No Disillusionment in Worshiping Christ (Jer. 29; Ez. 46:9-10)

Visions. Revisions. Disillusionment.                                                        Hope.

New season. New mission. New challenges.                                          New joys.

My ever-changing landscape does not represent my unchanging hope, and it is to the hope of Christ I cling. My silence has not meant separation. 

As I was reminded today in my reading of Jeremiah, God’s Word is full of His presence, and I stand daily before Him soaking in as much of His presence as I am able, worshiping Him best when sitting at His feet but walking out my worship, flawed as it is, daily, knowing that He will direct my paths, provide the strength I lack, and offer correction as needed, providing me a way to be made right through Christ.

So many thought have circulated through my mind as I have been working and waiting, as I have worshiped and walked, willing to write but not driven to do so or provided the necessary time. It has been a busy season. 

Worship is one of those thoughts that has circled back around continuously. Ezekiel reminded me of this again recently as I read in chapter 46. The worshipers who come to the appointed feast days before the LORD never leave the same way (v. 9-10), just as we do not come to worship and leave in the same state in which we come. If we do, we alone are at fault. God is present with two or more belivers. Leaving unchanged is leaving rebelliously, defiant to His will, His way. Being in His presence, bathing in His Word, worshiping Him in song, in spirit, living indwelt by His Spirit, we cannot leave “worship” unchanged.  

So I have hope. I mentioned above vision, revisions, disillusionment, and hope. I have been tasked this year (a return to the classroom) with teaching 11th graders latter American English, Modernism. As such I am teaching the students to see it through the lens the writers used. Their lens was torn by wars, a world beaten down by depression, lives ruined, financially shattered, drought-driven. Their lens was hopelessness, disillusionment, detachment, fragmentation, the “realism” they believed they were seeing. What THEY lacked was hope. They turned their backs on the hope to be found in Christ and turned their eyes toward their own circumstances, leaving them without anchor in the storm that was their world. Their writing reveals their hopelessness, but we can look at their hopelessness and see a desperate need for Christ, for redemption, for the promise of a future even when this life is hard. The turning of their backs on God did not bring fulfillment but more hardship. Desperate lives lived by sinful, rebellious people will never equal joy and fulfillment. Instead, it brings ruin. I want these students to see not only these people’s desperate need for Christ but the reality that a life lived apart from Him can only bring destruction and hopelessness. I see it, and it urges me to draw closer to Christ as I see the ruins of their lives even amidst what the world would call success. Success is never worth being separated from Christ, and nothing can separate me. The Word tells me so … 

The reminder of this hope, Jesus’ righteousness, my own call to worship Him resonates in my mind today as I have a day off, a recently rare time of contemplation in the word combined with time alone. Edward Motes’ 1834 hymn “My Hope Is Built on Nothing Less" wells up within me:

My hope is built on nothing less

than Jesus' blood and righteousness;

I dare not trust the sweetest frame,

but wholly lean on Jesus' name.

Refrain:

On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand:

all other ground is sinking sand;

all other ground is sinking sand.

When darkness veils his lovely face,

I rest on his unchanging grace;

in every high and stormy gale,

my anchor holds within the veil. [Refrain]

His oath, his covenant, his blood,

support me in the whelming flood;

when all around my soul gives way,

he then is all my hope and stay. [Refrain]

When he shall come with trumpet sound,

O may I then in him be found:

dressed in his righteousness alone,

faultless to stand before the throne. [Refrain]

So here I am to worship and share the secure hope that I have even when things in this life seem hard, painful, changing, or unbalanced. I have Christ, my hope. I cannot fully know His plans for me, but I know Him, and I know He is without change, totally sovereign, wise in His dispensation, firm in His discipline, and worthy of my hope.