John Piper has keenly diagnosed the problem with the worship of many churches (and individual believers), including me. Praise God for using the book Desiring God to help me refocus and repent of my dull heart that has starved itself of the pleasures of God!
Piper postulates that there are three stages (or phases) of worship that believers can be in. From pp. 96-96:
1. There is the final stage in which we feel an unencumbered joy in the manifold perfections of God-the joy of gratitude, wonder, hope, admiration. “My soul is feasted as with marrow and fat and my mouth praises thee with joyful lips” (Psalm 63:5). In this stage we are satisfied with the excellency of God, and we overflow with the joy of his fellowship. This is the feast of Christian Hedonism.
2. In a prior stage that we often taste, we do not feel fullness, but rather longing and desire. Having tasted the feast before, we recall the goodness of the Lord-but it seems far off. We preach to our souls not to be downcast, because we are sure we shall again praise the Lord (Psalm 42:5). Yet for now our hearts are not very fervent.
Even though this falls short of the ideal of vigorous, heartfelt ad oration and hope, yet it is a great honor to God. We honor the water from a mountain spring not only by the satisfied “ahhh” after drinking our fill, but also by the unquenched longing to be satisfied while still climbing to it.
In fact, these two stages are not really separable in the true saint, because all satisfaction in this life is still shot through with longing and all genuine longing has tasted the satisfying water of life.
3. The lowest stage of worship-where all genuine worship starts, and where it often returns for a dark season-is the barrenness of soul that scarcely feels any longing, and yet is still granted the grace of repentant sorrow for having so little love. “When my soul was embit tered, when I was pricked in heart, I was stupid and ignorant, I was like a beast toward thee” (Psalm 73 :22).
It is very easy to fall into stage three and remain there for long periods of time, both individually and corporately. The excitement we have for the doctrines of God, fueled by expository and thorough preaching can actually mask a barrenness of heart that can slowly creep in on us and catch us unaware. Piper puts it this way:
For many, Christianity has become the grinding out of general doctrinal laws from collections of biblical facts. But childlike wonder and aw have died.
From my own experience, I know that even when my heart is not engaged, I tend to remain excited about worship for external reasons: because the songs/prayers/teaching are biblical, deep, and faith-building. I sweep the fact that I feel close to nothing under the carpet because after all, this worship MUST be great since it appears biblical and since so many other people are so excited about it. But this veil of deception is exactly what Satan loves, because it keeps us from life-changing encounters with God. Paul teaches us that
The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
- 2 Corinthians 4:4
It would seem to me that even though Satan can not ultimately blind the minds of believers, he can influence us in a similar way by causing us to look not to Christ, but to the pleasures of our own life. I can see Satan grinning with glee when we “cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.” The pitiful, tangible pleasures we have settled for have caused our capacity for joy to become shriveled. We have so long teased our affections with counterfeit jewels that we have difficulty detecting real treasure.
This morning I read Deuteronomy 6 and was reminded how easy it is to forget the Lord, both the glories of His character and the manifold ways He has shown us his kindness. Meditating on these passages helped bring me out of stage 3 worship this morning:
Be careful that you do not forget the LORD, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. – Deuteronomy 6:12
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. – Ephesians 2:1-7
The May issue of the Intentional Parents newsletter was a particular delight to us. It reminded us that “Inter-generational living” is the normal and biblical pattern of how to raise children. Many sociologists and child “experts” of today’s society believe just the opposite – that children should be segregated into their own age groups for much of their day to achieve maximum developmental benefits. Gone are the days of the one-room schoolhouse in our public education system. The only place left to find multi-age teaching going on is in the home!
Here is a keen insight into the scene today:
For some reason, our culture assumes that children must be herded into age groups, isolated with others just their age for most of their time every day. But I don’t see age segregation in the Bible. I see family members living and learning together, helping each other and interacting with other families; I see grandparents and older adults coming alongside younger parents and letting them benefit from their wisdom; I see Jesus teaching all ages in one group; I see parents discipling their children by spending lots of time with them.
