#38. Constant Embodied Worship
Corporate worship is more important that we often think, but it doesn’t take up most of our time. Like sex in marriage, its significance is not reflected in the amount of time spent doing it. We’d never say that sex is the entire substance of a marriage. It’s meant to benefit and build the quality of the more common spaces. The effect is beyond the act itself. Corporate worship is meant to effect and affect common worship in all the other spaces.
It’s not unusual to divide life into sacred and secular, bits God cares about and the bits he doesn’t. Because gathered worship and the Bible and prayer and evangelism matter enormously, we think that everything else doesn’t matter at all. But that is an unbiblical view, and a rather disheartening one.
Most of our time as mums is given over to things which we would still do even if we weren’t Christian. When we think that God doesn’t care about the common activities we do, we’re behaving as if someone else created ordinary human life in this world and then God came in to rescue us from it. Not so! All the ordinary rhythms, needs and provisions of humanity were God’s idea and they matter to him. He hasn’t abandoned his commitment to what he originally made*.
Intentional times of worship reorient us back towards God’s good intentions in creation. Corporate worship is meant to prepare us for doing all the ordinary human things the way we were created to. This ordinary living is another kind of worship, filling the spaces between the distinctly Christian activities. God is reclaiming what was lost in the Fall. He is reclaiming the common spaces.
God has seen fit to create us as embodied persons. We can’t bypass the filling of spaces and use of materials and the spending of hours. We must do the things which people in bodies need to do. It takes a lot of time and energy to be human. That doesn’t change when we become a Christian.
Becoming and being a mum, caring for young dependent, embodied people forces us to deal with physical realities in ways we might have previously been able to ignore. The work of being a person in a body who cares for other dependent persons in bodies can be a great spiritual paralyser if we don’t think domestic things have much value to God. If God doesn’t care about these common things, then home duties are a chronic interruption to our Christian life.
When we treat our spiritual life as something entirely apart from the work of our bodies and homes, we live as if the things which really matter are all somewhere else, organised by someone else. Without giving consideration to what’s good in all the beige parts of our life, we waste the common, in-between spaces. We cut corners on the common activities so we can spend more time on the peculiarly Christian ones.
Following his glorious doxology, “For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.” (Romans 11:36), Paul launches into a therefore:
“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Romans 12:1-2
When we see our “spiritual life” as separate from our common activities, we miss the altar where our constant, personal, spiritual worship happens. We resent the demands physical reality makes of us. Demands, which God makes of us through reality (the God from whom and through whom and for whom all reality exists). We treat our abundance of responsibilities, provisions and opportunities as afflictions. Distractions. Which is untrue and ungrateful. We waste the time and space and materials we could be productive with, time and space and materials we are called to worship with.
Standing in God’s mercy, (an ungodly enemy justified by the death of Jesus; forgiven, adopted, given the Holy Spirit and made a co-heir with Jesus—see the earlier chapters of Romans), the Christian presents herself as a living sacrifice, in a spiritual act of worship. Corporate, public worship is occasional; offering our body as a living sacrifice is as constant as being in a body. It’s non-stop. Conscious and unconscious. Planned and spontaneous. Inner and outer. Public and private. We’re saved into a constant posture of submitted sacrifice to the Lord, while we do all the things a body needs to do. The space where the constant spiritual worship is done is everywhere our bodies go. In the season where home demands a lot, then home is the dominant place. The worship often involves soap suds and a dustpan.
Our once-darkened minds are renewed and being trained to discern what God says is good—not just how to read the Bible and pray and tell others about Jesus—but how to rightly interpret and order and do all the common things humans do. This discernment doesn’t stop at merely recognising and receiving the gospel of Jesus. Neither is discernment only about figuring out what’s good in the dramatic ethical crises. God is renewing our minds and transforming us to know and do what is good in the ordinary, blank spaces where most of us spend our lives. We’re being transformed not merely to discern what to reject and run from, but what to accept and mature towards. As Paul goes on to say later in chapter 12, the Christian is learning how to overcome evil with good.
As we bring our kids into worship, the most influential factor—for good or ill—is going to be our daily, spiritual, embodied worship. Our daily posture before the Lord will be far more formative for our children than the programs and activities we send them to. Our constant renewal and transformation as we submit ourselves to God will amplify and illustrate our public profession in corporate worship. Without it, our children get close training in living the contradiction of hypocrisy and formalism. I guess that’s just another way of saying that our prime duty as mothers is to abide in Jesus. What a comfort, given this picture of constant worship is not dependent on other people performing well, or conditions being ideal. It can happen wherever we happen to be embodied.
*Oliver O’Donovan writes about this in “Resurrection and Moral Order”, which I am working through very slowly.
