As my family and I prepared to move out here a few months ago with our commissioning from Oregon to Minnesota, we spent as much time as we could at the Oregon coast. It’s one of our favorite places. It’s a place where my wife was born and spent many summers. And it’s a place that in many ways inspires worship.
You know this experience when you’re captured by the greatness of a mighty ocean and standing on a shore. It has an arresting silence that happens when you’re there, and it’s a worshipful moment. Not so much a worship of the nature itself, but of the one who created it and is sustaining it, and you recognize how small you are and your place in creation.
It was our last time to go to the coast and the last time to enjoy it together. We hiked about a mile down a beach with our family. Our boys were mildly tired, as you could imagine, and giving us all the feelings you get when you’re tired as a kid. But we get there, and it’s epic, and everyone’s having a good time now.
We’re looking at this massive rock called Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach. When you’ve seen pictures of Oregon, this is the picture of the coast they show you. And we see waves crashing, and as I’m taking it in with my family, there’s a man sitting behind me on a log, talking on his phone. And he’s having a very casual conversation about a business deal that didn’t go the way he wanted. He wasn’t talking about how he lost his family, lost his job, lost everything. He’s just shooting the breeze while standing in front of this mighty testimony of creation about how if he would have had a better strategy, he might have made a few thousand more bucks.
As I’m taking it in and I hear this conversation happening behind me, I'm thinking to myself, “My man, you are missing the moment.”
You're just missing it.
This would be like standing at the Grand Canyon and thinking about your stocks and how they're doing. No, everything needs to be quiet right now to take in what you're experiencing. And in that flurry of judgment — I still believe in some respects a correct judgment, but maybe too harsh — the Lord convicted me. He convicted me that I do that all the time with so many areas of my life. I even do it on Sunday mornings, the place where worship should be most obvious. I come in here running on fumes, giving the rest of my week all the fuel, and then I give God my last bits, where I'm thinking about all the different things that could have happened during the week.
That conviction reminds me of the throne room scene that John writes about in Revelation 4. He says that there are these angelic beings flying around the throne of the Lord.
We are getting in on that on Sunday mornings. There's a worship service happening in heaven right now as angelic beings are crying out,
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come.”
And we're getting in on that right now as we sing to our Lord. But I wonder if we are getting in on it. I wonder if we are able to say those words with full-throated honesty, or if we're thinking about all the other things: about the fourth quarter and how it's closing out, how our fantasy team is doing, what our phone buzzing in our pocket might mean for us right now.
I wonder if we miss it. And with that thought and that question, I want to usher us into a time of silent confession, to ask the Lord where we might be missing it and to help right our eyes and our hearts toward Him.
Prayer of Confession
Lord, we enter into this moment of silent confession, asking that you would examine our hearts toward these ends we just talked about, and any other ends where we might be able to ask and answer the question: What has my attention and my intentions over you? What has my gaze, what has my focus right now over you? Not that these other things aren't important. We know that they're important, Lord. We know that you care about them quite a bit. But at the end of the day, they cannot be more important than you. So Lord, we ask that we would get that order right, that we would come to you with our first fruits and our first efforts, and everything else would fall by the backside of that. We want that, Lord. Come and be with us. Reveal our hearts…