Stand in Awe: How Reverance Transforms Our Worship and Our Lives

Laura Story
So I’m Laura, and it is.. I can’t really see.. can’t really see you. When I heard breakout, I was thinking like 30 women. So I am very encouraged that there are this many people here, and a little bit surprised, because I only know like seven people here. So I don’t know who the rest of you. I think you thought it was Jen Wilkin, and now you just feel really awkward. You don’t know how to leave. No, it is. It’s a treat to be here. And I’ll tell you this: I feel like I should give you all this information up front. I was in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, like 36 hours ago, eating pad thai for breakfast, which was.. it was glorious. I’m not just saying that to brag, but all that to say, I think it’s so.. it’s about 4am there. Good, the good news is what I’m going to talk about today. I have.. I’ve been teaching on for, for about.. I guess, I had like a whole week over there teaching, so I have about 16 hours worth of content, so we’ll be out of here by midnight for sure. The bad news is I might fall asleep at any moment, it’s or I may at any point in time, I might say now what was I saying, but that’s actually fairly normal. But I am Laura, and I’m privileged to get to be here, not just because TGC is such a great group of people to partner with, but also Crossway, who is the partner for this book I just released in May. They’re wonderful folks, and they’ve been incredibly supportive, and I’m not just saying this because they’re my sponsors for this breakout, but I do think I.. is there a certain amount I have to say? Crossway isn’t there like a certain Crossway is great, they are wonderful. I don’t know if you noticed, they have a display out there, they sell Bibles and my book, a little bit of my background, and why, why this is a topic that the Lord has placed on my heart. This is the topic is reverence, which is that’s part of the reasons why I’m so amazed that so many people are here. It’s, it can be a topic that’s a little obscure, but the Lord really places this topic on my heart for two reasons. First of all, I’m a music minister at a church called Perimeter Church in Atlanta, Georgia. I think I have a few of, yeah, the seven people that I, that I know, by the way. Jamie, did you ever find my Bible? No. Okay, cool. That’s great. I lost my Bible somewhere, but Crossway. For those of you who missed it in the back, she said Crossway. I hear Crossway has some. Jamie, did you bring your Bible? Did anyone bring their Bible that I could borrow? Please don’t tell Crossway that I showed up to myself. Oh, thank you. Bless your heart. What’s your name? Margaret. Thank you, Margaret. You have just saved this entire thing. Whew. Okay, and I set a timer for 445 because they said if I wanted to stop and do questions at the end. Okay. Oh, all that to say, Perimeter Church. I do own a Bible, by the way. It just is, and it’s somewhere in this building. If you see a Bible without an owner, I was literally just sitting in a session, they were talking about the importance of having an actual Bible, and I show up to teach a breakout session without my Bible. Okay, back to Perimeter. So, I’ve been there as part of their music worship staff for 21 years now, and I showed up knowing my job before that, I was kind of right out of college. It took me a very long time to get through college because I was playing in bands and writing songs, and so right before I started at Perimeter, my gig before that, I was a, I was playing upright bass in a bluegrass band at a Mexican restaurant, so when I started off at Perimeter, like, I knew I knew all of the songs to play, like, as a worship leader, I knew I knew how to play a few different instruments.

Laura Story
I had heard the job came with health insurance, which is like, yes, I would love to be your worship leader, you know, but honestly, I didn’t know a ton about worship, and, and here, here’s kind of why that was the case. I grew up in a church where we had a wonderful choir and a man that directed the choir, and that was kind of my. Context for worship, so but the other reason was at the time of my life that I came to Perimeter, I had been more of a like recording artist at that point, and I had just written and released, well, actually I had written, and then a guy named Chris Tomlin had released a song called Indescribable, and the reason, reason that’s important is because at the time that he, that he recorded it, it was so.. this has been about 20 years now, and it was hard. So, I had a friend that was sharing the song with all these different people, and it was amazing. I could tell you a very impressive list of Nashville artists that did not want to record my song, and then Chris Tomlin came along, and he was a worship leader, and at the time the reason why so many people didn’t, didn’t really have a vision for recording it is because worship and kind of normal Christian artist radio, that they were very separate, and I promise you I’m going somewhere with this, but over the past probably 20 years those two kind of different genres have have met, and now worship is one of the most popular, or is the most popular genre of Christian music, and the reason that’s important for you to know is because there’s some great things about that, and then there’s some not so great things about that. When worship music that is designed for the glory of God and designed for the church, when that is married now with an a branch of the entertainment industry, so, and by the way, I am, I think I mentioned earlier, I function in both of those worlds, and I love both of those worlds, but it is interesting to think about what happens when those worlds come together, because anyone that is familiar with Christian radio, which is again a big part of my story, and big part of how God has ministered to me for years, but their goals, and anyone that knows of Christian radio, is they’re positive, encouraging, family-friendly. You guys, you’re thinking of the jingle right now, whatever your station is. Again, I love these, are my people, but when you marry those, you end up having worship music that is positive, encouraging, family-friendly, and what I began to realize as I studied the scriptures is that God really desires more from us as worshipers, especially as those who are choosing the music for the church and creating the services for the church. It’s important that we understand really what the Lord desires when He calls us to worship Him, and that’s that was kind of the first thing that kind of awakened in my heart, I need, I need to understand how God wants to be worshiped. It’s like when my husband turned 40, I planned a party for him. I’m sorry, I planned a surprise for his birthday. Okay, and I told him, just, you know, you pack, pack clothes and leave the rest to me. So, on Friday afternoon, his birthday was on Saturday. Friday, we drive up to a place in the mountains that I had booked, and and then Saturday morning comes around, and he wakes up, and I say, “Surprise, happy birthday. He was like, “Thanks, and I said, “Yeah, we’re gonna spend the day here, we’re gonna drink coffee, stay in our pajamas, play board games, and you could just see his face was like, oh, oh, is that what we’re so what we’re gonna do, and I, it was that moment that I realized, oh wow, I have planned the perfect birthday celebration for me, this is exactly what I would like to do on my 40th birthday. And then I ended up end up calling friends, and I was like, hey, can you guys meet us tomorrow at our house?

