Stepping Into Something Greater

I treated myself to a book yesterday. It is just a small book and didn’t cost a huge amount. Why is it, I wonder, that Christian books seem to cost more than other books? It is by Dave Billborough – “Worship and the Presence of God”.

I read these words this morning. He has described exactly what it is I want to experience when I worship.

“When we worship Christ, we step out of the reality present all around us and into the truth of who God is – a much bigger reality. As we worship, so we begin to bridge the gulf between the transcendent worlds of the unseen and the seen…We might meet together on a Sunday morning and go through many familiar acts of worship, and yet we always need to be reminded that we are stepping into something greater. We’re aligning ourselves with the things of heaven as we worship.”

Sometimes it seems that we have shifted the focus away from that “stepping into something greater” to just going through the motions of the “familiar acts”.

Someone who was fed up of going through the familiar acts was Moses. In Exodus 33 Moses does some stepping out into something greater. It is not enough to see a cloud or a pillar of fire, or to hear a voice that sounds like thunder. It is not enough to see God’s provision of water from a rock or in a flock of quails. It is not enough to see God’s power in each of the plagues, or in the parting of the Red Sea. Not quite “familiar” in my experience – but it was in Moses.

Moses wants something more intimate. He wants God himself – a personal encounter not disguised as a burning bush. God sees the desperation and the desire and graciously complies.

Not enough of His people ask to see His glory today. We are not desperate enough! We don’t like heights – so standing in a cleft of a rock is too far out of our comfort zone. We are more like the rest of the Israelites – watching from the safety of the doorways of our tents.