Holy Awe

“Everyone was filled with awe” (Acts 2:43).

Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote,
“Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes –
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”

We were challenged this past Sunday to be a team, a team devoted, like the early church in Acts, to instruction, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayer. Devotion is a concept that gets my attention, because the life verse the Lord gave me some years ago comes from Jeremiah 30:21: “Who is he who will devote himself to be close to me?”

So I’ve been trying to learn more and more about this thing called devotion – what it is and what it looks like in practice. And I’ve gotten at least this far: It’s much easier to be devoted to something that fills you with awe. That’s bigger than you, bigger than anything else on the horizon of your life.

The bigger I see God to be, the easier it is to be devoted to Him. The early church was filled with awe (or “reverential fear,” as the Amplified puts it); Am I? Are we? The best description I’ve read of that awe was written by A.W. Tozer in Worship: The Missing Jewel of the Evangelical Church. He writes that real worship is made up of :

Boundless confidence. You cannot worship a Being you cannot trust.
Admiration. Appreciation of the excellency of God… to the point of wonder and delight.
Fascination. Entranced with who God is, and struck with astonished wonder at the inconceivable elevation and magnitude and splendor of Almighty God.
Adoration. To love God with all the power within us… with fear and wonder and yearning and awe.

Do you see how often he mentions wonder? But to make it an ingredient of our worship, we desperately need eyes to see God for Who He really is. We need those eyes opened by His Spirit; we need to turn them away from everything else and focus them on God. As individuals, and as a team.

When that happens, you can be sure that we’ll set our blackberry pails aside, the shoes will come off, and we will worship God together in holy awe.