Peanut Butter Toast

I remember seeing the young kids in Youth with a Mission eating peanut butter on toast when I was in Europe a few years back. I felt sorry for them because they couldn't afford better and I couldn't imagine eating peanut butter on toast. Now I love it. Add a dash of honey and it is spectacular. Isn't it funny how our perspectives and tastes change over the years?

Our worship lives are like that, too. Things we thought were strange or even distasteful early in our faith lives become meaningful as we come to understand their Biblical roots and the reason God would even want us to worship Him that way. For example, think about raising your hands in worship. For some this is a familiar and comfortable posture and a genuine expression of their hearts to God. For others it is embarrassing and far too "charismatic" for their tastes. So, who's right? Should we raise our hands in worship, or is that just a Pentecostal thing? In the end, this isn't a discussion about who's "right or wrong" or who is an introvert or extrovert, charismatic, Pentecostal, or anything else - it boils down to understanding what raising our hands in worship means and what it does in connecting us to God in a spiritual sense.

The psalmist wrote, "Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice" (Psalm 141:2). Paul later wrote, "I desire therefore that the men pray in every place, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and disputing" (I Timothy 2:8). Obviously, there was some tradition in the Hebrew church of lifting hands in worship and prayer. Jesus would be very familiar with this and would have practiced it Himself, perhaps lifting the five loaves and two fish to God as He blessed it, broke it, and fed the five thousand with it (Mark 6:41).

One of the primary words in Hebrew for the action of lifting hands in worship is yadah, a word very close to the word used in Genesis in the phrase "Adam knew his wife, Eve" (Genesis 4). It literally means to "throw up the hands spontaneously" and connotes surrender, intimacy, and engagement with God. The problem with waiting until we feel like doing this is the same problem with waiting til you feel like being faithful to your spouse - the feelings of love come and go, but the relationship and our commitment to it are the important matters. If we are committed to deepening our love relationship with God, we should be exploring greater expressions and acts of worship (along with all the other spiritual disciplines) corporately and privately.

In my workshops I never force expressions of worship. I want to model freedom that flows out of my own relationship to God in worship. I encourage people to begin to explore raising their hands in private worship and prayer first, reminding them they're doing it for God and not for me anyway. As we go deeper in private worship expressions, our faith and our intimacy will respond and grow. Whether we ever lift our hands in public isn't the issue, but I have seen that when people experience this freedom they long to engage in it at every level.

Lifting our hands in worship and prayer is at least symbolic of surrender, but I believe doing it actually works a humility into our souls that mental acknowledgement will never accomplish. Worship is active, dynamic, and organic, involving spirit, soul, and body. When we only "think" our worship we limit the impact of the experience and miss the effect of singing, bowing, lifting our hands, or dancing in joy before the Lord. As worship leaders, we never force people into these actions of worship but model them and demonstrate their power in our own lives just like those kids in Europe didn't force me to eat what they did at breakfast. Ours is only to expose them to the possibilities and invite them into deeper expressions of their hearts to God.

I had my peanut butter toast this morning. It was delicious.