Listening to Radical Grace Radio Podcast which is done by a Lutheran pastor and lay person down in Florida. Matthew Pancake says the Magnificat never meant much to him until he had to learn it for choir. We learn things by repeating them over and over again. He says he suddenly realized what it was saying.
Hmmmm isn’t it so true. That is what liturgical worship is all about. Liturgy is deep, it is full of meaning. If people would stop treating it as just rote and really think about what it’s saying, what it means in our life, it will impress Biblical teachings and elements, God’s Word into our soul.
The problem is that our world wants a blunt ten second sound byte, tell me and I will decide whether I want it or not and move on. Yea, and we wonder why we are becoming more superficial and frankly crude. No one really makes us think, except that the church should be making us think through Biblical teaching and through fundamental Christian worship. But we want everything dragged down and diluted to make it easy for us. Sorry, but church is not ding-dong school, like too much public education. It’s intended to push, to make you think, to constantly have God’s Word hard-coated into your very soul.
God is not superficial, He gives us what we need in order to be pressed into our brain, heart and soul. For us to repeat over and over and when those times of trial come, we have God’s teaching right where we need it. When we have it hard coated it comes right back to us when it matters. We have taken the time to repeat it, to think about it, to let the Holy Spirit have time to really drill it into our head and soul. Something that we don’t do in our superficial, tell me something new and easy right now, world.
Liturgy, Bible study, prayer, may all seem rote, even tedious. But when it really is impressed on our brain, heart and soul, through regular worship, repetition, prayer then we truly begin to live in a way that is responsive to the leading of the Holy Spirit and become less responsive to the leading of the world. We begin to realize more and more how deep God’s Word is and how superficial and tedious all the blah, blah of the world really is.