MySpace a place for friends

For whatever it may or may not be, worship is a dialogue. One that began in the garden before the Fall and one that continues here in the wildernesses and wastelands that have come after it. It is a dialogue between God and man. These "God-with-people encounters" as Donald Hustad puts it, are a series of conversations that contain statements or expressions of both revelation and response. The voice of revelation is the voice of God, and the voice of response is that of man, and not only of man, but of all created things. The Word of God testifies unto itself in Isaiah 55:11 that the voice of God, in this dialogue of worship, will not return to him empty but rather will "accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it." It demands a response. It will never afford us the opportunity to remain silent. We are naturally inclined by the intention of our design to be worshipers of God. Even the unredeemed of fallen man as natural agents of God's creation will exhibit, whether by acts of wickedness or goodness, a response of worship to their creator. This kind of glorifying, says C.S. Lewis, is the kind we share with the 'dragons and great deeps', 'with the frost and snows'. But we, those called by the intention of our Father to the glory of His purpose, We who find our identity in Christ Jesus, that Man of Sorrows who for the joy set before Him endured the affliction of all our sin to his very death on a cross, have been raised by grace into a very different conversation. One that begins something like this: "Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD. Though your sins are like scarlet they shall be white as snow, though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool" - Isaiah 1:18. We are the most enviable of all creation, privileged while mortals to honor God like angels and, for a few golden moments, to see spirit and flesh, delight and labor, skill and worship, the natural and the supernatural, all fused into that unity they would have had before the Fall. And so on and so forth, the dialogue continues...