Biblically, we know that children are born sinners and are overrun by foolishness. If parents do not intentionally seek to drive the foolishness from children’s hearts it will mutate into more insidious, secret, deeply-rooted and damaging sins as they grow up.
Proverbs 12:19 presents the truth, “He that walketh with wise men shall be wise; but the companion of fools shall be destroyed.” Now, I don’t know your child’s friends, but I wouldn’t consider many children to be wise. Why then does our society keep children with other children? Our children need to walk with wise people in order to become wise. They need to spend a lot of life with wiser, more mature people, not with their peers.
What’s more, when children are herded together with little supervision (think of the case when there are 25 or 30 young children with one or at most two adults in a classroom) a breeding ground is developed for comparing themselves to each other (peer pressure). In this kind of competitive environment, children will attack each other with words in order to jockey for position either as the “better” child or as the more “popular” child. And unfortunately, the parents are not there to see what happens and deal with it appropriately. By the time the parents hear about a traumatic experience, hours later, the facts are difficult to obtain and the golden window for teachability has often passed.
Let’s face it: children can be downright mean to each other. Children who spend a lot of time in an age-isolated group tend to set up foolish standards that breed comparison and competition. Yet Scripture tells us explicitly not to compare ourselves with ourselves (2 Corinthians 10:12) and to help each other, not try to beat each other (Philippians 2:2-4).
…
Proverbs 22:15 explains that “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child,” and it seems that most of this foolishness surfaces when parents aren’t around and several children are left to their own devices with minimal adult supervision. Keeping the ages integrated and your children by your side checks this potentially crushing situation and protects your child’s heart from those wounding words and attitudes. Sure, someone may still say something that hurts your child’s feelings, but when that happens you are there to experience it along with your child and to help him deal with it in a gracious, loving manner (a discipleship opportunity again).
While I was a college student, I attended a local convenience store that was off-campus and was shocked by how many babies and young children I saw. I thought that there must be some strange phenomenon happening in the community where this store was, or that there was some particular function going on in the store to attract moms with young children at that moment. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that in the real world there are simply a lot of children. While I was at college I almost never saw them and developed a quite distorted view of the world. It was the same way with older adults. For those years the “wise” counselors from my life circumstances (apart from church life) were my peers and professors (and believe me, at Rutgers there was not much godly wisdom among the faculty).
As I look out at society, I see people who can be segregated with their own age group literally their entire life. Young children are sent to day-care, then graduate to kindergarted and enter the school system, where they stay in their own age-groups until age 18. In college, the situation is slightly better, as students from 18-24 (or even higher today as students take more and more time to complete 4 year degrees) have classes and live on campus together. Once they graduate, they typically get a job where they are working with people who have a similar skillset and background experience. Their co-workers are likely to be their age. When adults retire, they often travel, go on cruises with other retirees, join retirement communities, etc. How are the young to learn from the old if they never interact with them?
As your children spend time with those younger than they are, they learn to nurture and care for babies and toddlers; they learn to help the parents of those babies and toddlers as they are able; they see and hear firsthand what goes into caring for a baby; they realize the importance of discipline and obedience in children; they experience the thrill of each developmental milestone; and they develop the characteristic of patience as they help and protect those little ones.
…
As they spend time with people older than they are, your children learn to carry on intelligent conversations with adults; they learn from a variety of people with a variety of hobbies and interests; they benefit from large amounts of time together that give opportunities for everyday discipleship; they keep the elderly engaged in life, and give them meaningful relationships that preserve their dignity and give them a reason to get out of bed in the morning; the children learn to care for and respect the older; they see firsthand the cycle of life and how bodies can change; and they learn to be considerate of others’ limitations. They also learn history firsthand as the elder recounts stories of his life.
I pray that we will be a family that cherishes different age groups and seeks to go against the cultural tide of age segregation. We should be intentional about who we have in our home for fellowship and strive to not just have our peers or those like us over but rather have families with teenagers, single adults, those with disabilities, of varying economic ability, and the elderly in our home.
