Embrace Worship: Remember

The Bible weaves throughout God’s story the history and narrative of God’s people, as well as poetic and prophetic wisdom. That means we can read God’s Word for instruction, encouragement, and revelation. It meets us – personally and corporately – where and when we are. 

In recent years, I’ve been reading a lot of Exodus and Acts. In ways I never expected, these two books of the Bible on either end of the redemptive history timeline contain similar purposes. Each sets out to record the beginning of a new era for God’s people. 

• Throughout Exodus, Moses chronicles the deliverance of the Israelites and the issuing of the Law, the wilderness travels, and the tabernacle – God’s dwelling place among His people. 
• In Acts, Luke pens Jesus’ final teachings and ascension, the church’s early years, and the arrival of Holy Spirit – God’s new mode of being with His people.

Thousands of years packed with events and experiences is a lot to recall, so through these faithful scribes, God offers readers of all time mnemonic devices to help us remember our story, God’s ways, and God Himself. 

• Like the cloud of fire, whose guiding glow each night helped God’s fledgling nation recall He was with them. 
• Like altars, the sights and smells of which reminded God’s people of their need for repentance and of God.
• Like feasts, which enabled God’s nation to gather and remember key historical moments and moves of God, such as the giving of the Law (the old covenant) during the Feast of Weeks.

• Like candles on the altars of churches today, whose flames become a visual cue to recall that Holy Spirit is present, that the Light of the World is among us. 
• Like holy days, which annually keep before us the defining moments of our faith history – such as Christ’s resurrection and His defeat of sin and death at Easter.
• Like Holy Communion, which brings communities of believers together to partake in the bread and wine in remembrance of Jesus’ sacrifice, the ushering in of the new covenant, and our call to participate in the work He began.

Old or New, God’s covenantal way of leading and being with His people comes with documented history, ongoing practices, and symbols that are intended to help us remember who He is, who we are, and what we’re called to be. But as history has proven over and over, God’s people easily forget; we lose our way and our why. 

So it’s always a good practice to review where we’ve come from and why we do what we do. In that way, remembering becomes a facet of worship as it refreshes our connection to the One who establishes us; it is to step out of our forgetfulness and into the heart of the Father.

Acknowledging Amnesia

Less than two months after walking through the parted Red Sea, the Israelites met with God at Mount Sinai to receive the Law (Exodus 19-23) – to which “they responded, ‘We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey.’ Moses then took the blood of the sacrifice, saying, ‘This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you’” (24:7-8).

Forty days later, the people of God forgot their covenant, bowing, instead, to a golden calf (32:4). Thus demonstrates our collective cyclical history.  

We’re a forgetful people.

Fifteen-hundred years later, Paul traveled the known world to share the gospel and to establish churches. Inevitably, he would learn of a church’s failure to remember the full gospel. They’d add rules that Jesus had died to eliminate (Acts 15), or take away the idea and power of Jesus’ resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:12-34), or become enamored by a false teacher’s charisma (Romans 16:17-18). 

And if we’re honest with ourselves, not much has changed in our modern era. We still follow idols – be they celebrities or careers; we add to the gospel ideas of prosperity, take away from the gospel the power of the Spirit, and follow charisma and charm over Truth.

We’re a forgetful people. 

The Church has gotten a lot wrong in the last many decades. People have been genuinely hurt. So have feelings. We split over social issues and take offense at tertiary ideologies. And with the advent of online-church, many have taken to worshiping alone. All the time.*

All our forgetting leads us toward isolation, self-sufficiency, and even division. Living and worshiping from our self-made exile causes us to miss the purposes of Jesus’ coming and the Spirit’s anointing.

“Amnesia is the inevitable infirmity of those who leave community. It’s no accident that the call to sacred remembrance in Scripture is most often issued in the congregation.”

Beth Moore¹ 

My friends, when we fail to know the love of a church family, we miss the power and beauty of gathering together. We’re meant to be one with each other just as Jesus and the Father are one (John 17:20-23); we’re meant to “have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people” (Ephesians 3:17). We’re designed to be the Body of Christ, working together as one, in unity (1 Corinthians 12) – to continue meeting together as an encouragement to one another (Hebrews 10:25).

The Power of Remembering

Every time the Israelites collectively forgot who they were, God would give them over to their wayward choices. Until they remembered. In their remembering, they repented with one voice and turned back to God. 

