I Come to the Garden...for a few minutes.

Worship Before the Fall


     It's been said that "loneliness is the unspoken disease of the soul." But God never intended for us to experience it. He created us to enjoy relationships, because He is the God of relationships. Just think: you don't remember people's wealth or corporate achievements after their dead, you remember how they treated you. We recollect the relationship we've had with them.

     Can you imagine the relationship with God before sin? I mean, really. Complete peace with your family. Uninterrupted rest, waking to security in God's love. All day you're guided by His presence and in the evening, you return home to walk with Him just for the relationship's sake. Adam and Eve loved to be with God and God loved to be with them. They were the ONLY creation privileged to worship One in whose image they had been made. Even though the angels worship and the stars were created for it, we, humans, are the only creation made with a desire in us to worship Him.

To top it off, our first parents were given Eden to worship and dwell in. God placed them where He would also dwell, an place of unimaginable beauty and wonder. Precious stones, rivers, bountiful fruit and vegetation, it was as if God was saying, "Adam, Eve, this garden is all about you and Me." With an entire planet at their disposal, all of the world's goings on, it would have been so easy for Adam and Eve to get distracted-so much to see, so much to do, so much to be involved in...sound familiar? But in the peaceful quiet of a pristine garden, they could focus. Undistracted communion with God. They could worship, perfectly.

Principles of Worship

• God is all about relationship. Proof? Creation of man in His image. Only He can satisfy the inner craving that He has put there. When we respond to His call to relationship and worship we fulfill the purpose for which He made us.

• Where we worship matters. Worship cannot take place where noise is abundant and distractions are many. We cannot worship fruitfully where there are countless voices all vying for our attention. We'll miss His voice. We cannot worship perfectly where clock is King. God Himself must be King, and we must spend time with Him, in a place unoccupied by anything that would manipulate our worship, making it manufactured rather than a natural outflow of our love for God. We must find our own "Eden." In other words, we must get alone with God. This is when worship becomes fruitful and we're brought into the very presence of God and our relationship is deepened.

• Worship brings multiplication. We don't know how long God allowed man to live in the garden. But we do know creation multiplied in the garden. And there will be multiplication in our personal Eden as well. Psalm 16:11 says "there is fullness of joy" and as we experience it, we will praise God. God responds to our praise by giving us multiplied joy, over and over as we worship.

God's specific design and purpose for our lives, individually and collectively, is worshipping Him. "If we do not honor this purpose," wrote Tozer, "our lives will degenerate into shallow, selfish, humanistic pursuits." Even though see through a glass darkly (I Cor 13:12), we must pursue to worship God as best we can.

     May the clocks, appointments, ipods, TV's, after school activities, and even Christian or church programs become strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace.