robinson, one of our generation's most outstanding preachers, tells this story about the paradigm shift that we discover when we see as God sees:

A while ago I was trying to fix our garage door. I came to that one screw I had to get loose, and the more I worked to loosen that screw the tighter it seemed to get. A neighbor came over and saw my plight. He looked for a moment or two and said, "Oh, this has a left-handed thread. It's a reverse screw. You have to tighten or loosen it going in the opposite direction." It took me fifty years to find out how screws work, and now they change the rules.

There's a sense in which the entire Bible is kind of a reverse screw. Everything in the culture that seems right, in the Bible comes out wrong. The way up is the way down. The way to spiritual wealth is to acknowledge your spiritual poverty. The way to live is to die. The way to rule is to serve. I mean the screw just doesn't work right. It's just incongruous. But unless you understand the reverse nature of the screw, you never do anything. The more you try to work it according to the values of the culture, the tighter the screw gets and the less you accomplish.

The whole Bible is that way. {It seems like} everything is upside down. When you come with the values of the culture and read the New Testament, it seems crazy. You spent fifty years learning how to play the game, {and then you discover that you didn't play according to God's rules for the game.}

Citation: Haddon Robinson, "The Wisdom of Small Creatures," Preaching Today

Listening friend, are you wondering if your life can be rescued from the wrong rules? Do you wonder if your highs, lows and in-betweens—especially those repetitive, humdrum in-betweens, where so much of life is lived—be infused with significance?

Yes. And we can also experience two modern-day wonders: a reduction of negative stress and a release of productive energy. How is that possible? It's possible by embracing a lifestyle of worship that fulfills our design.

Tomorrow we'll talk more about your one-of-a-kind design. Join us again for insight on some of the ways God has made you a unique and special person.

© 2007 John Garmo. If you would be interested in using this article, please contact us at Info@MissionToChildren.org.