Worship: When It Suddenly Makes Sense

                This is about worship.  “I Give My Heart to Thee Lord, Eagerly and Sincerely.”  Maybe the most useful thing John Calvin has ever taught me.  That will cause me some trouble with the purists.  I am the one who complained that “The Institutes of the Christian Religion”, Calvin’s masterwork of theology and the Christian life, really needs a fresh translation into more contemporary English.  Maybe someone needs to do for the Institutes what The Message did for the Bible.

                Well, that is a bunch of Church-y insider jargon that is bound to lose a lot of readers.  This phrase surrounds the Seal of John Calvin, which is him offering his burning heart up to God.  It is the eagerly and sincerely offered heart to the work and worship of Jesus. 

                What confused me about the image all these years I have seen it in the Stained Glass at church is that I mistook it for the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  Not that the Sacred Heart of Jesus is not important.  It most certainly is.  But it is not mine.  It is iconography, religious artwork, that I am going to explore.  What took me by surprise was that the burning heart that John Calvin offers to the Lord was unknown to my experience before now.

                Which is really strange, because I must have been exposed to it in some form.  It is also the Seal of Calvin College and Seminary, the central institutions of learning of the Christian Reformed Church, in which I was reared. 

                Worship is a reactive enterprise.  God did great by me.  In gratitude I will seek to do great by God, in my own broken and sinful way.  I pledge my heart, I pledge eagerness, I pledge sincerity.  Up to this moment, I was caught up in the forms of worship-prayers, singing, sermons, not in the heart-nature.  This is not to say that I do not worship the Lord.  It is to say that worship has been fulfilling more by the intervention of the Holy Spirit than by the deliberate movement of my heart and soul.

                The next question is how to work this out in my life and worship.  The joy is that this invests everything I do with the possibility of being worship.  The fear is how much of my life is uninvested in my Lord, much less invested eagerly or sincerely.