by Ken Costa
Worship, then, equips us for the battle ahead. It is a time of preparation and training. I have a friend who was in the Special Air Service, the front line of covert military operations. An essential part of his training was the repeated command, “Check your exit.” This must become an unconscious habit: even when parking a car, one makes sure that it’s pointing the right way to get out. Exit from danger matters. And worship is the best way I know to get away from the dangers of distraction, fear, and repeated sins.
Worship is the child’s longing to be with the Father, who pours out love, encouragement, and guidance. It is the child’s pleasure in spending time with a devoted parent, receiving boundless support and kindness. No calling can be sustained without the constant encouragement and affirmation that comes from God through worship.
WORSHIP AS RECEIVING
Realignment is not the only effect of worship. We are shaped, but we are also equipped. Although it is an outpouring of our praise to God, worship becomes a time when we receive from God. Worship opens us to intimate interaction with him. As we interact, so we receive the empowering and life-transforming presence of the Holy Spirit.
When we receive the presence of God, we become the presence of God in the world—wherever we are called to be. There is something deeply alluring about the presence of Christ. It changes the atmosphere. Worship gives us the “aroma of Christ” (2 Corinthians 2:15)—and others pick it up. But it doesn’t just attract others; it changes us.
Worship is the way in which I remove myself as the center of the universe and return this incarnate, reconciling God to that place. We will always struggle to allow the center of gravity to shift from ourselves to God. That is what happened at the fall: we tried to make ourselves into gods. But now, in Christ and by his Spirit, God enables us to love him and to give our lives in service for others.
Paul set out a key calling to all Christians—to become a new creation: “The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17 ESV). And part of this newness is a call to be reconcilers of the world to God, just as Christ reconciled the world through himself. This is a passage of immense power. Grasp this message, and your life will never be the same again. Why so? One of the key thoughts in the works of Karl Barth, perhaps the greatest theologian of the twentieth century, is that alienation was the basic dysfunction of humanity.2 The true calling of all Christians is to be the ones who, in Christ, become the reconcilers of humanity, just as God, in Christ, reconciled the world.
Every day we see this alienation of humanity working itself out. We have estranged relationships in our families, tension at work, disagreements with colleagues on contracts or negotiations, disputes between people, political animosity, and political antipathies between nations. The list of dysfunctional behavior goes on, and our task is to bring the good news of reconciliation to each of these fractious situations. Christ makes his reconciling appeal through us, and we become involved in this drawing together and reconciling of all those many situations where people are divided.
Our workplaces are no different. They reflect the tensions of living alienated from God. And we are the ones who have the privilege, in the contact we have with people around us, to be his spokespeople for conflict resolution. It is fundamental to all callings. In worship we gain the strength and the motivation to continue being the ones who help patch things up, untangle the knots of prejudice, and counter the negative self-images that people are forced into. In these ways, we who are changed through worship collectively can change the world.
To carry the presence of Christ is a huge privilege, and often it seems confined to people of such obviously saintly qualities as to make most of us feel marginalized. “I am no Mother Teresa,” a friend told me knowingly. Of that fact I was well aware. Several parts of his life were not running smoothly together. But he wanted to be recognized as a person who carried the presence of God with him.
Tattoos almost always tell a story. Often, they commemorate something meaningful, and a person with a tattoo wants to be able to show it off. Saint Paul wrote, “I bear on my body the marks of Jesus” (Galatians 6:17). Figuratively, he carries Christ’s tattoos, and they are there for all to see—a living memory. We, too, carry Christ’s presence in the world today as if it were a tat.
The more we worship him, the more Christlike we become. And it was Christ who “did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant” (Philippians 2:6–7). He made humility his hallmark. If we are to carry his presence, the tattoo we bear will be humility.
WORSHIP AND CALLING
Worship is ultimately the key to our callings: the place where much of what is hidden from our understanding is unlocked. Worship is the place where we receive wisdom and revelation, where our eyes are enlightened to know the hope to which God has called us (Ephesians 1:17–18). It opens our hearts and minds to new possibilities and fresh challenges. It quickens our conscience. It is thus where our callings start, are strengthened, and are sustained. We cannot stay the course of our callings without it. It is both the entry point into a new way of living for God and an exit from the encircling pressures of life around us, which can draw us away from or dilute our first love of God.
The Holy Spirit leads us into worship as the ultimate goal of our lives. Worship is a whole-of-life experience and an attitude of the heart. It is the alignment of our hopes and desires with those God has for us. The more aligned our wills are with his will, the more effective our lives become. The more intimate we are prepared to be, the more we will find worship opening up our closed lives. In worship, we lay down our crowns and ambitions, we escape our self-centeredness and self-indulgences, and we find our perspectives restored in the light of his love.
Worship is to calling what the air is to breathing: life-giving, essential, impossible to survive without. Without worship the experienced life of Christ is dormant within us, and his Spirit is grieved.
