In Awe?

 When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” Genesis 28:16

....."I am afraid that many of us have lost our awe of God and we don't even know it." Paul Tripp

Do we, you and I, belong in that group of "many" that Paul Tripp speaks of? Do we live, go about our daily things, including corporate worship, with a distinct lack of being in awe of the God we say we worship, serve, and follow? Jacob, spoken of in the above Scripture, was a man born into a family with a rich spiritual heritage. His grandfather was Abraham, friend of God, declared righteous by God. The father of the faithful. His father was Isaac, the very Isaac who had witnessed so many acts of faithfulness by his father Abraham, and who himself had led a life of faith. Jacob had either seen or heard firsthand accounts of the wonders his God had done, yet he had grown so dull to His presence that he came to a place where the encounter he had with God caused him to exclaim that he hadn't even been aware of His presence. Had he gotten so used to the idea of God that he no longer sought His reality? He knew a great deal about Him, very little of Him? How like him are we?

I fear that we have, as Tripp warns, lost our sense of awe in His presence. It can be seen in how casually we approach Him, be it public worship or private prayer. When Isaiah encountered a Holy God in his vision in Isaiah 6, he could only say, "Woe is me. I am undone." The holiness of God overwhelmed him. When a cohort of soldiers came to arrest Jesus in the Garden, asking if He was the One they had come for, His answer, "I Am He," caused every one of them to fall to the ground before Him. Such was the power of His Presence. When Peter first began to understand who Jesus was, all he could do was ask Him to depart from him, because the holy presence of Jesus Christ made Peter realize his own sin and his unworthiness to be in His presence. The disciples spent three years following Him, loving Him, beholding His miracles, and enjoying deep intimacy with Him. Yet they never became so familiar with Him that they lost their sense of awe in His company, especially as they witnessed His miracles. When He calmed a savage storm, all they could do was ask, "Who is this, that even the winds and waves obey Him?" When's the last time that kind of question, spoken in amazing wonder, came from us? The old lyric comes to mind; "I stand amazed in the presence of Jesus the Nazarene." When was the last time we experienced true amazement before Him? Has He become so familiar to us that we no longer wonder at His name, at who He is? 

I often think of how He must grieve as He moves about our various fellowships as we come together. We come in a myriad of different attitudes, but so few of them are that of true worship. We come before Him distracted, unfocused, half-asleep, or thinking about what has gone on before we got there or what might be coming after we leave. Worst of all, we come expecting pretty much the same thing we saw the last time. We've seen it so often now, and Lord help us that it's true, we've gotten a bit bored with it all. Like Jacob, we've been in a trance, and like Jacob, it is time, past time, for us to wake up.

Some years back Larry Crabb wrote a book with the title, "Real Church. Does It Exist? Can I Find It?" The book came out of his realizing that he, and so many he knew, had grown bored and unsatisfied with their worship experience, which wasn't much of an experience at all. A dying world and a sleeping church are desperate to experience "real church." May we, you and I, rediscover the awesome God who is very much present but who we so often don't notice. May we confess all the attitudes and reasons that have made that so, repent of them all, and enter into, maybe for the first time, the wonder of His presence. To know and experience true awe. To be undone and then re-made. To worship Him in spirit and truth. For us and our fellowships to never be the same again.

Blessings,
Pastor O