Worship is a whole-being response to all of who God is and what He’s done for us, encompassing all of life, empowered by the Holy Spirit, offered through Jesus, in concert with all of God’s people (past, present, and around the world), using the gifts God has given us under the regulation of His Word and in response to His revelation which culminates in Christ and Him crucified, toward the goal that His kingdom would spread to the whole of creation.

Worship is formative. That means it has power to shape us. We are what we sing (as Mark Noll writes in a recent article in Christianity Today.) Our hearts are drawn from other “treasures” as our eyes are opened to see Jesus for who He really is. Thomas Chalmers called this the “expulsive power of a new affection.” By that phrase he means that you never really get over one love until a new one comes along. In worship we seek to have Jesus become more beautiful and believable to us. We seek to have God restore our sanity so that we can live in line with the truth of the gospel rather than in the fantasy world in which we must earn God’s favor and manipulate Him to do whatever we want.

In Stephen Pressfield’s book, Gates of Fire, you have the ancient story of the Spartan’s fabled stand at Thermopylae against the invading Persians, under the leadership of Xerxes.  The story of how three hundred Spartan warriors, along with their battle slaves and their Thespaian allies, held back hundreds of thousands Persians for seven days has been recounted many times, first from antiquity by Herodotus in The Histories, and down through ages.  In our own day the movie, The Three Hundred keeps this tale alive.  The reason it has been told and retold is the same as when it originally happened in 480 B.C.  The tale of three hundred Spartans dying to a man to give their fellow countrymen a chance was such a tale of courage, honor, and valor, that it enflamed the passion of the rest of Greece, so that eventually the Greeks rallied to defeat the Persians and Western Civilization was saved.

In June the Senior High Ministry at our church traveled to Colorado for Reformed Youth Movement (RYM). I could hardly wait until the bus door closed and we started our trip to and from Colorado! Really, I loved it—24 hour bus ride and all. It was a week of hiking, rafting, mountain biking, ropes courses, horseback riding, attempting to summit a 12,000+ peak, and taking on whatever else the front range of the Rockies threw at us. Each evening we worshipped together with great teaching and a time for small group discussions.