The Body Takes Shape in Worship
... And in Its Own Emergent Way Lives and Breathes
Gathering for worship, in person, together in one place at one time, opens a space in which special things can happen for those who participate.
The ancient tabernacle and, later after Israel’s wanderings concluded, Jerusalem’s great temple were places where heaven intersected earth. God dwelled in his tabernacle and temple.
Rome, of course, destroyed the great temple in 70 A.D., forty years after God sent his Spirit at Pentecost to birth Christ’s church. God now dwells, we know, wherever two or more gather in his name, working out his redemption of all things through his church. The church isn’t the tabernacle or temple. But corporate worship at church still fosters a time, place, and space to experience God’s presence.
Special things indeed happen in God’s presence. Worshipers sense some of those things immediately. Immediate benefits of worship can certainly include joy, relief from oppression and anxiety, and a strong sense of communing, joining, sharing, and celebrating. But immediate benefits can also include insight, realization, and discernment. Worship can reorder and refresh the mind, soul, and spirit.
And worship’s benefits aren’t all immediate. An hour later, day later, or week, month, or year later, one may realize that worship has restored one’s confidence, purpose, clarity, and hope. The benefits of worship aren’t even all describable. The unexplained, unarticulated, unrecognized things that worship does to us and for us may be far more valuable than anything we can state.
Yet we don’t worship solely or even primarily for personal benefit. My worship may inform you, and your worship surely informs me. In corporate worship, we draw from one another and give to one another. But the benefits go beyond realizing a personal gain or contributing to another’s gain. The corporate body itself takes shape and in its own emergent way lives and breathes.
You and I may not worship mainly for ourselves or for one another but instead for the body of Christ, that the body may express its glory and life. True worship, authentic worship, deep worship, may be more of that sacrificial type than consumptive type. In worship, we give of ourselves to the body of Christ.
Oddly, our greatest worship gain may be in giving up ourselves, which shouldn’t seem so odd, given that redemptive sacrifice is the very body of Christ.
