Not a Graveyard for our Prayers

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The pattern of worship in the Bible is this. We, in the power of the Holy Spirit, ascend into the heavenly places to worship God. As we worship Him there, and He receives our praise, He takes that glory and manifests it on earth. If we try to manifest God’s glory on earth directly, we are trying to sell second-hand goods. This is not how God does it.

In the book of Revelation, throughout the book of Revelation, the worship of the saints from earth to heaven, is then taken by God and translated back into earthly affairs. The division between heaven and earth is overcome in the worship of God through Jesus Christ, and only there.

But if we do not worship God in faith, then we will start directing our worship “horizontally,” aiming at things we believe need to be corrected. This is humanistic idolatry. It is theological liberalism.

Another alternative, another form of faithless worship, seeks to escape to heaven. This approach wants to worship God in the heavenlies, on the condition that the worship be bottled up there forever. But when this happens, we send our worship off to heaven because heaven is the place where everything goes when it is dead. But heaven is not a graveyard for our prayers; God is not the God of the dead but of the living. Anything that truly goes to heaven, is going there to live—and to be fruitful, and to multiply.

So the worship that God intends for us to offer is the kind of worship that fills heaven, and because it fills heaven to overflowing, it pours back down upon us all. This is not arrogant hubris; the Bible says explicitly that the Church is the fullness of Jesus Christ, the one who fills all things. We are the fullness of Jesus Christ, and as we worship in this faith, that fullness abounds, overflows, and the world around us is transformed.

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