True worship celebrates our callings. We are drawn into the greatest privilege for a human being: to worship the living God. The book of Revelation ends with the invitation, “Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life” (Revelation 22:17). This is what sustains, refreshes, nourishes, and strengthens us—this water of life, the only true elixir that will give us eternal worshipping life.
Worship is the most important thing I can do on this earth. The great opening sentence of the Bible—“In the beginning God . . .” (Genesis 1:1)—captures this starting point for all worship. It was his initiative. I could not worship him unless he had first put that desire into my heart by allowing his Son to change my life. It is a fundamental tenet of my life that trust in Jesus Christ changes everything. And the exciting part is that worship is the way in which, through this extraordinary two-way street of encounter, we are able to commune with God himself. What greater calling could there be on our lives?
But perhaps the greatest truth is that we can worship him wherever we are. We do not need to go to some special place. The Samaritan woman who met Jesus at the well (John 4) was told that no longer would believers have to worship in a particular place—Jerusalem—or in a particular way, or at a particular time. Instead we would worship “in the Spirit and in truth” (v. 24). A whole new world opened up. We can meet God anywhere at any time, enabled by his Spirit, even at work! But who is this Spirit who is the power behind the call to worship?
TEN
CALLED TO BREAK BORDERS
Dear, dear Corinthians, I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn’t fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!
—2 CORINTHIANS 6:11–13 THE MESSAGE
SINCE MY FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST CAME ALIVE, I HAV
E LONGED to experience more of the presence of the empowering Spirit as I work out my calling—often, as the Scriptures indicate, “with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12). Perhaps you come at it another way. You long to put into effect the calling you sense there is on your life, but you lack the power, the energy, or the inclination to do so. So often we think that only other people have callings. There have been times when the calling on my life is strong and I feel confident and ready to attack the world; then there are those seasons when my calling is cold and confidence is low.
How do we keep our callings in good repair so that they grow into a flame and don’t just flicker?
The answer for us, as it was for those first disciples at the beginning of Acts, is the Holy Spirit.
Why? Because we cannot do it without him. His greatest task is to make our callings known to us and to confirm them along the way. We simply cannot flourish in our God-given callings without the daily in-filling of the Holy Spirit. We are temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16); our very bodies are where he dwells. When he flows, we flourish. He is the unbroken and unchanging current that courses from creation through Christ to us, helping us to be the people who we really long to be. He is the flow of our lives, the currency of the kingdom. Did you know that the words current and currency derive from the same Latin root meaning “fluidity”? As currency enables an economy to function, so the Spirit facilitates the economy of the kingdom of God.
Whether through worship, prayer, Scripture reading, or meditation, we need to renew our connection with the Spirit each day. True fullness of life is impossible without him, while life with him knows no end of possibility. Therefore we are told to “be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18). We are constantly in need of his power.
He enables us to break through the borders of self-limitation, and every day he challenges us afresh to live risky lives for Christ. Our lives become enriched, challenged, and changed. The kingdom grows because we are prepared to take up our callings, which change not only our lives but the lives of those around us.
That Christ died and rose again two thousand years ago is of great assurance to me. That he will come again at the end of time and initiate a new heaven and a new earth I have no doubt. But what matters to me is now. The past and the future are persuasive, but the present is compelling. The Holy Spirit reminds us of the events of Christ’s life in the past and of the promise of the full restoration of creation in the future. Above all, he reminds us how to live life to the full in the here and now. That’s why he is key to life.
WHO NEEDS THE HOLY SPIRIT?
There is a view that the Holy Spirit is given to those who are especially saintly: the pope, perhaps, or Mother Teresa, or the archbishop of Canterbury. Wherever this view has come from, it is certainly not from the New Testament. Jesus makes it clear that the Holy Spirit will be given to all: “how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:13). Jesus makes it clear that each person who asks receives. Asking is the only test; there is no other qualification for receiving the Spirit. Receiving is the great promise.
James, a youth leader, once came to talk to me about the lack of direction in his life. He had no sense of calling. “Have you prayed to be filled with the Spirit?” I asked. He gave the sort of vague answer that clearly indicated that he didn’t really believe that the Spirit had much to do with his day-to-day life, being instead active only in times of worship and on Sundays. It was a memorable time of prayer as he opened himself for the first time to receive the fullness of the Spirit’s power in every area of his life.
In Acts 1–2, a group of people huddled together in the Upper Room. On the face of it, they could not have been more devoted to Jesus. They were, however, depressed. Their leader had died on a cross. He had returned, but then he left them again. They couldn’t understand. Their calling to see a new kingdom come was seemingly at an end, and the future looked bleak. But the following day, at Pentecost, a mighty rushing wind blew them away, tongues of fire descended upon the whole gathering, and they were filled with the Holy Spirit.
