Today in worship our church had a sharing service. God was at work moving hearts with what to share. Wanting my own worship to be raised to a higher level I was contemplating the following song. After reading the verses read my thoughts below on bringing balance to worship.
My God, How Wonderful Thou Art by Fredrick Faber
My God, how wonderful Thou art
Thy majesty how bright
How beautiful Thy mercy seat
In depths of burning light
How dread are Thine eternal years
O everlasting Lord
By prostrate spirits day and night
Incessantly adored
How wonderful, how beautiful
The sight of Thee must be
Thine endless wisdom, boundless pow’r
And awful purity
O how I fear Thee, living God
With deepest, tenderest fears
And worship Thee with trembling hope
And penitential tears
Yet I may love Thee too, O Lord
Almighty as Thou art
For Thou has stooped to ask of me
The love of my poor heart
Our worship must always be skewed for lack of knowledge of God, or for knowledge we have but our own or collective blindness willfully or unwittingly neglects. By skewed I do not mean to necessitate sinfulness (though willful neglect of knowledge is) but rather leaning to one side and therefore lacking or incomplete. There are those who see God as harsh so that their worship is wrong and skewed away from grace. Those of us who know grace are frequently skewed toward grace away from a true understanding of all that God’s character entails. Grace and truth are not the paradox of God’s character, the harsh versus the warm fuzzy. Grace is God’s truth applied; truth is the full extent of God’s grace understood.
God is pure and good and just and wrathful and loving because He is so separate and other than we, that is, holy. His grace is that justice satisfied, that wrath poured out but not on us, that goodness reaching us, that purity transferred to us, and that love passionately pursued because He is so holy. Grace and truth are in no way opposed. They seem to me as two sides of the same coin, equal in value, both representative of the same thing, God’s character. I have need of balancing my view of grace by reminder of how awesome and holy and just He is so that I better understand how kind and patient and forgiving He really is.
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