Laura Story
And anyway, I ended up, we, they all showed up and surprised him, and he was like, oh my gosh, that’s so funny, I really, you had me going there, Laura. I really thought that was what you had planned. I was like, oh yeah, of course not, hun, but oftentimes worship, oftentimes when you think of worship as being the celebration of God, we live in a day and age where it’s like worship can be anything, it’s just as long as you’re authentic, as long as it’s heartfelt, rather than asking, you know, asking the Lord, How do you want to be celebrated when your people meet together? How are you most glorified? And I’ll tell you, he kind of has a lot to say about it, you know. We don’t have to sit and wonder. He has so much that he says in his word. Okay, that being said, I really need to get to these guys. Are like, she gave us this whole thing of PowerPoint. I’m actually going to use it now. This is the moment. Oh, and you gave me the clicker. Oh, this is so much power. This is so exciting. So that is kind of the back. Oh, there was one more thing I wanted to tell you, just real quick. So one of the reasons why this was an important kind of topic for me was better understanding how does God want to be worshiped, how does He want to be celebrated, what does our posture need to be when we come before a holy God. The second thing is another part of my story. I said I’ve been at Perimeter for 20 years, something else probably for almost 20 years. My husband, Martin, who I think we have a.. here we go.. yeah, the one that I planned the terrible birthday surprise for Martin. Within the, we’ve been married for 22 years, and when the within the first two years of our marriage, Martin was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and the reason why that’s an important part of our story is because the majority of our marriage has been lived with him with a brain injury, and don’t have a lot of time to go into that, but but the reason why that’s important is because where I began studying reverence as this thing for Sundays, this thing for worshiping. What I discovered is reverence really is it’s not just the one day a week, it’s the six other days a week, and how I respond to God when his plan looks different than what I expected, and I’m sure in a room this size there’s more than just me that has had moments where you say, okay, God, this is not what I thought life would look like, it’s not what I thought marriage would look like, this is not what I thought family would look like, but you realize this is the plan that God is sovereignly writing for my life. He has allowed these things, and so we, we don’t always get to choose what we walk through, but we can always choose how we walk through what we walk through. I don’t know if I said that right, because I’m so jet lagged. You can’t always choose what you walk through, but we can choose how we walk through what we walk through, and so it began. It wasn’t just a subject I was learning about. It began to be a choice that I was choosing to revere God, and the way that I respond to the life that He has blessed me with, and I can honestly say that now, for years, my husband and I, I mean, really struggled with how could disability be part of God’s good plan for my life and for our lives, but now I can truly, I can tell you, God has blessed us so richly, and again, I don’t have time to get into that. Crossway, the gracious people at Crossway have asked me to not talk. They’ve asked me to talk about something specific, and that’s what we’re going to do. Oh, I didn’t – I didn’t introduce all these people. So, Martin Josie, the one in the overall, she’s somewhere around here today.

