wrong or immature, but is actually following a God-planned path.
For most Christians, perhaps the best way to deal with such questions is to refer them to the Bible. Do believers in the Bible meet God? Do they desire to encounter Him? Do they walk and talk with Him and interact with Him? The answer, of course, is a resounding “Yes!” Indeed, if you carefully read Scripture one of the amazing things that emerges, one that often shocks our culture, is the free and frequent direct communication between God and humanity.
When our family went as missionaries to the mountains of northern Thailand, one of the first major cultural/religious differences we noticed was this very fact—the people expected divine action. They saw God or the evil one at work in daily life. I found that I, the supposed religious teacher, was much more dubious about the Lord’s presence and action than those who supposedly needed teaching. Finally I concluded, to my chagrin, that the people I was living among were much more like the biblical saints than I was. While I do not agree with everything they thought, it was good for me to see that they, along with the Bible, truly believed that God acted and could be experienced.
Although we could say much, much more on the topic, I believe this is sufficient to make the basic point clear. The Bible story, both Old and New Testaments, expects that true religion implies an experience of God’s presence. Israelite and Christian faith was and is not just a philosophy based on ideas, but a religion based on an ongoing interaction with God. If He was not relating in a real way with His people, something was wrong.
The Double Longing
The hunger for God is not to be denied, squelched, suppressed, or reasoned away. God has placed it in us to be nurtured, cherished, and satisfied as only He can do. He meant it to draw us on a quest, a search, a pilgrimage to find Him, and to be surprised by the discovery that before we began to look for Him, He had already for a long time been seeking us.
As Thad Rutter put it so beautifully, we discover the double longing.7 We learn first that we have a longing—a deep hunger for God and a sense of His presence. As we begin to pursue that intense desire, we encounter a second even stronger longing. God’s heart desperately longs for us. That increases even more our desire for Him, and the spiral of communion continues to grow.
Greater understanding of this double longing came to me through our grandson, Noah. For a number of months, our son and his family, including three-year-old Noah, lived in our basement. Noah and I were friends, and every morning when he awakened he would come up the stairs calling for me. “Grandpa, Grandpa, where are you? I haven’t seen you yet today.” Usually I was in my study, and we would talk and play awhile before I had to go to work. As you can imagine I longed to hear that voice every day. I must admit that I even called my office assistant several times to say that I’d be late for work because of a situation at home. Noah had overslept, and I couldn’t face the day without that time together. I wanted to meet my grandson even more than he did me. I can only faintly imagine how much God, our heavenly Father, longs to hear our voice reaching out to Him, saying, “Father, Father, where are you? I haven’t seen you yet today?” That shows the divinely ordained “double longing.”
Conclusion
The only way to satisfy the deep spiritual hunger of our age is to pursue the “double longing.” That is what this book is about. It invites you in a practical way to cultivate the spiritual path of communion with God that can both meet your longing for Him and allow you to bask in His longing for fellowship with you. If that is happening, all other true religion follows. But if that is missing, all other religious practices are meaningless. Please join me for the journey.
1 Thomas R Kelly, A Testament of Devotion (New York: Harper and Row, 1941).
2 Henri J. M. Nouwen, Making All Things New (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981).
3 Reproduced in Christianity Today, October 24, 1994, p. 75.
4 E.M. Bounds, Power through Prayer (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1961), p. 37.
5 F.L. Cross, ed., “Lutheranism,” The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (London: Oxford University Press, 1958). See also “Pietism.”
6 Bounds, p.48.
7 Thad Rutter, Jr., Where the Heart Longs to Go (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 1998), pp. 17, 18ff.
Chapter 2: Worship:
Gateway to Communion
“I need to express myself more in worship. I feel closer to God when I do.”
“I have learned to come before God’s presence with fullness of joy and humble adoration.”
— FELLOW SPIRITUAL PILGRIMS
I first “caught” the real spirit of the spiritual disciplines through worship. As I stood in the back of a darkened college church during a student-led worship, three girls led the worship chorus, I Love You, Lord. Their faces shone as from their hearts they expressed their feelings in song:
I love You, Lord,
and I lift my voice
to worship You, O my soul. Rejoice!
In their joyful expression of personal devotion suddenly everything made sense for me. Worship became more than a liturgy or order of service, and song became more than “preliminaries.” These young women were reaching out to express love and devotion to God and inviting us to join them. That act had to be at the core of the spiritual life. What my heart learned that evening became something my mind then pursued. I became convinced that worship is the central priority of God’s people. It is at the heart of what He is calling us to do today. And it is the foundation of everything else that He wants to build into our lives.
For many conservative and evangelical Christians the center of life is evangelism or mission. But John Piper makes it clear that there is something more basic:
Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exist because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man. When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever.
Worship, therefore, is the fuel and goal in missions.8
The Bible and Worship
For Christians, however, worship is central not because Jon Dybdahl experienced it or John Piper writes about it, but because the Bible makes it so. Worship is the predominant activity of believers and the natural response when the awesome, loving God of the universe manifests Himself. While biblical instances of worship are sometimes difficult to define, Scripture has at least 400 examples.
But even more than sheer numbers, the call to worship is the most basic command in Scripture. When an expert in religious law asks Jesus, “What is the greatest commandment in the Law?” He gives a clear answer.9 First and foremost, He declares, “You are to love God with all your heart, soul and mind. Then second, you are to love your neighbor as yourself.” According to Jesus, the whole Old Testament hangs on these two commands, because the law and the prophets are the two major sections of that sacred collection.
What does it mean to love God? I have heard it said that you show your love to God by loving other people. That can’t be the whole answer, because it turns the first commandment into the second one! While loving God should lead to loving one’s neighbor, it has to be more than that.
Scripture makes it clear that you love God by worshiping Him. The two great acts of God in the Old Testament that