Prepare to meet your God, O Israel! For behold He who forms mountains, and creates the wind, who declares to man what his thought is, and makes the morning darkness, who treads the high places of the earth - the LORD God of hosts is His name. ~Amos 4:12-13
The prophet Amos was reintroducing God to a people who had turned to worshiping God as an afterthought, as a way to 'cover their bases'. They had lost the knowledge of who God really is; God is not an idol of wood or stone without the ability to hear or move or talk, He is not a God created by man in order to pander to our needs and to meet our expectations. He is living and real and His presence is so powerful that when we truly encounter it we realize that it is He that must be worshiped and we that must be humbled. It is only when we are distant from God that we can forget this about Him. I can imagine God's incredulity as He asks through Isaiah (45:9) “Does the clay say to the one who fashions it, 'What are you making?' or 'Your work has no handles'”? The same metaphor is used in Jeremiah 18:6 “Just like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand”. We are the created ones, we are the lesser ones. We will one day stand before God and He will need no further introduction. “Every knee will bow” (Philippians 2:10-11) in recognition of who He is; at that moment, even the people who never knew God in life will acknowledge and worship Him.
If we stay close to God now, our worship will flow sincerely and spontaneously. It reminds me of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in which a sailor falls under a curse, all his shipmates die and as the man nears death himself, he looks at the creatures of the sea and marvels at God's creation. “And I blessed them unaware” he claims, which lifted the curse and freed him to pray. The breathtaking beauty of nature often stirs us to think of God. Nearness with God necessitates worship, its just what happens.
Sometimes I need to be reintroduced to God - reminded again of his sovereignty. Whether these moments come through poetry, nature, or the fellowship of church family, it is a blessing to recognize that I have been minimizing God by worshiping on my terms and in my time. I fall into the trap of trying to bring God to me instead of presenting myself to God. It is ironic that we need God in the Holy Spirit in order to worship God fully. Ironic, weird, and beautiful. That's how our God works. We cannot control, predict, or understand Him. Instead we walk with Him, learn from Him, and praise Him.
God thunders wondrously with his voice; he does great things that we cannot comprehend. ~Job 37:5
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