Considering this rich history, Jesus knew our propensity toward forgetfulness. So on the night of His arrest, He brought the Twelve together to celebrate the Seder meal – a Passover tradition wrapped in remembering. 

Jesus took elements of the Seder that symbolized parts of the Jewish story, and pivoted. He grabbed hold of the familiar and gave it new meaning: 

Jesus “took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.’” 

1 Corinthians 11:23-25, emphasis mine

In most churches I’ve been part of, an altar table stands at the front of the sanctuary, and across the front edge are inscribed the words, “This do in remembrance of me.” Even as a child who had not been taught the theology of sacrament or even the deeper tenets of Holy Communion, I had a dawning understanding that what happened at that table helped us remember Jesus. 

In His perfect, purposeful way, Jesus handed us a way to remember Him and His ways, to remain connected to Him:

“The bread reveals the Son of God who gave himself entirely and utterly for us. The cup offers the blood shed to take away every sin. The essence of the Lord’s Supper is Jesus offering in the present moment all that his incarnate life, death, resurrection, and ascension have accomplished.”² 

This righteous rhythm in our Christian participation connects us to the greater community: 

“When we take Communion, we mysteriously feast with all those who are in Christ…. We are immersed in the Christian life together.”³ 

This redeeming ritual connects us to the heart of worship:

“Setting out this tangible reminder of Christ time after time in the life of the church will be worship if our hearts feel the preciousness of remembering Christ and tremble at the prospect of forgetting him.”⁴ 

The Holy Goodness of Being Together

For too long I worshiped by myself on Sunday mornings. At first because of the pandemic. Then because of our move to Texas. Eventually because it was the easier mode of “doing church” – I didn’t have to search for a new church home or start over making friends or risk my heart.

But then I stepped into a sanctuary packed with people who had come to worship God with all their hearts, and I felt my body relax. I stood amazed as my eyes wept with a release I didn’t know was needed, and I realized how much I missed worshiping and engaging with my brothers and sisters in Christ. I remembered.

There are reasons for such a reaction. Namely, having been made in the image of God, we are created by community, by our Three-In-One God, for community.⁵ Trappist Monk Thomas Merton grasped the depth at which humans are “already one;” it’s the reality of “our original unity.”⁶ I felt the truth of this so deeply in my soul that first time I returned to the Body of Christ – my whole self communed with the collective hearts around me. 

As we follow the growth and expansion of the early Church in the New Testament, we won’t see perfect bands of believers doing everything right or well. But we will see the faithful fighting forgetfulness by continually coming together – a sticking together through persecution. A holding onto each other despite disagreements. A clinging to one another even as they kept Christ at the core of their identity. 

It’s an interesting fact that the word ‘worship’ is never used in the New Testament to describe the gathering of the local church.⁴ Yes, they certainly worshiped when they met together, but the way they lived demonstrates for us how worship “flows in all of life.”⁴ Worship is a both-and. Personal and corporate. In our singular souls and with the collective soul. 

So while we each have our personal journeys with Jesus, if we make it only about our individual path, we forget how critical it is to be part of something bigger than ourselves. We miss out on the greater good of being in true community. We fail to see how “our own small stories are wrapped up in the story of all believers throughout time, which are together part of the eternal story of Christ.”³

Friends, we are wired to need one another. We are meant to gather corporately as a means of remembering who we are together, as one with each other and with our Triune God. Meeting together draws us into rhythms and practices that help us recall our history, our holy hope in Jesus, and our heavenly calling to go into the world with the love and truth of Christ. Together we help others find a life of connection in Jesus’ community – His beautiful, imperfect Church. 

This is worship.

Holy Trinity, from community You have created community. We are made in your image. We are made to be one just as You are one. And we confess that too often we make it about self. We realize how much the world, specifically American culture, has influenced our thinking and behaving. We’re not created for total independence but dependence on You and even on one another in the most holy and whole ways. So we ask that You would meet each one of us where we are and highlight the places in our understanding and motivations that need redemption, that need your touch of healing so that we might be willing to move toward You and toward other believers in faith and trust so that we can encourage and support and work with one another. Help us to remember who we are, who You have created us to be, and who You are as our Creator, Redeemer, and Helper. Thank You for putting before us Scripture, symbols, and practices that aid our ability to recall that You are the One we worship in Spirit and in truth – that we are one in You and with each other. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
(inspired by Genesis 1:26-27; John 17:20-23; Ephesians 3:17; Hebrews 10:25; 1 Corinthians 12; Galatians 3:28)

Resources: I love sharing with you the books, podcasts, articles, and anything else that has inspired, encouraged, or taught me. These are humble offerings with no expectations.

