Adoration
How to worship God
Our Father in Heaven- hallowed be your name.
St Francis of Assisi
Telescope versus microscope
It’s easy to skim through the opening line of the Lord’s Prayer as if it’s just some kind of pleasantry – a heavenly handshake, a ding-dong at the door, before we get down to the real business of asking – but nothing could be further from the truth.
Psalm 148.7 ‘It is the heart that prays’
‘It is to the voice of the heart that God listens, and it is the heart that he answers.’8 ‘We do not know what we ought to pray for,’ admits the Apostle Paul, ‘but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit.’
Perhaps it’s better after all to have a mustard seed than a mountain. Better to have little faith in a great, big unshakable God than a great, big unshakable faith in a little god unworthy of the title.
I suspect that unemotional worship – the kind that feels a bit forced and fake – is precious to God precisely because it is so costly to us.
Awaking my soul
Praying a Psalm
Psalm 4 is clearly the prayer of a person preparing themselves for bed: ‘In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety’ (v. 8). But its successor, Psalm 5, is a prayer for the start of a new day: ‘In the morning, Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait expectantly’ (v. 3). The very first Psalm describes the blessing of meditating ‘day and night’ on God’s word (1:2).
Worshipping with Bach, Beyoncé and Bethel
When it comes to worship, instrumental music has the added advantage of bypassing the left hemisphere of the brain’s central cortex, enabling our spirits to soar unencumbered by the constraints of language.
Worshipping with others
Lord's Prayer written in first person plural and second person singular x
Liturgy: the shape and the shaping of our prayers
Worshipping with your own weirdness
Adoration
Children's letters
Bizarre things children say - communication achieved via intimacy - think of examples (Savage Archer?
How do you pray?
Father God in Heaven?
Lord Jesus?
Gracious God? etc
A microsope allows us to study a small thing and blows it up
A telescope allows us to study a huge thing