Journal

Worship as orientating ourselves towards God

Posted on May 5th, 2005, in the evening

I've been thinking about worship in the context of the all-creation, all-history scope of God's plans for the universe.

The middle verses of Romans 8 are the background to these thoughts: the idea that all creation is groaning in anticipation of sharing our freedom in the consummation of the Church in Christ at the end of the ages. The focus is the idea most explicit in Colossians that everything is summed up in Christ:

Through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven

Colossians 1:20, NRSV

(As a very brief aside: how narrow is the scope of what we (I) often imagine God is interested in and what the cross accomplished! Read more of that chapter. You can't get a wider scope than that.)

One part of what we are doing when we worship is orientating our lives towards God. Worship is a deliberate aligning of ourselves in his direction. This is true both for the individual and corporately, but it's corporate worship I'm primarily interested in here. In worship we align ourselves with each other towards God.

Aligned together towards God we are like shards of metal attracted by a powerful magnet. Even where other scattered shards are not pulled in to the core, they begin to distribute themselves according to the pattern of the magnetic field. (I'm not sure if my physics is spot on but I think the following point survives even if not.) This is a picture of the worshipping Church and its influence in God's world. 'Kingdom' is perhaps the New Testament word for the magnetic field of influence.

This is a process not just in space, but through time as well; not just in the earth, but in history. All creation is headed towards the summing up of everything in Christ, which is God's ambition for the universe. When we come together in worship (or even in our own lives of worship) we align our small part of the universe ever truer to the orientation of everything in all creation.

So it means something to come together to worship, both in symbol and in reality. Symbolically we are pointing in the direction all things are headed, and in reality we are involved in the actual business (humble as its here-and-now expression may be) of reaching towards that end.