• *I want to clarify my heart about worshiping online. There are seasons and reasons to worship with a virtual community. And we celebrate our ability to do so! I’m merely challenging us to evaluate our motives for remaining alone in our worship if we’re bodily able to meet in person. XOXO
• 1 – Quoted from Beth Moore in Chasing Vines,^ p.204
• 2 – This “Desiring God” article sets out to “reclaim the heart of communion.”
• 3 – Quoted from Tish Harrison Warren in The Liturgy of the Ordinary,^ P.119-121. I also love this quote: “Jesus sent his Spirit to a people. The preservation of our faith and the endurance of the saints is not an individual promise; it is a promise that God will redeem and preserve his church—a people, a community, an organism, an institution—generation after generation, and that even the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”
• 4 – This “Desiring God” article unpacks deeper ideas of Communion as worship.
• 5 – A quote from Lisa Harper’s Back Porch Theology podcast episode, “Theology of Worship Part Two” with four women who lead worship regularly. They converse about much in this episode, including the role of the Trinity and worship. “The fact that we were made in the image of a God who is a community in Himself denotes relationship! We tend to make God segregate and Holy Spirit absent. Augustine said, ‘only the Christian God is a perfect community unto Himself,’ and we were hardwired as image bearers for relationship, to be in COMMUNION with Him – to listen to Him, and there’s a communal aspect with each other.
• 6 – Thomas Merton, Seeds by Thomas Merton, Robert Inchausti, editor. Here is the full quote: “The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear Brothers, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”
• One of Bristol House’s songs, “Presence and Power,” is on our Embrace Worship Spotify playlist because it so perfectly captures the essence of Holy Communion — look at/listen to the chorus:
  • So as I take the blood and body
    I remember your kindness toward me
    Love divine and grace unending
    This is more than just a remembering
    This is love. Holy love
• Each Wednesday I upload a “Teacup” teaching video that carries on the topic here. You can find all the videos on my Facebook Author Page, Instagram, and YouTube.
• Many of you have already found me on Substack! Thank you so much! While you’re on Substack, check out the ministry I’m blessed to be part of, the Devoted Collective. And, if you’d rather listen to these weekly posts, you can now do so on Substack — it’s easy to see and use the audio bar across the top of each post.
• My monthly newsletter, The Abiding Life, goes to email inboxes of those who have subscribed on my website, and I post them on Substack — usually within the first week of the month. My most recent edition can be found there, and you can subscribe for future newsletters on Substack, here.

Rhythms: As my newsletter’s title infers, we seek to develop an abiding life in this space — a place where we can get informed but also be transformed as we learn to abide in God’s presence throughout our days. I like to think that developing rhythms is one way to aid us in our desire to become more Christlike. These next three months we’re focusing on the rhythm of worship (surprise!).

• This week we are highlighting and ‘tabbing’ a section in our Prayer Bibles: 1 Corinthians 11:23-26. Each week this summer we’re marking significant passages about worship so that we can find them easily, put them to memory, and apply them in our abiding lives. These are words we can pray with a little personalization. They can also become words of reverence-filled worship. Jesus Himself speaks the words of bread and body, wine and blood in the Gospels, but Paul had to bring Jesus’ words before the church in Corinth because they’d forgotten the purpose behind the sacred meal. So as we read these verses, may we remember Jesus, “His sacrifice of love, His blood poured out for us, the only Son of God upon the cross; the price He had to pay, the wounds that made a way, the Lamb who was slain upon the cross” (Brooke Ligertwood’s lyrics in “Communion”). May we remember that this call for Communion is to the Church — as we commune together. So with this context and mindset, let’s hear Paul describe this holy sacrament, from 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 in the NLT:
  
  “For I pass on to you what I received from the Lord himself. On the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took some bread and gave thanks to God for it. Then he broke it in pieces and said, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, he took the cup of wine after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant between God and his people—an agreement confirmed with my blood. Do this in remembrance of me as often as you drink it.’ For every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are announcing the Lord’s death until he comes again.”
• We’re all called to share the truths about the work of Jesus. One way you can do that is by sharing this site and telling others your own stories of faith experiences. Believe it or not, we worship God each time we share our stories of faith! We use our whole selves to tell about our holy God!!

Featured Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash. “All the Bits and Pieces” photo by Aleksandra Sapozhnikova on Unsplash.
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