LakePastor.com

Spiritual Pathways- Part 4: Worshiping Pathways

People on the worship pathway resonate with the psalmist who wrote, "I rejoiced with those who said to me, `Let us go to the house of the LORD.'" They have a natural gift for expression and celebration. Something deep inside them feels released  during times of worship.

A classic example of this occurs in Psalm 73. The psalmist is complaining  about how often bad people get all the breaks, how the very people his mother warned him about are living the good life, and how he has been keeping his nose clean all his life and it has never paid off. "When I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me, till I entered the sanctuary of God." For the psalmist, it was in worship that he experienced again the reality of God's presence, and that presence changed his per­spective on everything.

If this is you, when you worship at church you don’t mind if the service goes over an hour. Infact, you lose track of time. While the intellectual types are looking at their watches, waiting for the message to start, you're internally shouting, "play it again, Sam." You may or may not be naturally expressive, but somehow in worship your heart opens up and you become one with God. You sometimes find yourself in tears, sometimes in moments of deep joy, because God seems so close.

If this is your pathway, you need to experience great worship on a regular basis. You may want to turn your car into a rolling sanctuary. Get great music that helps you worship, then sing your lungs out as you drive down the road, just don’t try  drive into our church. Don't worry that we're all staring at you from our car. This is how you connect to God. Besides, you will bring joy to all of us who watch.

Here are a few cautions for people on this pathway: Don't judge people who are not as outwardly expressive as you. Some people are from traditions where no one raises a finger, let alone a hand, in a worship service. Not everybody dances. Some of us were taught not to show emotion.

Also, guard against an experienced-based spirituality that has you always looking for the next "worship high." C. S. Lewis wrote about the fatal sin of saying "encore!" by demanding that
God reproduce an experience or an emotion. He said that of all prayers, this may be the one God is least likely to grant, because it can lead us to worship an experience rather than the God to whom our
experience points. Music, for instance, can be a great gift to worship. But because music
affects our feelings so power­ fully I can grow dependent on music to produce a certain emo­tional response. I may need to spend some time worshiping God without music so that my worship is based on who God is and not a matter of getting swept up in certain sounds.

We can begin to judge the worship in our churches super­ficially by always demanding that they produce a certain emo­tional response. Engaging in study will be an important stretch for you, so that your heart is deeply rooted in the knowledge of God.

Spiritual Pathways- Part 3: Serving Pathways

On the serving pathway people find that God's presence seems most tangible when they are involved in helping others. Jesus' comment that "whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me" is a truth they experience viscerally. If this is you, you may find that you are somewhat uncomfortable in a setting where you don't have a role to play. But if you can do some­thing  set up chairs, make coffee, help decorate—you feel a sense of God's delight in you. You often find yourself making observations that help you grow, or speaking to God in ways that feel most natural while you are engaged in acts of service.

An example of this in Acts 9 is a woman named Dorcas, yes (Dork-ass), or in English, Tabitha. She merits the only use of the feminine form of the Greek word for "disciple" in the New Testament. She gets only a brief mention, but we are told that she was always doing good and involved in helping the poor. Mother Teresa would be a kind of modern icon for this pathway. She said that the primary reason she was so involved in serving was not that it was something she was supposed to do, but that it brought her joy. She often felt her own inadequacy

when she was alone; she never felt the presence of Jesus more strongly than in those she served. Jimmy Carter has probably inspired more people as an ex-president than he did while he was in office because of his passion for servanthood through chan­nels like Habitat for Humanity.

People on this pathway find that if they are just attending church but have no place to serve, God begins to feel distant. They need to be plugged into a community where they have meaningful serving opportu­nities. They can enrich their sense of God's presence in their lives by constantly look­ing for him in the people they serve.

A danger to these people is the temptation to think God is present only when they are serving. They can get so caught up in being God's servant they forget they are his child first of all. They will have to stretch by learning to receive love as well as to offer it. Another danger is that if I am a “big­time” server, there is the temptation to resent others who are not serving as much as I am.

Spiritual Pathways- Part 2: Intellectual Pathways

People on the intellectual pathway draw closer to God as they learn more about him. You begin to get excited when someone talks about the "life of the mind." Ideas are as alive to you as people. You love to study Scripture. The word "theology" has the same impact on you that the phrase "hot doughnuts now" has on the average customer of a Krispy Kreme shop. No one wants to go to a bookstore with you, because once you walk in, they know they're going to miss curfew.

When you go to church, you often find yourself marking time during the music until the sermon starts. You get a little concerned about small groups containing a bunch of people who are all about the social thing. When you are faced with crises or spiritual challenges, you tend to go into an analytic, problem-solving mode.

Moses said in the central command of the Law that God's people are to love him "with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength." When Jesus cited that statement, he followed the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament) by adding one phrase: "with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind. " If you're on the intellectual pathway, you are deeply grateful for that addition. (If it's your dominant pathway, you get a little thrill when you see the word Septuagint.)

One person who probably walked this pathway was the apostle Paul. He writes about his life as a student of Gamaliel, one of the great Jewish scholars of his day. The richness of Paul's mind has occupied many of the greatest thinkers in the world for the past two thousand years. Perhaps most typical of this path­way is how frequently and irresistibly Paul will move in the mid­dle of his writing from thinking to praising: "Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, accord­ing to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory...."

If you're like Paul, the road to your heart usually runs through your head. You hear God best when you learn. You need to con­tinually immerse yourself in great books, deep thoughts, and sound teaching. When your mind is growing, you feel fully alive. Many of your most significant moments of worship or devotion or decision or repentance came when you were in deep learning mode. You may want to sign up for classes at a seminary or go online for distance learning or get tapes of a few great teachers. If you quit learning, you grow stagnant.

The danger of this pathway lies in becoming all head and no heart. Dallas Willard once observed that it is extremely difficult to be right and not to hurt anybody with it. Very few people enjoy sitting next to the kid in class who's right all the time and knows it. One of the remarkable things about Jesus is that he was always right, yet never damaged anyone with his mental superiority. "Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up," wrote Paul, who was in a good position to know. So you may want to stretch by making sure your growth in knowledge always leads to a growth in worship.