MANY CHRISTIANS allow circumstances to determine their level of worship when worship should really be disconnected from circumstances. If you allow the conditions of life to dictate your level of worship, they will also determine and limited your altitude. The only way to achieve the altitude of a God’s-eye view is found in this passage: “Those who wait on the LORD . . . shall mount up with wings like eagles.” [See Isaiah 40:31, emphasis added.]
An elevated perspective changes everything.
That is why you can come into a worship service weighed down with big troubles and insurmountable problems and suddenly sense a change the moment you catch an “updraft” of the Spirit. When you begin to worship, you ascend to join the Object of your adoration. The Bible says God “made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” [Ephesians 2:6] Suddenly you find yourself soaring in His presence.
[Tenny, The God Catchers, pp. 80-81]
If you are soaring in His presence, then that means you are looking down on your problems. How do you wait on God? You worship Him. You anticipate divine needs and discern what the Holy Spirit wants. David the psalmist declared under the anointing of God, “Oh, magnify the LORD with me.” [Psalm 34:3, emphasis added.] He was referring to worship. If worship magnifies, then does its absence minimize?
A young and unmarried but pregnant Jewish woman named Mary echoed David’s words centuries later when she declared to her relative who was also expecting a child, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.” [Luke 1:46-47, emphasis added.] What does it mean “to magnify”?
WE CAN”T MAKE HIM ANY BIGGER THAN HE ALREADY IS
These Bible passage reveal a divine principle I call “the principle of magnification.” Have you ever wondered, How do you magnify a God who is so big He already fills the whole universe? How do you magnify the omnipresent God? How do you make the Creator of the universe bigger? The truth is that we really can’t make Him any bigger than He already is - He “fills all in all.” [Ephesians 1:23]
When I was a little boy, my dad often ministered at large camp meetings held at rustic campsites. One toy stood out during those periods when I had lots of free time on my hands and the wonder of the outdoors in which to spend it. In fact, it is one of the few toys I’ve been able to keep track of over the year. It is still sitting at my parents’ house in Louisiana, and my kids often play with it.
This magnificent tool of play is a large Bausch & Lomb magnifying glass with an amber-colored handle. My favorite project back then was to see if I could start a fire - now don’t laugh! Come to think of it, I guess I never got over that inner urge to start fires. I just transferred it to the spirit realm to make it legal.
In the process of honing my fire-starting skills, I discovered that when you use a magnifying glass to magnify something like a grasshopper, you don’t really make the grasshopper any bigger. The magnification properties of the glass simply make the insect appear bigger so you can better examine the minute details and understand the beauty of the grasshopper (if there is such a thing).
THE PROCESS OF WORSHIP MAKES HIS APPEAR BIGGER
When you look through a magnifying glass at a grasshopper, you are not making the grasshopper bigger; you are just making it appear bigger. The process of worship does not make God bigger; it just makes Him appear bigger.
Unlike the grasshopper, God is already bigger than all created beings, form, and matter; yet the magnification of worship makes Him larger in your view. Suddenly everything about Him gets bigger in your eyes. That means His capabilities get bigger, His power gets bigger, and the force of all of His promises and wonder is suddenly enlarged when you magnify the Lord.
Why does the world have such a skewed view of God? One of the most important reasons is that we have not magnified God in the sight of the unsaved. They look at our misrepresentations (and underrepresentation) of Him and His kingdom and say. “Nothing we see there can help us. Those people are as messed up as we are.”
We must restore the principle of magnification. How do we do that? Worship magnifies God to the world. When they see and hear us praise God for His mighty works and His godly attributes, they begin to realize there is more to Him than meets the eye.
When non-Christians hear how He transformed our lives, they begin to see Him for the first time. Then they say, “If He can do that for them, then maybe He would do it for me too.” This is the principle of magnification in operation.
ABRAHAM USED THE REST OF HIS LIFE AS A MAGNIFYING GLASS
God revealed Himself to the son of a moon worshiper and gave him a God-sized promise. Abraham used the rest of his life as a magnifying glass to declare and reaffirm God’s power and ability to keep His impossible promise. Countless individuals, tribes, and people groups saw their first glimpse of God through Abraham’s worship and faith in God. In the end, God’s promise that all nations would be blessed through Abraham came true through Jesus Christ.
Abraham’s life illustrates how faith operates according to the magnification principle. He constantly magnified God’s ability to keep His word despite facing years of contrary circumstances. Fear also works according to the magnification principle. If faith is the forward gear propelling a car forward, then fear is the reverse gear propelling the same car backward.
Faith and fear operate on the same principle. The alarming thing about it is that North Americans have allowed fear to so infiltrate our version of the English language that we have adopted “fearful language” as a matter of habit. How many times have you asked someone how is he feeling only to hear him say, “I’m afraid I’m catching a cold”?
Job said, “The things I greatly feared has come upon me, and what I dreaded has happened to me,” [Job 3:25] Have we made that our cultural slogan?
[ THE ABOVE ARTICLE IS TAKEN FROM ]
Tommy Tenny, ‘Worship Is Heaven’s Tool Of Choice’, in id., God’s Eye View: Worshiping Your Way to a Higher Perspective (Nashville, Tennessee: Thoman Nelson, Inc., 2002), pp. 8-9.
