Experience God in community
What’s a church community all about? We gather together in fellowship to have fun, share our stories and our experiences to create new memories, for the making of traditions that we look forward to …weddings, baptisms, funerals as we usher the saints into their eternal home, we worship God with love, who is the author of love. We give him thanks and appreciation. Something my parents taught me growing up was to always be polite – always say please and thank you. Maybe that’s why worship is so deeply meaningful for me; because it’s something I was taught… I was taught to give thanks, to be appreciative, and not take things for granted.
Worshipping God, coming to church on a Sunday morning and worshipping God in community is my way of saying, “God… Wow! Thank you for this incredible life you’ve given me. You didn’t have to. It’s yours. You gave it to me. You breathed life into me. (Psalm 139:13 For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.) You gave me these gifts that I have, and I just want to say ‘Thank You’, and this is the only way I have to do it.”
What’s really special about the church is that we meet God in intangible ways. We have our compassionate care group who will take people to the doctor that don’t have family members that can take them because they’re working, or they don’t have family members, or they’re estranged from family members. Our church steps in and physically takes people to the doctor to show people our love. We help at the homeless shelter and prepare meals. Those meals are prepared with love. There are ways the church shows love in tangible ways, but what’s really awesome about the church is that we go beyond tangible ways. We go beyond our senses of sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste, and we meet the Divine in intangible ways. There’s something given in the mystery. As we try and define everything and prove things by fact, and state things by scientific methodology of being able to repeat them, there’s something deeply profound about not being able to do that; the mystery of God that goes beyond our finite, tangible world, and steps into a spiritual realm that we can’t describe in human terms. It’s only something we experience when we receive Jesus Christ as our personal Savior. When we receive the Holy Spirit, then God meets us in this finite body and we experience the Holy to the point that almost overcomes
our physical body, to the point that we might be in prayer and be so filled with the Holy Spirit that we begin to shake because our body can’t fully contain the holiness of God.
That’s where true worship comes in … in the experiential model that we can’t define and we can’t conjure up, and we can’t pretend, and we can’t fake. It’s authentic Christianity in trying to walk in the footsteps of Jesus… to make that effort… and when we do that, God says, “Yes, you are my friend and I want you to experience the fullness of my being, not just what the world sees, but what my disciples see – the people I call my children in very deep, precious ways… the way you would have a different love for an intimate lover, that’s the kind of intimate love we can have with God when we dare to invite Him into our hearts.
I invite you, the readers of this column, to welcome Jesus, the Holy Spirit, God into your heart to that type of fullness. If you don’t know how to do that, I welcome you and invite you to come to Heidelberg or find a church where you can go deeper in your life … that you can connect with something that’s larger than yourself in intangible ways, especially if you’re not able to find satisfaction from the tangible. Experience God. Experience life.