July 14, 2015
Wait For Each Other
I’m noticing in charismatic churches there are different levels
of enthusiasm depending on whether the church is located
in a city, or a smaller town. They all have the same accompaniment — praise
team, praise songs, overhead projectors, keyboards, drums and guitars. However,
in smaller towns I’m finding the song services are more reflective, softer in
tone and volume, and less demonstrative. In these smaller congregations there
is a sense of waiting for the Spirit to lead people in worship, rather than the
worship leader or the pastor trying to motivate people to show more outward
signs of being spirit filled. I think Paul’s instruction on the discipline of waiting
for one another when partaking of the Lord’s Supper is applicable to waiting for
others in the worship service as well. “So then, my brothers, when you come
together to eat, wait for each other. If anyone is hungry,
he should eat at home, so that when you meet together it may not result in
judgment” (1 Cor 11:33 NIV).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----We do wait for each other in the worship services almost universally in all churches. We wait until the gathering together is complete just like Paul said to wait for the completion of gathering to communion before starting. But when either gathering is complete, the waiting is over, the going is ready. And “go” it should be. Yet you are so fundamentally right in that “waiting for one another” charismatically affects the going of the worship service, too, even though the waiting is done and the going has gotten on.
-----In fact, the rational connection between the two is basically giant. The pleasure of the Lord is the blessing of His creation. All of His crankiness, and threats, and “daddyness with an attitude and willow-switch”, and His wrath, and such are His characteristics developed for relationships during an evil age. When evil is gone those characteristics will be out of sorts. Since God is never “out of sorts” with anything, then, those attitudes will be gone, too. The attitudes of His relationships will then be composed entirely of righteousness, peace, and joy - composition of the kingdom of heaven. At that time, the pleasing of His creation will be a cinch. For His creation will then be made entirely and totally without exception of soles every last one having made His will and His kingdom the most basic desire of their hearts, and interlaced it through all other desires. For, in pleasing another, that other person’s desire has to have been somehow acknowledged by the thing done to be pleasing.
-----In other words, being pleasing to everything we effect is godliness. All effects pleasing righteousness, no effects excluded, and every last one of them making such effect totally of its own desire is among the most basic natures of God. We will share in that nature, thus making those effects throughout all eternity after Satan and all his misguided underlings are cast into the lake of fire. But today, in this mosh-pit of sin and degradation sticking to and sliming all over every effort to please another, or simply to do anything right, we can not talk so much about simply pleasing everybody, because everybody’s desires are actually skewed away from actual righteousness. They may tend towards there, and some may nearly get there, but everyone’s desires during this temporal time are tainted. That makes pleasing folks tricky.
-----Yet pleasing everything we effect remains part of our character, because it is part of the character of whose Spirit we have. So we must look very carefully to whom our neighbor is for learning best we can how to and not to please him. If we are going to really get into praising the Lord amongst a group of people, we should really know what turns on their praise spewing mechanisms and join in (if such are approved by God - a precaution for an evil age.) Usually those mechanisms are certain sounds and rhythms and concepts sung thereto. In charismatic churches, expressive behaviors are added. But all should be done with a mind for “the other”. It is the seminal element of “waiting for one another”. It comes from thinking about and considering one another.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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