What's with God and worship?!

I got the following dialogue about worship from my Stanford campus pastor, Glen Davis. As usual, Glen invents an incredibly witty and funny way of explaining difficult concepts. He is one guy I really respect for being truly intellectually honest about faith! Hope you enjoy the following as much as I did!

Q: Does God need us?
A: No. God did not create us because he was lonely or lacking in anything. He had perfect community within the trinity before creating anything.

Q: I thought maybe he fed on our worship or something.
A: No. You've been playing too much Dungeons & Dragons.

Q: Then why did God create?
A: For the same reason that an artist paints or a singer sings. For the joy of it.

Q: So why should God care whether we worship him or not?
A: Because God is love.

Q: You didn't answer my question. What does that have to do with worship?
A: Yes I did, I just didn't unpack it. Here's how it goes: love is to desire good for someone else. God is the ultimate good and so he desires Himself for us.

Q: That sounds fishy. How is worshiping God good for us?
A: Let's hit it from a different angle - God's highest value is God. That's not arrogance--that's a simple realization of truth. God understands that He is greater than any thing in the universe (or indeed the whole universe put together), both from a standpoint of raw power and from a standpoint of moral perfection. If God were not intelligent enough to understand his own greatness and not truth-loving enough to admit it he would be a very poor God indeed. In fact, to not recognize his own perfection would be evidence of horrendous imperfection.

This is where we come in. When we don't acknowledge God's greatness and give due honor to his perfection (which is another way of describing worship), we reveal our horrendous imperfection. Moreover, we begin to build our lives on false assumptions--assumptions that are dangerous. We begin to ignore the existence of a real and binding moral code external to ourselves, and so we take immoral actions and reap painful consequences. Ultimately, we reap the final consequence and are consigned to eternity apart from God (a fate more horrendous that we can conceive of, for we are not truly separated from him now).

Because God loves us, He doesn't want that fate for us.

Q: Saying how not worshiping is bad is not the same thing as saying how worshiping is good.
A: True enough. The flip side of the coin is that God wants to help us overcome our horrendous imperfection. He wants us to become morally admirable, even as he is. We have to at least admire moral perfection to make any progress towards it. There are other ingredients, but not admiring or desiring moral perfection will certainly stymie progress.

To admire it is to admire God, which returns us to the idea of worship.

Q: Perhaps. What does that have to do with evangelism?
A: Everything--we aspire to moral perfection (or at least sustained moral improvement) and so we desire to become more like God. God wants people to worship him and so we desire the same thing for much the same reasons.

Q: Much the same reasons? What reasons are different for us?
A: An additional motive for us is the desire to bring God pleasure.

Q: Not only do I have to worship him but I have to make him happy as well? How neurotic is this guy?
A: You miss the point. First, we don't have to worship him. We have a choice, and the choice (like all choices) has consequences. We either understand the nature of reality accurately or we do not. Upon understanding it, we either act congruently or we do not.

Second, we don't have to make him happy. But what else can you get for the guy who has everything? Bringing him pleasure is about all that we can offer.

Q: Why should I care whether or not I offer him anything?
A: Let's see--gratitude for being created, gratitude for being forgiven, gratitude for giving us help in our journey towards being like him, and that whole love thing.

Q: That whole love thing?
A: Yeah. We ought to love him because love is moral. Loving him means we want what's best for him. Bringing him pleasure is undeniably better than bringing him pain.

Q: But why doesn't that motivate me?
A: That brings us back to the whole horrendous imperfection thing...

God of Debugging

I want to share an amazing story from my friend, Sieweng, who works here at I2R with me. I meet her every morning on the bus to work, and we would chat about many things. One day, we talked about prayer: that it is about having a conversation with God. I told her that we have a God who desires to help us in all our problems.

Sieweng is writing a program for one of her research work. She has spent a lot of time debugging the complex program. About two weeks ago, she got really frustrated over a particular bug, so she asked her God to help her. That Sunday night (13 Nov '05), she had a dream. In the dream, she solved the bug and was extremely happy. When she woke up, she tried to remember the solution but could not. She felt a little upset, but she was encouraged by the dream to work at the program again.

So that faithful Monday morning, she studied the bug. She had an idea to view the problem from a different perspective, and tried it out. Suddenly, the program worked! She felt so happy that the next morning on the bus, she was still beaming about it when she told me about her marvelous encounter with God.

To others, it may all seem like a coincidence. But many of us who have been touched by God in a similar way know how it feels. You know deep in your heart that it did not happen by chance.

Overcomer

That is one word which God spoke clearly into me, since last year when I was in Budapest. Another word that God spoke clearly of is warrior . It seems at first to me, that perhaps God was telling me about my future, that I would have to endure and overcome the troubles of some sort, or that I would be a mighty warrior of God extending His kingdom here with the rest of His army of saints.

Then, I realized that God was using the words to tell me more about my existing circumstances: the problems I had adjusting to life in Budapest, the weak relationship I had with my family which He wanted to strengthen, the stress over applying for graduate school. God wanted me to overcome those problems. Even if I fell down again and again, He just wanted me to pick myself up again and again. He wanted me to never give up.

A few months later, I was especially encouraged when I read Revelations. In Jesus' words to the seven churchs, he always ended of by encouraging those who overcome.

"To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God." Rev 2:7

"He who overcomes will not be hurt by the second death." Rev 2:11

"To him who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it." Rev 2:17

"To him who overcomes and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations, ..., just as I have receuived authority from my Father. I will also give him the morning star." Rev 2:26

"He who overcomes will, like them, be dressed in white. I will never blot out his name from the book of life, but will acknowledge his name before my Father and his angels." Rev 3:5

"Him who overcomes, I will make a pillar in the temple of my God. Never again will he leave it. I will write on him the name of my God and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which is coming down out of heaven from my God; and I will also write on him my new name." Rev 3:12

"To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne." Rev 3:21

What was encouraging was that Jesus didn't say, "To him who accomplishes many things". He said that we only have to remain faithful to Him, never giving up. Recently, I was reading "Day of the Saints" by Bill Hamon, and the author talked about exactly the same things! He described how as saints, we are overcomers and warriors in the Lord! The book touched my heart deeply in a way only God can. This is why I chose to write this here in my blog.

God gave me a word two weeks ago: "I desire to work through my people - not through those who do not fall, but through those who fall and always pick themselves up again." The Bible is full of stories about people who fell and picked themselves up again to be used by God: Moses who killed someone, Joseph who was thrown in jail, David who killed a man for his wife, Peter who denied the Lord, Paul who persecuted the Christians. God is an expert in helping people to their feet, if they would allow him to do it and not depend on their own strengths.