The story is told about one of the famous
eighteenth century classical composers who had a rebellious son. This boy gave
his parents terrible heartaches. One of the things the boy enjoyed doing to
make his father upset was to come in late at night after his dad and mom had gone
to bed, and before going to his own room, sit down at his dad’s piano in the
living room. Slowly, loudly, he’d play a simple scale, note by note,
deliberately. And he would intentionally stop the scale right before the final note,
leaving the scale unfinished. Then he would go to his bedroom.
His father, hearing the scale minus the final
note, would toss and turn in his bed, going crazy, his mind unable to relax
because the scale was unresolved. Finally, in consternation, he would groggily stumble
down the stairs to his piano and hit the final note of the scale. Only then
would his mind and body surrender to sleep.
We have all been created with the need for
completion and resolution in our lives. So when we don’t experience that, we
feel frustrated. We are half ourselves, like there is a need for something
more. Thousands of people live their lives in search of something more, never
quite sure where to look, often experimenting in ways that are not effective or
healthy and that do not produce the desired result.
St. Augustine, one of the early church fathers
of Christianity, noted this reality about life and penned the words, “God, you
have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their
rest in you.” This is one of the central truths of Scripture. We were created
by God with a God-shaped hole that can only be truly filled by God. Another way
of saying it is, when we pay attention to God in our lives and how God
encompasses and embraces and fills all of life, we are brought to a sense of
completeness and resolution like nothing else can do for us.
When we realize that the whole point of worship
is to pay attention to God as the creator and sustainer and redeemer of life,
to focus our hearts on God and God’s purpose for life, we begin to sense the
absolute value of worship to the human experience. Worship is one of God’s most
effective tools for bringing us to a place of completion and resolution in our
lives.
Yet the tragic irony is that the way so many
congregations worship on any given Sabbath—the lack of intentionality, the lack
of preparation and planning, the lack of focus, the lack of anything in the
service that is engaging and meaningful—would lead one to think that corporate worship
is not very important or less important than the other activities of the
church. Our practice reveals our true belief and values.
“Evangelism is an exceedingly important work of
the church, as is teaching, fellowship, servanthood, missions, and the healing
of broken lives,” writes Robert Webber in his book Worship Is A Verb. “But it is worship that
really stands behind all these activities. The church is first a worshipping
community. Evangelism and other functions of ministry flow from the worship of
the church.” (page 18)
Worship as God’s tool to connect us with Him and
bring us completion and resolution in our lives is of primary significance. But
if the way churches plan and facilitate the worship experience often is not as
effective as it could be, then this divine tool doesn’t accomplish what it was
designed to. Perhaps sloppy and poorly executed worship experiences actually increase
our sense of incompleteness, like the composer painfully experienced when his son
left the final note of the scale unplayed. That is actually the way many
worshipers describe their feelings when they attend church services.
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