The gift of passionate worship…
Aug 26th, 2010 by ljkim
The spiritual gift of “tongues” was a controversial issue for some contemporary Christians, but it was a fact of life for the early church. Without getting lost in controversies, the main idea here is that there is a gift of “passionate worship.” People with this gift are able to worship “in the moment” standing on the very precipice of eternity and bask in the knowledge of God, experiencing His presence and goodness, trusting His wisdom, and losing themselves (if only for a little while) in Him. In the early church this led to babbling, or ecstatic utterances that were sometimes called the languages of angels… Anthropologists have noted examples of “ecstatic utterances” in non-Christian pagan religions from the Mediterranean to Africa and East Asia (mainly with the aid of drugs)… No matter, the point of tongues is not really the “tongues,” it’s the state of mind that led to it… Deep, heartfelt, in-the-moment worship of the kind we should all one day experience inwardly.
People who don’t have this gift sometimes look at this as over-emotionalism, but looking closely it’s clear that it’s more than that. People with this gift are changed and renewed and inspired and inspire others with the knowledge of God. They remind the less emotional among us how God is alive and real and active, and in their worship they help us to wake up from spiritual dullness… They’re the beating heart of the church, and we need them to stay alive.
Ironically, this gift does NOT make people good worship leaders… They get lost so easily in their own emotions toward God, that they get out of touch with the people they’re supposed to lead. It’s better not to hire a math genius to teach remedial math, she won’t understand why it’s so difficult for her students.
But just the way thoroughbred horses need to run in order to stay fit, churches need to have this passionate worship in order to be complete. Those of us without this gift need to make room for worship, understanding that when it comes to this they must take the lead and show us the way.
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