We can see ourselves in one or more of these characters who were present at that depressing wake in the Upper Room: doubting Thomas; Simon the hothead; John, Jesus’ closest disciple; Peter, the chosen leader who was desperate to please but became Christ’s denier; Andrew, who responded so rapidly to the first call of Christ; Matthew, the tax collector who must have been ostracized by the community; Matthias, the new kid on the block who had only just been elected an apostle the day before; not to mention Joseph, a.k.a. Justus, who lost out in the election as successor to Judas. And Mary, who had been filled with the Spirit when the angel Gabriel appeared to her more than thirty years before. She was there. Why ever did she need to be filled with the Spirit again? Here they were together, along with other women and Jesus’ brothers. All had different temperaments, backgrounds, and spiritual conditions; all needed the Spirit to enable them to make the most of the rest of their lives. Far from their callings ending along with Jesus’ life on earth, the Spirit came visibly to reignite them.
Without the Spirit, they would have been dejected followers of a failed Messiah. The Acts of the Apostles is the continuation of the story of Christ. The last act of Jesus is the beginning of a new story that continues today and will continue until Christ comes again. As Jesus said to the disciples, “Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7). Our understanding of the Gospels is incomplete unless we have read the book of Acts. In the same way, our callings are incomplete unless we acknowledge and embrace the Spirit of God.
The Spirit of God changed the disciples’ lives—and the world. That group grasped their callings with vigor, turned the world upside down, and changed the course of history. A new boldness seized them as they realized that they were part of the greatest calling on earth, and the world has never been the same since.
This is our moment. We are not just given some vague sense of destiny and left to work it out by ourselves. But through the infilling of the Spirit given to each of us, we are taken each day, from where we are and whatever personality type we are, to the next step of the revelation of Christ for our lives. We begin to show the fruit of the Spirit—“love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22–23)—for no calling is valid if it does not make us more like Christ.
THE SPIRIT BREAKS BORDERS
In 1770, a fourteen-year-old boy visited the Sistine Chapel to hear the singing of the Miserere, a meditation on Psalm 51 by Allegri, the sixteenth-century composer. The Vatican at the time did not allow the reproduction of the music for use outside the Sistine Chapel. Anyone who flouted the prohibition was to be excommunicated. The music remained the preserve of an elite until that fourteen-year-old boy heard it. He left the Sistine Chapel and transcribed the work flawlessly from memory. That boy was Mozart. And from that moment, the Miserere could be performed everywhere. It was released to the world and was soon performed all over Europe.
It is now performed regularly worldwide, especially at the start of Lent. I first heard the Miserere on Ash Wednesday in King’s College Chapel in Cambridge. To this day, I remember the effect of this deeply moving reflection on the most famous penitential psalm. I thought of David, desperate for God’s forgiveness, and I thought of the need for my own life to straighten out. The music has a haunting solo part for a young treble that reaches to the depths of the soul.
What was bound into one place for a particular purpose for an elite group was disseminated far and wide and made accessible to all. That is what the Spirit does. He took what was confined to a particular time and place in Palestine and broke geographical, cultural, and religious borders so the risen Jesus would be accessible to all. But even more than that, the Spirit is the one who is constantly by our side reminding us of our callings, giving us insight into our work, and equipping us for each task.
When I was in South Africa with Joel Houston and Hillsong United at the start of their Zion Tour, I sat with some friends for the sold-out evening worship event. It was extraordinarily moving. My eyes clouded over with memories. Around me, with hands lifted high, were thousands of people of every race and age, worshipping together. I remembered the times when, as a student in South Africa during the apartheid years, meetings were racially segregated, and the law prohibited contact between people of different ethnic groups. Now I was at a Christian worship event and around me the “rainbow nation,” so called by Archbishop Tutu, was shining. I choked back the tears, eventually giving in. It was deeply moving, and I was stirred to the depths of my spirit by the sight of thousands of worshippers drawn together from every cultural and racial background, praising Jesus in the capital city, Pretoria, which had been the bastion of racial oppression in the apartheid years.
As I listened through the tears, a young Australian singer, Taya Smith, sang a song, “Oceans,” from Hillsong’s new album. The chorus tells of the work of the Spirit breaking borders, smashing barriers, and crossing divides.1 The words leapt at me. It was the song’s first major outing internationally, and I had not heard it before. I knew in an instant that it was a truly anointed song for our time. Not only is it a Spirit-inspired song, but seeing the borders erected by the apartheid regime now destroyed all around me made it an even more powerful and prophetic experience.
I cannot forget that evening. After the event, while traveling back in the car, I told one of the band members about the painful memories of those days and the healing I’d received from that song. He listened, tears flowed, and we prayed. It is vivid to me even now as I write. I believe that “Oceans” will continue to have a profound and healing effect wherever it is sung.