How to Worship God Out of the Sunday-Morning Box--Laura Story

Laura Story: Reverence isn't necessarily something that's tied to a music style, that's tied to architecture, that's tied to a denomination, but really it's an acknowledging of God's holiness. It's responding in humility and surrender and faith to who God is and all that He's done.
Dave Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Dave Wilson.
Ann Wilson: And I'm Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is FamilyLife Today. It's been great having some time off, which is not really time off.
Dave Wilson: The knees are healing. I'm starting to walk. It's been a little bit relaxing over the last few days, but what's even better?
Ann Wilson: Having time off while still listening to all the great guests that are coming on the show.
Dave Wilson: Bingo. I can't wait to hear what Cheryl and Laura Story will be discussing today. Laura is the best.
Ann Wilson: We love her.
Laura Story: Twenty-five years ago, I prayed what I called a dangerous prayer. The kind of prayer that resets your life and challenges everything that you are. I prayed, "God, I don't want to be the same person I am this time next year." Honestly, by the time I understood all of the chaos that was going on around me was a direct answer to that prayer, I thought to myself, "Girl, that's the dumbest prayer you have ever prayed in your entire life." But when I look back on it, I'm so grateful for the nudge of the Holy Spirit because for the first fifteen years of my walk with God, I was focused largely on my benefits as a recipient of God's grace rather than the God who gives grace. Since then, for the last twenty-five years, what has happened as a result of that prayer, I have been refocused so that largely my life is attuned to God's holiness, His sovereignty, His faithfulness, His bigness, that He is worthy of worship.
Guest (Male): Reverence is the foundation of wisdom. It is the framework for relationship with God, and it is the topic of our conversation today as we talk with Grammy Award-winning worship leader, theologian, and author of the new book, *Stand in Awe: How Reverence Transforms Our Worship and Our Lives*, Laura Story. Laura, thank you so much for being here with us today.
Laura Story: Thanks so much for having me.
Guest (Male): I know that you have been a guest on FamilyLife Today before, right?
Laura Story: Yes, I've done stuff with FamilyLife for a while now. I've been a stowaway on their marriage cruises a couple times. I remember visiting Little Rock when they were still there. It's wonderful to be here in Florida with you guys today.
Guest (Male): Because I want to get to know you a little bit and I'm sure there are listeners who want to as well, can you tell us a little bit about your story? How you came to faith in God and what led you to writing this book?
Laura Story: I'll start with my family. I'm married to Martin. We've been married for 22 years and that's been so sweet. We have four children. My oldest is Josie. We have one girl who's our 13-year-old. Then we have twin 11-year-old boys and an eight-year-old boy.
Guest (Male): Teens and pre-teens.
Laura Story: Yes, it's a lot, but it's so much fun and they're really neat kids. I have two tearing up some greenroom somewhere behind us. I grew up in Spartanburg, South Carolina, but moved to Atlanta, Georgia, 21 years ago. Martin and I had only been married a year and I was asked to come on staff at a church there called Perimeter Church. I've been there ever since helping with their music ministry.
Guest (Male): What led you then to write this book? What led you to devote your gifts and your talents to worshipping God and specifically reverencing Him?
Laura Story: Two reasons. One would be when I first began working as a... I say help with their music. A lot of people call that role the worship leader. I like the term music minister. That's the term that we used at my church growing up. That word minister meaning servant. It's a great perspective to have when you're in that role that your true aim is to serve the congregation. It's not so much that you're the lead singer of the church. You're serving them and facilitating moments of them communing with God. When I first started, I was in a bluegrass band because I grew up playing upright bass. I played in a bluegrass band at a Mexican restaurant through college. It was ridiculous. So when I started at Perimeter, I thought, "This sounds like a great idea, but I have no idea what I'm doing." I began to learn things, whether it's worship books or whatever, but mostly just turning to the scriptures and asking this question of how does God want to be worshipped? One of the reasons for the book was just the past 20-something years of me asking that question and searching the scriptures. One thing I saw pretty quickly was that worship isn't just this thing we do on Sundays. Reverencing God isn't just this thing we do on Sundays, even though Sunday is a big part of that. Reverencing God is also about those other six days of the week. Another part of our story, which I've shared with some of the FamilyLife people whenever I've been able to be with them, within the first two years of our marriage, Martin was diagnosed with a brain tumor. It really has changed everything about our marriage, everything about our family. More than anything, with his brain injury that ensued after that tumor, life has looked differently. As a believer, if you began life or marriage with this idea that God exists to make my life better, tidier, more manageable, when you have some sort of chronic illness, you'll become frustrated with God pretty quickly if you think He exists to serve us. We have had to really change our perspective about what it means to be a Christian. To say, "God, this is not the story I would have written for my marriage, for my family, but we believe that You're God and we're not." We're learning also to revere Him even in us walking a road that is different than what we expected.
