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The Lord’s Sovereignty and Our Worship
Say among the nations, “The LORD reigns;
Indeed, the world is firmly established, it will not be moved;
He will judge the peoples with equity.”
Psalm 96:10
To continue on with the series from the book, How Shall We Worship?, we look at God’s sovereignty, His power, and find how that can shape how we worship Him.
The underlying belief that we all share is that the Lord is in control of the world, our lives and our salvation. He is the Creator of…well, everything. God created the blades of grass that cushion our step as we walk through our yard; every single blade. The song that the birds sing, the melodies we sing every Sunday, was created by Him. There are times when I wonder what I would do if I ever lost my voice. He blessed me with the gift to sing and allowed me to make music, but it can be taken away. It fills me with a sense of humbleness. I know that I do this because He has blessed me with the talent.
Have we lost this sense of awe and wonder? In the Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis, writing about a demon giving advice to another demon, writes that humans have confused ownership. What he means is that we use the possessive pronoun “My” to portray ownership over something that is clearly not ours. We refer to objects and people as mine: my wife, my house, and my country. We use it to refer to time, as in “Stop wasting my time.” We even use it when we talk about “my God”. None of these things are ours in the sense that we own them, especially God. God is the Creator of these things, not the created. We don’t own Him. A proper sense of our place in God’s story, not ours, will help us to worship God properly.
Matt Redman says it best in his song Breathing the Breath.
We have nothing to give that didn’t first come from Your hands
We have nothing to offer You that You did not provide
Every good and perfect gift comes from Your Kind and gracious heart
And all we do is give back to You what always has been Yours.
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