Responding To God: Bowing Down

In the youthful days of college I was a hurdler and sprinter. Our high school coach was a distance runner, and although he was a great coach he didn’t have a lot to offer for sprinters. During freshman year of college, the coach at that university knew a good bit about hurdles but was not a very good coach, so I remained self-taught. Before sophomore year I transferred to James Madison University. The coach there was a different story- he specialized in sprints and hurdles, and had coached a five-time All-American hurdler. We began with him telling me to forget virtually everything I knew as a hurdler. This was difficult, because for years my mind and body were trained a certain way. But the technique was wrong, and no matter how many races I had won, the competition would soon begin blowing by me as they ran with correct technique.

We are in a similar place as the Church. Not in the sense of competing, but our knowledge and belief of worship is small. Somewhere along the way, we’ve strayed down a path of equating worship with singing songs in a service. Whether it’s the fault of church leadership, the Christian music industry, or humanity in general doesn’t matter. Here we are, and we must forget a great deal about what we “know” and what we are familiar with. Say it with me now:

Worship is more than singing.
Worship is more than singing.
Worship is more than singing.

The Bible does not define worship by singing; why should we? In fact, the Bible doesn’t define worship in toto*, but instead gives us examples of people’s responses to God. Today we’ll take a look an Old Testament word often used for worship, “shachah” which means “bow oneself down to the ground”.

Worship of God by “shachah”

• The people of Israel after hearing the Lord had visited (Exodus 4:31)
• Moses when the presence of the Lord passed by (Exodus 34:8)
• King David mourning the death of his son (2 Samuel 12:20)
• Jehosophat and the people of Judah and Jerusalem after God’s word came, on the brink of a huge battle (2 Chronicles 20:18)
• The Israelites in response to Ezra’s reading of the Law (Nehemiah 8:6)
• Job after calamity was brought upon his whole life (Job 1:20)

This may seem irrelevant to our worship of God today (can you imagine stepping into the aisle of a worship service and laying face down!) but this should not be. Arguably, this is the most appropriate physical response when faced with God. These people bow down in worship when God makes His presence known in a big way or when they are in utter despair. A dramatic response to a dramatic revelation or need.

There have been several times in my life when I lay prostrate before the Lord – when my wife was bedridden with morning sickness while pregnant with our daughter, when my daughter was an infant and I was at my wit’s end, and when the Spirit of God spoke to my heart from Scripture or in regards to a major decision. In each of these cases, I had no words, no perceived brilliance, nothing at all to bring to the table. Which is exactly the reason bowing down is relevant, and should be a regular part of our worship, whether alone or in a corporate gathering. This is a whole-body response, representative of laying our hearts, minds, treasures down before God, when words no longer suffice.

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*there’s never an excuse to use a latin phrase in our day and time, but this one cracks me up, mainly because of Ben Stiller’s hilarious use of “in toto” during Mystery Men.