I picked up Samuel Wells’ Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics for a spell this evening. He has great things to say about worship transforming the worshiper.
Worship is the time when the conventional rules of the fallen world are suspended, when God is at last addressed as Lord, when time and heart and voice and posture are directed toward knowing God and making him known, toward experiencing the glorious liberty of being his child, when need and expectation are focused on their true source, when all desires are known and no secrets are hid, when attention moves from what is to what might yet be. (82)
The next several pages walk through various aspects of worship. I found his section on listening to scripture to be particularly compelling:
When Christians listen for God’s word in Scripture, they learn to listen for God’s word in every conversation. They develop the skill of storytelling, of finding their place and role in the story, of recognizing beginnings and endings, of seeing the author at work; and also the sill of listening, of realizing how much there is to discover, of fitting their small story into the larger story of God. (82)
“Fitting their small story into the larger story of God.” Exactly.
As I was reading and copying this in, I couldn’t help but hear the difference between Wells’ “listen for God’s word in Scripture” and what many from my world would prefer: “listen to God’s word in scripture”. I wonder how that posture of listening for God to speak afresh, rather than a more past-focused listening to how God has spoken once for all, might itself conduce toward the posture of listening for the truth and finding one’s place in the story that he goes on to articulate. Can you have the latter without the former? If so, will they be more independent of each other?




