Listening as Worship

I’m sitting in my favorite chair, house to myself. My dog is asleep on her bed a few feet away. In a few minutes she’ll be snoring. The only other sounds I can hear are the gentle whirring of the fan above me, the flicker of a lit candle, and a few passing cars outside. It’s quiet. It’s early. I have time to let everything within me fall at Jesus’ feet and allow Him to reorganize what needs reorganizing, making good on His promise to provide “rest for my soul” as I come to Him.

To do that, to receive that rest, I have to pay attention to His promptings in my heart through the working of the Holy Spirit. I must listen.

Author David W. Augsburger, Ph.D., writes, “Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.”

So, to love God, to worship Him, we must first learn to listen to Him. This is at the heart of our expression of adoration. Listening expresses a desire for the heart and thoughts of someone else to arise to the forefront, a willingness to lay down our own need to be heard (at least momentarily) for that event to take place. It is a conscious decision to submit and to place utmost importance on the person before us and whatever they are saying.

Taking this into the realm of corporate worship, when we listen to the Lord, we are expressing two fundamental beliefs:

First, we are affirming our belief in the unseen realm. We are agreeing with Jesus that His Kingdom is not of this world and that flesh and blood cannot inherit it. We are aligning ourselves to hear Jesus say that only what is born of the Spirit is spirit. We cannot come into alignment with the purposes of Heaven if we are not paying attention to what is going on in the unseen, spiritual realm.

Second, we are affirming that God desires to express Himself to us in worship. That He is our Good Shepherd, leading and guiding us, and that we can hear His voice in real time as He is speaking — in scripture, yes, but we also pay attention as we plan and pray for our services of worship and within the services themselves. If we get to a point where we are not seeing or hearing Him, then we must slow down and remember to listen and trust that He is still speaking and leading us.

With these fundamental truths in mind, a few questions arise that deserve our reflection as Salvationists:

If (a) listening expresses love and if (b) we are people of an unseen Kingdom, who (c) desire for God to make known to us in real-time His plans and ways, then: how would it look for our gathered worship services to reflect these truths?

Would we have more or fewer program items? Would we have more or less time allotted for quiet reflection? Would we allow our bodies to engage more as we shut our one mouth more and open our two ears more? Would we share the reading of scripture across multiple people and allow silence to absorb what was just read? Would we face our fears of disruption and allow more space for encounters with the Holy One?

These can be challenging questions for Salvationists, a people on the move, actively expressing God’s heart of love in tangible ways to the lost. But I humbly submit that if we get in tune with the moving and leading and vision and voice of the Holy Spirit expressing the heart of the Father to us in real ways in our meetings, it will renew our affection and love for the Lord and His Church. And that cannot help but invigorate even further our mission in the world.