Guest (Male): I think that's so important for people to understand that we are actually promised trials and tribulations in this life. We were not promised our best life now, but the better is coming. More importantly, our life is to be centralized around the reality of who God is and it's to reflect His glory and reflect His story. That means our stories come under subjection to His. What does that look like every single day of the week? I know Sunday. I come in and I have my three songs and we're going to stand and we're going to raise our hands. One of my struggles with worship right now is because sometimes those songs are so directed at self and what God does for us and less towards Him and His holiness and acknowledging Him for who He is that it doesn't even really feel like worship. We sing those three songs and we check the box off. "I worshipped God." We go home and we might go back into a trial or a chronic illness or even if we just go back into regular everyday life. How do we draw the thread from what I do on Sunday morning into what I'm doing every day of the week?
Laura Story: I think you're hitting the nail on the head. You ask the question, "What do people need? What do they need to be singing about God?" Also, what does God desire us to be singing? In the Psalms, you see over and over again the psalmist singing, "I will exalt the Lord. I will tell of His wondrous deeds." When you think about a phrase like "I will tell of God's wondrous deeds," they're not necessarily saying... Psalm 34 would be a good example. "I will bless the Lord at all times." He never says, "I feel like blessing the Lord at all times." Oftentimes I'm reminding worship leaders, "Let's get away from the I feel so happy towards the Lord right now and let's focus on the wondrous deeds of God." Oftentimes when we're singing about the things that God has done in the scriptures or even just the things He's done in our lives, when we're singing about the ways that He's already shown up and provided for us, it really bolsters our faith. It really stirs up within us the faith we need to believe Him for the things He's yet to do in our lives. That's a big part of worship.
Guest (Male): I pulled up the scripture. I pulled up Psalm 89:7 and it reads, "God is greatly feared in the council of the holy ones, more awe-inspiring than all who surround Him." Verse 8: "Lord God of hosts, who is strong like You, Lord?" He's really talking about God. Would you consider this reverence? How would you define reverence?
Laura Story: That's a great question because a lot of times people think about reverence as a style of music. "If you have a drum kit in your sanctuary, there's no way you can be reverent. If you have lights and smoke, you are not worshipping God." Exactly. But how many of us have gone to a cathedral that has the most beautiful pictures and all of that, but it's basically a museum? It's dead. Reverence isn't necessarily something that's tied to a music style, that's tied to architecture, that's tied to a denomination, but really it's an acknowledging of God's holiness. It's responding in humility and surrender and faith to who God is and all that He's done. I love the passage you talk about, the fear of the Lord. A lot of times we don't like to think about God as being someone that we should fear. Ultimately, if I go to the end of the story for us believers, Christ has paid the penalty of our sin, so Hebrews tells us we can approach His throne with boldness and confidence. But it's not because God totally mellowed out between the Old Testament and the New Testament. He finally chilled out. You read the Book of Revelation and you realize, no, He's not mellow at all. He is still that consuming fire. One of the things I love, the idea of fearing, one of the things we see constantly in the scriptures is when God's people encounter Him, you see a lot of falling down. Isn't that neat? You see passages where Joshua sees the Lord and falls down. Isaiah is a great example because we have Isaiah 6 where he sees God. Isaiah is this prophet who's a big deal. He's wealthy. He knows the king who's just died. He sees the Lord. It's shaking, there's smoke, the robes filling the temple, all of this. His response is, "Woe is me, I am ruined." I remember having one of those "I am ruined" moments with the Lord. I was 19 years old and I was on a mission trip. It was a mission trip that I just stumbled into. I was with this college ministry and all of my friends were like, "Let's sign up for this trip to Mongolia." That's not what you do for a first mission trip. It's not like downtown feeding at the soup kitchen. You should have told me that's not what I'm supposed to do for a first mission trip. Here I am. All my friends ended up dropping out. So it's just me with all these random people that I don't know. I remember spending the first... we were there for a month. We could bring two changes of clothes. We were showing the Jesus film on the side of these yurts, these tents, to nomads in Outer Mongolia. I probably spent the first week of that trip complaining. "I just wish I had a shower. I miss McDonald's." I don't know what I was missing. I remember the day before we left to come back and the trip leader said to me, "I know that you probably can't wait to get back." I said, "I don't want to go back." What had happened is I had experienced the Lord in such a powerful way. Seeing people come to faith not even understanding the language that they were hearing, seeing the change in their lives, the change in their countenance. I really had this moment of saying, "I'm ruined. Everything that I did before doesn't make sense." When you truly have that kind of encounter with the Lord, revering God for who He is and all that He's done, it is impossible to walk away not changed forever.
Guest (Male): It's impossible to not carry it into your everyday experiences because you're always reminded of who it is that you are serving. Who it is who is not just your King but your Father. To imagine that this great big God who thinks a thing and it is so, who is so worthy of adoration that right now, as you and I are sitting here, there are angels flying around His throne crying, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty," that that God wants an intimate relationship with you. That He tabernacles with us and wants relationship with us. Of course I would want to reverence Him. That's what Jesus said, "The Lord desires for those that worship Him to worship Him in spirit and in truth." We carry the Spirit of God and we carry the truth of God with us every single day. Might I add that that one moment was just that one moment then. I'm sure that there have been many other moments since then. When you think back over your experience with the awe of God and with reverencing God, what was a moment that other than the Mongolian moment really stands out as pivotal to you as a worship leader and as a wife?
