O Lord our God, the majesty and glory of your name fills all the earth and overflows the heavens. You have taught the little children to praise you perfectly. May their example shame and silence your enemies! (Psalm 8:1-2 TLB)
On Sunday as we began our service singing the praises of our Lord I was prompted to get a banner to use in this worship. I love to worship this way when prompted by the Holy Spirit but was conscious that of late I have had problems with pain in my upper back and shoulder so was a little reluctant.
As I contemplated this my eight year old Grandson George asked me to go with him to “fetch a flag”. As we walked around the back of the church family he stopped me and pointed behind us saying “ can we get more ‘cause Amelie and Lilly want one too”.
We each chose flags of different sizes and colours, and returned to the opposite side of the church and began waving our banners in worship as we all sang praises to our Father. By the end of the next song our number had substantially increased with many more children joining us in fervent worship singing and waving banners to our Lord. Albeit with some clashing of banners and an occasional concern within me that someone was going to get poked or receive a clout. Our happy throng continued until the children left to go upstairs to children’s church.
After the service I received a few comments along the lines of me leading the children. I explained that I hadn’t lead them at all but that God had. Since then I have realised that in reality God had used the children to lead and encourage me! I had been apprehensive of using a banner given the recent muscular pain and was then distracted further by the occasional clumsy clashing amongst our happy crowd.
Verse 2 of Psalm 8 in the ESV translation reads:
“Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.
I was allowing the enemy to hold me back from the fervent worship God desires from me. In this instance my worship was with song and banners but I believe that at other times I may have held back in other ways from the life of worship God desires of me for one reason or another. God used the wonderful, free, random and at times clumsy flag waving of our children in an uninhibited act of worship which I believe brought strength to our meeting and stilled the enemy in some of his works against us as a body and for some of us as individuals.
During his talk Tim spoke of our worship together being ‘practice’ for when we are in the glory of heaven. As I have thought about this it occurred to me that some times we consider practise as necessary steps toward as near a perfect action or process as possible. Many of us probably grew up being told “Practice makes Perfect” by parents, teachers or someone else in authority. But in the ‘Living Bible’ (an easy to read paraphrase of the precise translation) we see that our Father God has ‘taught the little children to praise [Him] perfectly’.
So, if God has taught them this ‘perfect’ way, and it is uninhibited, random, free, and at times to us adults may appear clumsy; what does that tell us about what God really wants from us? And what does it tell us about how we try to live a life of worship but hold
ourselves back with inhibitions, pride, self made rules, worldly wisdom and perhaps fears of failure or looking foolish.
Tim also spoke about his continual desire for ‘more’. I took this to mean more breakthroughs, more healing, more freedom, more peace, more salvation, more blessings, more growth, more of seeing God at work, more of His kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven, MORE OF GOD! I want this too and … I know God wants it!
Perhaps if we came to the Lord as He wants us to:
“Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18:3 ESV)
Of course we are His Children, but perhaps we can come to Him in a more child like way and see more of the kingdom of heaven in our lives here on earth and shame and silence the enemy by our example too.
Prayer:
O Lord our God, the majesty and glory of your name fills all the earth and overflows the heavens. Father, you have taught the little children to praise you perfectly; help us your ‘grown up’ children be more like them, without any inhibitions whatsoever as we come closer to you and live a life of worship for your glory. May our example shame and silence your enemies too! In Jesus holy name, Amen.
Andrew White