Worship in the Waiting 2020 Advent Series
More than two years ago, I regularly thought that over the horizon there would be a utopia of circumstances that would allow for some form of better faithfulness on my part in my relationship with God. Have you, too, thought, “I’ll read that Bible study or serve this person with love or pray more or work on my impatience or practice worship when the kids are older or not struggling with (fill in the blank) issue or our schedule isn’t crazy or life is easier or at least not so hard?” Think for a moment, what is your “I’ll do blank” for God “when blank happens.” I’m telling you now it is a foolish way to think because we don’t know if tomorrow will be better. We don’t know if the struggle will subside, time will be ample, or life easier. We don’t know what tomorrow holds.
My tomorrow came, and as many of you know, every semblance of control, that I thought I had over my life, came crashing down. My husband, Brett, was just getting to the point of walking almost normally after ACL surgery and rehabilitation from a basketball injury. I would trip over his crutches from that surgery, tweak my knee and have pain that gradually increased over two months. What the doctor initially thought was an injury to my meniscus ended up being diagnosed as bone cancer in my femur. Osteosarcoma meant surgery to take out a large portion of my femur, and a small portion of my quad muscle, replacing my knee and my femur with plastic and steel. This surgery resulted in a lack of mobility, rehab and a long road of PT that I am still working on to this day. My leg isn’t as strong as it once was. Bone cancer meant 3-week cycles of 5-day, inpatient chemotherapy for months. It would wreak such havoc on my body that after less than a week at home with all the normal fatigue, digestive issuers and inability to keep food down, I would end up back in the hospital with a fever and some sort of infection.
At this time two years ago, while everyone else was making holiday preparations, I was in the ICU because the doctors were worried. I was having another adverse reaction to my chemo treatments but this one was dangerously starting to effect my heart and kidney function. My chemo was terminated, not because I had finished my course of treatment, but because my body couldn’t handle the high dose chemo treatments anymore. I was feeble in body, feeble in mind, and my faith—it was mustard seed size. I was sleeping 18-20 hours a day. My husband tells me that there were many times my mind “wasn’t all there.”
Do you know what was in my mind at that time? The constant ebbing in and out of exhaustion, grief, fear, sadness, loneliness, and confusion due to jumbled thinking. In these moments of intense physical and emotional pain, in the moments of weariness, God would bring a scripture, seemingly out of nowhere to my fragile mind. My thought life went something like this:
I miss Brett & the kids. I wish I could be with them. I feel so alone in this hospital. Where are you God?
“and behold I am with you always even to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20).“
This is so hard. My body doesn’t work right. I’m so tired of this body you gave me God.
“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal(2 Corinthians 4:16-18).”
I am tired of pain Lord, tired of suffering, I know I am growing “weary of doing good (Galatians 6:9).”
“We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Romans 5:3-5).”
Day by day, moment by moment, I would struggle, and God would bring scripture to my weak mind. Can you hear it? The rhythm of my daily life? Sleep, pain, doubt, truth. Sleep, pain, doubt, truth. Each of these verses from past study of God’s word were a seed of faith planted in my heart, and it thumped on babum, babum sustained by those truths that had grown there. Before I had cancer, I tried to be faithful in knowing God better, but that faithfulness was messy with inconsistency, vacillating between joy & drudgery and sometimes motivated by the wrong heart attitudes. God took my messy faithfulness and He used it anyway. He used His words to minister to me in my weakness. His strength truly was “made perfect in weakness,” my weakness, as He promises in 2 Corinthians 12:9. Like the shepherds in Luke, God used my knowledge of Him to change me, and it resulted in worship in the quiet of my heart, a worship that was based on the seeds of truth God had planted in me through my imperfect faithfulness.
It was a worship that would make its way out of my heart, and onto my tongue as I reminded my kids about God’s presence with us, His strength in us, and His purpose for our pain. We would cling to those truths and recite them to one another because He was at work in their hearts too. Sometimes, that worship looked like singing songs of praise with tears in our eyes and smiles on our lips not because we were putting on a façade, but because we were experiencing both joy and grief. Each of our family members has a song of praise that was key to helping them through last year’s suffering. We would sing these to each other from time to time. My song was “Thy Will” by Hillary Scott where the chorus simply states “Thy will be done” three times. Ultimately, this song is about surrender to God who is good, sees and hears us. It’s about trusting and yielding my life into God’s hands because I can trust Him.
