July 22, 2008: The Trouble With Adoration

A pastor friend told me that he was teaching his congregation to pray according to the ACTS formula (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication), and that he was having trouble with the "A". He couldn't get them to pray prayers of adoration.

I think there is a reason for that which has nothing to do with lukewarmness or immaturity on the part of the worshippers. It is simply because adoration tends to demand accompaniment. Stripped to mere words it comes across awkward and flat. When I pray I only need standard prose to confess, or give thanks, or make a request. But the act of praise wants more - a musical instrument perhaps, or formal expression in poetry or song. It is possible that my stuttering over verbal adoration is due to my coldness or lack of love for God, and if so, then God forgive me and reform me, and may he dismiss from everyone's mind the analysis below. But here is how I see it.

We have an intuition of what makes for an appropriate response to a performance, or revelation of fact, or stimulus. It is the denial of this intuition that allows that stupid line of rhetoric we've all heard in sermons: "At the football game Friday night you cheered for your team and shouted yourself hoarse when they scored a touchdown - are you telling me you can get excited about football but you can't get excited about God?" It is a common preacher's technique for drumming up enthusiasm-by-guilt in a quiet congregation, and it is idiotic. We should not cheer for God the way we cheer a walk-off home run. I believe we can see that by imagining other attempts to gin up inappropriate responses. When I'm hungry, for example, and good food is set before me, I salivate like one of Pavlov's dogs - and you probably do too. Imagine a preacher indicting us watery-mouthed diners with: "You mean to say you can salivate over a plate of food but you don't love God enough to get any spit in your mouth over him?" We'd say, "Fool! God isn't something you salivate over, food is." Or, if you will permit a racy example (we're all adults here), a man's body will respond in certain God-designed ways to the sight of an under-clad, shapely woman. If a preacher said, "You mean to say you can get it on for a woman but you can't do that for God?" I'd just walk out of the church.

The point is that different things call for different responses, and a vehicle of expression that works perfectly well in one setting will not work at all in another. Words work well for some things – like communicating truth, but not at all for other things - like satisfying hunger. And, I contend, words only "kind of" work, clunkily and under handicap, for some other good things. Like expressing love. As you know, love is notoriously difficult to express with words alone. Jim Croce gave up trying to do so and solved his problem musically:

Well I know it's kind of late,
I hope I didn't wake you.
But what I've got to say can't wait,
I know you'd understand.
'Cause every time I tried to tell you,
The words just came out wrong.
So I'll have to say 'I love you' in a song.

There it is, in a song! (Of course, you have to hear the above words sung to get their effect.) Croce was right. Love demands a song the way apple pie demands (for me anyway) a cup of coffee. Lovers stumble over mere words, and find themselves waxing poetical and musical in attempts to get their expression just right. Thus it was and ever shall be.

I believe that adoration of God is like the expression of love. Confine it to words alone and you'll see that it is "not quite right" or "missing something." That sense may be so strong that you'll struggle to get out any words at all. So try singing your praise instead. I can sing "How Great Thou Art", but if I update the language and try to say, "God you're really great," the words seem to die on my tongue. Perhaps they should, because I'm not using the right medium. In a terribly inappropriate (but wickedly funny) skit in Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life a clergyman played by Michael Palin leads antiphonal praise in a chapel service, saying, "Oh Lord...Oooh you are so big...So absolutely huge...Gosh we're all really impressed down here I tell you." This is a lampooning of the Psalms of praise of course, but remember: the Psalms were composed as poetry and performed as songs! Cripple the poetry and mute the music and of course you wind up with something that sounds funny and odd.

I'm recommending to my pastor friend (and if I'm wrong, God give him the wisdom to ignore me!) to leave the confession, thanksgiving and supplication as they are - verbal - but to flavor the adoration with something else. Music, probably. Sing a song of adoration, or perhaps listen in silence to sacred instrumental music. Read a devotional poem. In a charismatic congregation, tongues might do nicely here. Maybe there are visual ways too of provoking the heart's adoration (a friend of mine came to believe in God when he saw mountains!), but I don't know how to do that in a worship service. The main thing is to find a way to give to Adoration the non-verbal accompaniment it demands and deserves.