Worship like a Weapon
We had just arrived at church, were walking in the doors, when my seven-year-old realized she’d forgotten her Bible. This meant she wouldn’t get a ticket toward earning a prize in kids’ class. She tearfully begged me to drive home and get her Bible. But we were out of time. The service was about to start.
Just as the worship team began to play, my daughter climbed into my lap and started sobbing. Her disappointment in that moment was real. I could have dismissed her loss as unimportant, but it was important to her. I didn’t care about tickets, but she cared deeply. So instead, I said, “Honey, I am so sorry this happened, and it’s OK to cry. Do you remember what to do when you feel sad? Do you remember that Jesus wants to meet you in your sadness, and if you worship him, he will help you feel better?”
She nodded. She remembered. After all, she had recently colored a picture that declares: YOU CAN CHOOSE JOY WHEN LIFE GETS HARD. That picture hangs on our fridge, and she loves to read it out loud to us.
We sat and snuggled through her tears, and after a few minutes, she got up, grabbed a little worship flag, and began dancing in the aisle. She likes dancing in worship, but this time was different. Her tear-streaked face was intent, focused. In her seven-year-old heart, she was giving Jesus her pain. She was doing battle with her worship.
By the time worship ended, her face glowed. It wasn’t just the exhilaration of dancing, but the joy of saying yes to Jesus in the middle of her sadness. As I walked her to her class, I realized what an example she had given me for my own heartaches. Her sadness seemed small to me, but her battle strategy works for even the biggest pains.
The truth is, Jesus doesn’t always rescue us out of the hard things in life. But he does promise to walk with us through even the darkest seasons. And the key to experiencing his presence with us is worship. When we worship, we shift our focus from our temporary struggles to God’s eternal glory.
The apostle Paul, who faced many terrible trials, tells us that the way to “not lose heart” but instead to be inwardly “renewed day by day” is to focus not on what we can see, but on the unseen yet eternal “weight of glory far beyond all comparison” (see 2 Cor. 4:16-18 NASB).
In other words, worship is our weapon—especially in the valley of the shadow of death. When we remind ourselves of God’s goodness and love and choose to worship him when we don’t feel like it, we find that he is with us, comforting our hearts and giving us what we need to keep moving forward, to experience his peace beyond understanding, to dance in his eternal joy.
God’s strategy against the schemes of his enemies is joy. When his enemies rage against him, God laughs (see Ps. 2:4)—not because he isn’t taking it seriously, but because he is supremely confident in his own goodness and the unstoppable force of his love. For this reason, he cannot fear their threats. He does not worry that they might succeed. The one who knows he will win can laugh loud and long. His joy is rooted in the unshakable knowledge that love and truth will always prevail.
This is why God laughs—and the joy we find in his presence enables us to laugh, too. Pain, loss, and disappointment are real. Walking through those seasons can be soul-wrenchingly hard. Yet, when we choose to give God the sacrifice of our worship in our moments of pain, that worship is a mighty weapon that leads us into his overwhelming peace, his indomitable joy. And when we laugh in the face of fear, we announce God’s victory.
When I picked my daughter up after church that day, she held up a matchbox car and told me that she had still been able to get a prize with the tickets she had from previous weeks. I smiled. In such a small thing, God had shown up for her. He had shown her how to worship him in her sadness. And in that place, she’d experienced his kindness toward her.
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