This worship wasn’t how we often imagine it. It wasn’t loud congregational song in a worship service or the carefree sing along of praise when it comes on the radio. It was sung with the quiet ache of suffering. It was whispered or hummed to as I prayed in my mind to believe the words. It was willingly placing myself under the scriptural truths as I timidly declared that God was who He said He was. This worship wasn’t important because God needed it. Worship is important because I needed it and you need it too! The truths about God that we recall take root in us and change our hearts as we recite them to ourselves and to one another. Our unsteady hearts slowly swell with the knowledge of His character and works as we remember Him. Soon, it beats to the rhythm of confidence in His truth until our minds are blown by the knowledge of Him. Francis Chan describes it this way,
““Isn’t it a comfort to worship a God we cannot exaggerate?” ”
Worship is an expression of high respect, awe and adoration to someone or something. The beauty of true worship is that it is centered around who God is, not what our circumstances are. This is why our family could worship Him in the midst of difficult times because His character and works remained the same even while our lives had changed drastically. Worship helped us remember this. Our worship wasn’t a denial of our situation, it was an act of remembrance that God is still who He says He is in the middle of all circumstances. You have a whole book of proclamations straight from God, where He gloriously declares the most beautiful story of who He is and what He has done, including the Christmas story we’ve been going through in Luke in this series.
My prayer for each of us is that God will keep using our messy unfaithfulness. I pray that we will grow in our knowledge of God. I pray that we remember our Mighty, Infinite, Majestic, All-knowing God, Our God who cannot be exaggerated and that this knowledge will resound first in our hearts, and then out through our mouth in praise both for the good of our own hearts and those of others around us.
Questions for Reflection
1. a. Read Luke 2:8-20. Think through the circumstances the shepherds were in based on last week’s blog post about them. Make a list of both the difficult and joyous circumstances they found themselves in.
b. Consider: The shepherds had worship welling up inside them when they encountered the truth of the Messiah’s arrival and believed. Notice that their circumstances did not change. They still had to go about the physical labor of raising sheep. The Shepherds beheld Jesus and they were profoundly changed. Their circumstances didn’t change, their hearts did. John Piper puts it this way, “In the case of Jesus, he is infinitely admirable, and our admiration rises to the most absolute worship. Therefore, when we behold him as we should, the change is profound.” Think on what is infinitely admirable about Jesus.
2. a. Read Luke 1:26-56. Think through the circumstances that Mary found herself in. Make a list of both the difficult and joyous circumstances she found herself in.
b. Consider: Culturally, Mary would be, at the very least, looked down on and gossiped about for being pregnant without being officially married. Her pregnancy was un unplanned one. In addition, while she knew that she carried God’s Son, what would other’s think of this explanation? Would she be believed or would they think she or she and Joseph were trying to hide their indiscretion? Mary was, likely, a teen at this time, as many married young. How does this play into her situation? Mary’s response is a song of praise to God for allowing her to be a part of His plan and for fulfilling His promise. Just before this, Elizabeth, in verse 45, says of Mary that she believed that the Lord would do what He said. What does her belief in God’s promise in the midst of difficult circumstances result in?
3. What hard circumstances are you in the middle of right now? What joyous circumstances are you in the middle of right now? What kind of emotions are going on in your heart right now? Consider what you know about God-- both His character and His works. Make a list of all of your circumstances and describe who God is in them based on His character and works. Is there a specific character trait or work that your heart needs to remember? Try to spend some time in worship concerning that trait or work of God.
Click the button below for a corresponding video on how to worship in all circumstances as a family:
*Resources used for reference: www.blueletterbible.org (Including, Strong’s, Vine’s Expository Dictionary, Thayer’s Greek Lexicon) and the ESV Bible translation.