Worship that is not Mistaken
Gather near, beloveds. Huddle by the internal fire of our hearts, exuding warmth. We will speak with a single topic and a single direction. The topic is praise; the direction is the Father. What follows is praise, written and directed to the Father as witness and song at once.
Set judgments to the side. The labels are not necessary here, little souls. We enter this endeavor with a single concept under our topic of praise and our direction toward God: a shared communal identity of Love as portrayed in the Heart of Christ our God.
Let us pray.
We come before You not as those who are sufficient.
We come as those who have known brokenness and the gentle and terrible healing of Your mercy.
We come not to offer pretty, easily wrapped praises; we come to offer praises that cost us something, for we refuse to offer sacrifices that cost us nothing.
We come in our soiled, burned, and filthy rags, and we offer them as children once more in innocence, with open hearts and courage. We offer our poorly wrapped mud pies, packaged in the stench of manure, and we know You radiate the most profound joy in our hearts’ earnest offering, not in the ritual.
We question with wisdom as guide internally for all and to You Father.
Perhaps Cain never understood why You rejected his offering and he proceeded to externalize his hypocrisy to educate the future hearts against wearing masks with You.
Did Cain see Abel's wilted and fly eaten offering and have a moment of outer crises? Did he perfect the outside and could he not reconcile that Abel's heart looked ugly and disorganized and allowed the seed of hatred to fester into death?
Was Cain the first so mistaken that he used the lack of worship received as weapon and fuel for hatreds first ended expression?
We await the answer.
We come not as ready, but as unready and surprised by grace in a way that has transformed our lives so deeply it appears explosive—supernova-adjacent—to the outside observer and to ourselves at once.
We come not to repeat fake and empty words. No, we come to say: thank You for the rain. Thank You for the trials. Thank You for the tribulation and purgation. Thank You for the breaking.
We come not as complete in ourselves, but as made full and complete in our inner being by the One who indwells.
We come not with music—not because music is unworthy, but because music is not our gift, except as consumers and avid listeners. We come to You with writing: writing as our chosen and given gift, reinvested to glorify You.
We bring what others might see as garbage, not because we believe it is garbage, but because we have learned that You desire the pure in heart to bring their filthy offerings so that You might hang them on the fridge of Your Son’s Heart for all to see.
The purification of the offering is secondary to the purity of the heart that offers it.
We come not with requests, though at times we do. We come simply to acknowledge You for who You are and who You are becoming within us.
We come not to speak of or glorify self, but to ask that You subsume self and replace it with the Lordship of our Beloved Yeshua.
We come because we weep over many things labeled as worship, and we long for authenticity. We also fear it at the same time, which for us is an indication of the cost of truly seeing and being seen.
We understand that there will always be offerings to place on the altar of our own lives. Praise—acceptable praise—is the attitude of the heart upon the altar and the willingness to sacrifice self for the greater identity of Love.
We come into this praise with intentionality. We come not to leave unchanged, but to leave with a new taste and lingering flavor of future praises.
We do not leave with a goodbye to truth, for the truth is that this little written liturgy is an example of how one is meant to draw near in hiddenness, when no one is around, and mean it.
This is our worship. Worship, in its native expression, is without rigid form. Worship flows from wonder that leads to and inspires awe. Worship is not tightly planned; it is spontaneous yet held within the organic order of a unified Body of Christ.
Praise has many forms. Praise is worship in song. Praise is the eternal tongue of fire spoken in unity with Love. Praise is the expression of writing like ours when it is directed to the Father. Praise is not a methodology for monetary gain or transactional considerations.
If money, cost, or time become the primary considerations, then we suggest that the foundation of praise is flawed and aimed at self-glorification.
We think of it like this:
A singer sings like an angel. The audience adores her. The listeners abroad adore her. She adores the adoration of those who adore her, even as she tries to direct it toward her Source. The one heaped with adoration is then drowned in the overflow of misdirected praise of the gift rather than the Giver, the Inspiration. This model of worship is what nearly all modern worship has slipped into.
We have found more true worship outside the institution of organized religion in America and abroad than anywhere else. The places that produce the most authentic worship are often the places that suffer the most.
We examine our own culture: how much are we suffering, and how are our artists responding to that undercurrent? If a society focuses only on external appearances of worth and becomes hollow, its expression turns into fear-based oppression—the opposite of wonder-inspired worship.
We do not do this, as a people, entirely on purpose. We do it because we believed the lie of “self” as an idolatrous concept and have severed ourselves from the unity of perfection with Love from before Creation.
Self, as we treat it, becomes the enemy of worship—anything that blocks both the reason and the offering. Self is the beast that must be willingly laid down if we ever want to hear the sound of heavenly angels in the buildings we mistakenly call churches nowadays.
As always, take what feels true to you.