Finding the gift

I love Christmas! But I guess you need to know something else…I used to despise it to the extreme! I know you are probably wondering what this has to do with finding a gift. In reality what I am trying to talk about is worship.

Now when I was in school my professor that taught the class in worship, Dr. James Melton, used the passage in Isaiah 6 to start as the foundation of worship. Now, I am not about to show disrespect to my teacher and argue against his starting point. I have, out of my own study and reading, think that we, as a worshipping community, need to look earlier than that. A while back I was reading in the later part of the book of Exodus about how the children of Israel built the Tabernacle of God and how they labored very hard to build it. Their whole purpose in doing this was to have the presence of God among them.

I think in the church today we have begun to take that approach with how we do things. We have reduced worship to a series of formulas….if we do a…then b…then adding c in we will be guaranteed the presence of God in our midst.

The fact is…we have it backwards….

it is not about getting God to do something because we did something….it is God, having done something for us and working through us, motivates us to come together and celebrate the good things that he is doing among us.

Church is meant operate like a family.

The problem is a vast majority of the "families" both Christian and non-Christian are dysfunctional…or just plain weird. Instead of a mom and dad….we have:

• Mom all by herself with the kids.
• Dad by himself with all the kids.
• Mom and live in boyfriend with all the kids….

The combinations are endless….and in some cases down right kooky. We are no longer the society we once were and now it has affected how the church looks and operates

…and how we worship.

When the family structure disintegrates we have a implosion of everything else in society…including the church.

The question is why?

My dear dad has a thought about this:

A HOPE
As the way of man runs along
Life’s unseen journey,
Not knowing the start
Or where life’s ending will be,
But if one had a guide
To life and its many ways,
Would the journey of life be over?
Much of life is taken
Through dark valleys of storms
Highlighted by lonely nights.
Is this the climax
To life and its journey?
Maybe till tomorrow.

(John F. Pershing)

See the thing about it is….we are all control freaks in one form or another. We want to be masters of our own fate and in the end when we pursue that route we end up looking really foolish….nah…that’s too nice…tremendously ignorant fits better.

In the end we end up running back to God like a kid who got his rear end kicked on the playground and expect Him to come and bail us out of the situation and beat up the bullies in what ever form they might exist…and God like the good Daddy doesn’t jump and run when we get ourselves into a fix. Sometimes we have to get whooped in order to get our attitudes straightened up and our relationship with our father to make sense….and work.

…stay tuned for part 2…