Laura Story: When I think about the awe of the Lord, we've gotten to travel a good bit with music and doing different things. I remember specifically being in Northern Ireland for a songwriting retreat. I know that sounds like I was really suffering for the Lord there. I'm at a retreat. I'm in Northern Ireland. I wish my motives were pure for, "I just love the Lord. I want to write songs about Him." But going to Ireland, that's a good perk. It was pretty cool. So we're at this cliff and you're just in awe of what the Lord... it's like you can't even put into words what you're feeling when you see His creation in a different way than you've ever seen it before. That's the kind of awe that I feel like sometimes we've lost in our worship, in our Sunday morning worship. One of the things in the book that I talk about, I talk about four different ways that sometimes we've gone off course. I call them four ditches we have to be careful of. One would be having a casual approach to God. Casual isn't necessarily a great word in any relationship. "We're married and we're kind of casual." If you're single and you see "I just want a casual" on a dating profile, you're like, "No, I'm not doing that." I think about one of the churches in Revelation where it talks about if you are hot or cold, but since you're lukewarm, I want to spit you out of my mouth. God is too holy and too majestic and too valuable. He is too worthy of our whole lives for us to be casual. But the thing that's interesting about this casual approach is there was actually a church movement about 50 years ago where there was a new approach to how to get people to come to church. The goal was we really want to program the entire service to make people feel comfortable. That wasn't Jesus' specialty. I don't know if you've read the Gospels. But it's interesting because the Lord used it and there was fruit that came out of that. But sometimes when you go about something with the right motives, but there's still some unintended consequences. All of a sudden you're preaching about the love and grace of God, but you're not mentioning, dare I say, God's wrath or the fact that prior to me having relationship with the Lord, I was an enemy. I was against Him. Basically, in order to make people feel comfortable at church, they were telling maybe half the story. It's interesting when you think about the good news of the gospel isn't good news unless you tell the bad news.
Guest (Male): It's like the person that says, "I went to the doctor and I got this treatment," but they don't know what they were cured of.
Laura Story: Exactly. If I were to draw a diagram right now and you think about the deeper we see our desperation and how much we do not deserve to have a relationship with God, so if you think about a line going down and then you think about another line going up where we're growing in our understanding of God's holiness and His majesty and His love and all of that, and then you draw between those two a cross. As we are growing in our understanding of how desperately we need the Lord and how sinful we are and growing in our understanding of God's goodness, the cross actually gets bigger as that chasm gets bigger. So you just realize how desperately we need to understand the bad news in order to marvel at this sweet amazing grace that God has shown us.
Guest (Male): It reminds me of when Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." Poor in spirit are those who recognize how desperately in need of God they are. Then He goes on to say, "Theirs is the kingdom of God." God opens up His kingdom to those who recognize that they need His kingdom, that they need Him. Okay, so that was the first ditch, being casual.
Laura Story: Yes, and then self-focused. We could spend the whole rest of our time on this one. One of the things I did in the book, I had a friend of mine help me with this. I said, "Could you help me come up with a survey, a list of questions that people could answer to try to discern whether their spirituality is God-focused or self-focused?" That was painful. I was like, "Okay, I'm going to include this in the book, but I don't know if I can take this more than once" because it was just so revealing. It goes back to what you were saying towards the beginning. If we're looking to God to meet our needs, we will become disappointed and disillusioned because what the scriptures actually teach is if you want to gain your life you have to lose it. One thing I've asked worship leaders before as they're planning their services, I've said, "If someone showed up at your church, they weren't familiar with church at all, but they showed up at your church and apart from the sermon, just based on the songs that you sing, would that person draw the conclusion that we exist for God or that God exists for us?"
Guest (Male): What an amazing question to ask a worship leader. It's for the worship leader, but it's also just for the worshiper. Like Toby Keith, "I want to talk about me." Of course, we all want to talk about us. It's like, "Okay, great, I'm going to be at home talking about myself all the time and then I'm going to go to church and I'm also going to talk about myself all the time. And I want you to talk about me as well." I'm just going to comb the scriptures for all the verses that point to me. The truth is of course the Lord loves us more than we could ever imagine. But you think about the Lord's Prayer. The disciples are saying, "Jesus, teach us how to pray." He says, "Our Father who art in heaven," and He begins with "hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Then He moves on to "give us this day our daily bread." It's not that He cares any less about providing for our needs, but He knows that for us, we have to start with putting God first. Putting His plan above our own, putting His will above our own, putting His glory above our own.
Dave Wilson: What a great discussion, and this is just the beginning.
Ann Wilson: And I can't wait for tomorrow because Cheryl's going to have more of a discussion with Laura Story and we'll continue on this topic. In the meantime, check out the show notes at familylifetoday.com for links to all the resources discussed in today's episode.
Dave Wilson: FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry, celebrating 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.