Freedom From Oppression

DAILY BYTE

Finally, we worship to keep us free from the potential oppression of any dark, circling clouds. Victor Frankl relates his experiences of being in a concentration camp during the Second World War. One afternoon the men of this camp had tramped back several miles from a work site and were lying exhausted and sick and hungry in their barracks. It was winter and they had marched through a cold, dispiriting rain.

Suddenly one of the men burst into the barracks and shouted for the others to come outside. Reluctantly, but sensing the urgency in his voice they stirred themselves and staggered out into the courtyard. The rain had stopped and after months of non-stop depressingly dark gloom, a ray of sunlight was piercing through the lumpy, leaden clouds. The sunlight was reflecting on the little pools of water that had gathered on the concrete floor of the courtyard.

‘We stood there,’ said Frankl, ‘marvelling at the goodness of creation. We were tired and cold and sick, we were starving to death, we had lost our loved ones and never expected to see them again, yet there we stood, feeling a sense of reverence as old and as formidable as the world itself.’

Worship is for those moments where we feel trapped in beds of exhaustion, disappointment and disillusionment: moments when we feel too tired or too angry to get up and worship and are dispirited by the dark storm clouds that are hanging over our lives.

Worship is the discipline of sometimes dragging ourselves week after week, day after day, into God’s presence, when we are feeling dry or angry or sad. Worship is stubbornly clinging to the hope that one day, despite all apparent evidence to the contrary, the light will break through those clouds. For we know that above those clouds, the sun still drenches the world in life-giving rays. We may not be able to see it for now, but it is there … and it always will be.

So why do we worship? Well, perhaps the greatest truth of this is that worship runs like a thread throughout the Bible and throughout humanity because worship is that which brings us out of ourselves, out of the world’s mould and out of the darkest clouds into a place of God’s sunlight.

Worship is not just about one thing, like the songs that we sing, or the prayers that we pray, or the experience of being together, but it is all those things together and more besides. When we worship we are listening for the strains of God’s gospel that fill the air even more powerfully than the greatest of musical compositions. When we worship we are opening our hearts to God. When we worship we are gulping in the air God created us to breathe. When we worship we are remembering how God really shaped us to be. For we all know deep down that we never stand to tall as when we learn to bow our knees before God and that when we are God’s then we are truly free to be ourselves.

Ultimately, we worship to be free and we worship to stay free.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Lord, help us to remember that discipline is indispensable to worship. Give us the strength we need to worship you despite the darkest clouds that may be hanging over our lives and despite any feelings of dryness, anger or sadness that we may be struggling with. For it is when we open our hearts to you in worship and when we bring to you a sacrifice of praise, that we can know the fullness of the freedom you created us to live in. Amen.

FOCUS READING

Psalm 112:4 (MSG)

Sunrise breaks through the darkness for good people—
God's grace and mercy and justice!