Laura Story
And then I have twin boys that I literally have to separate them, because last time we tried to do a family picture, and they were together, they were just strangling each other. Griffin and Ben, Ben’s the Ben’s the bigger one, Ben Big Head, think Big Head, Ben, that’s how you remember Ben and Griffin. And then Timothy, who all the kids say that he’s our favorite, he’s eight, they probably say that because he’s our favorite, I you can strike that from the recording, you can strike a lot of this from the recording. All right, so reverence, approaching God in reverence, standing in awe. One of the reasons we do this is because it really is consistent with the teaching of Scripture, Psalm 90. 95 Oh, come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker, for He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand. What I want to show you, and we’re going to look at as many scriptures as time will allow. Thanks to Margaret, thanks to Margaret, and her Bible that she brought, that was very responsible of you, but one thing you see over and over again is worship, the word worship being combined with bowing, being combined with kneeling, being combined with just getting lower, so this definition I’m sure 1000s of people have definitions for reverence, but this is the one that we came up with for the book. Reverence is a humble faith in and submission to the reality of God’s holiness, splendor, and goodness. Yes, so this happens on a micro level when you get to go on Sunday and experience the Lord, but it also happens on a macro level every other day of the week. So I’m going to fly through these because, wow, I have 10 minutes till I was going to stop for the Q&A. What another scripture that I love that that just I think plays this out so well. The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hands of the Lord. He turns it wherever he will. I’m sure that that verse had been in the Bible since the beginning of the Bible, but I had never read that until like a year ago. And do y’all ever have scriptures like that, where you’re like, I know this was in there the whole time, but it just hit me, and I think about in this room here, we probably don’t have any royalty. I’m assuming none of y’all are kings or queens, but when you think about everyone in here is responsible for something, a lot of you are responsible for families, jobs, whatever it is, and this reverence is this picture of our hearts being streams of water in the hands of the Lord. If I had to stop right now, that would be the best analogy I could give you, and just asking that question, is my heart a heart that is fully surrendered, because at the end of the day, that is the product of reverence. So, if you, I know that I haven’t gotten into what reverence is, but as well as I should have. But three ways to grow in the area of reverence, I feel like I’m moving on to, like, the 102 class. I feel like you guys, if you know all four verses of Holy, Holy, Holy. I can probably skip the Reverence 101 Okay, if you were to say, Laura, how can we grow in reverence? What if what if I had this next slide was just by my book? It’s not, I’m just kidding. I’m sorry. A little more punchy because of my lack of sleep here, it might be. Who knows. Three ways to grow in reverence. First of all, our posture towards the Lord. One thing I began to see as I started studying this topic of reverence, I noticed how people would encounter God in the scriptures. So you have Moses, who is taking off his shoes, because he’s standing on holy ground. You have Isaiah, and this is.. I love this. Isaiah is the one I probably want to focus on a little bit more than the others. You have Isaiah, and who.. you guys, you guys know this. What was Isaiah’s vision? What did he see? Saw the Lord on a throne. There’s smoke, the whole building shaking.

Laura Story
This just this amazing encounter where he’s just completely blown away by the Lord. What is his response? Yes. Woe is me. I am ruined. I am a man of unclean. So, even one thing that you see when people are responding to God, you know, from the Psalm 95 you see them bowing down, you see them kneeling, all of this. Another thing is, you see them saying, man, in light of God’s immense holiness, I’m able to see myself as I am, and it is not good. It is not pretty. I am ruined. I am, I am undone. And then you continue on in that passage, and as you guys all remember, not it’s not just this, I’m undone, but he says, ‘Here am I, send me. It’s like I had, I don’t have time for this story. I’m gonna tell it anyway, though. I mentioned I grew up in church and became a Christian when I was 10 years old, but it was when I was 19 I went on a mission trip to Mongolia, and this is.. it was kind of funny. I had.. I’d never been on a mission trip before, like not even like to like downtown New York, like I’d never been anywhere before, and I chose Outer Mongolia. It’s like completely ridiculous now that I think about it, and I was 19 years old, and I had been studying music at University of South Carolina, and just some things that happened in my life before going on that trip, I’d, I really kind of hit rock bottom in lots of different areas of life, and some friends were like, “Hey, we should all do a mission trip together, and we all signed up for this trip to Mongolia, every single one of them backed out, and all of a sudden I’m going to Mongolia with all these random people that I don’t even know, but the reason why, reason why I share it, I’ll never forget my first, probably three or four days there, we were, we were, we had like a backpack with like two changes of clothes, we’re living in 10. Tents showing the Jesus film on the side of these nomads tents. Okay, eating sheep, I mean it was just like the most rough in it thing you could possibly think of, but I spent the first probably three or four days like grieving my bed, my shower, my McDonald’s, like, grieve deeply grieving everything I’d left behind by the end of those three weeks after watching the Jesus film, which basically it was in Mongolian, I couldn’t even understand what it was saying, but just watching that lie life of Jesus three times a day for three weeks, I was undone, I was ruined. And I remember sitting on the side of that mountain, and the trip leader came up to me, and he’s like, “Well, Laura, you know we’re going home a few days, you know. I know how ready you are to go home. Apparently, I had not been suffering in silence, but I told him, I said, “I don’t want to go back, because the Lord had just gotten a hold in my heart in a way that I. it’s like I was ruined, like I could, I can relate to what Isaiah was saying, because none of the things that I had filled my life with before, none of them mattered to me anymore. My life had been so transformed, and that that’s a part of reverence, is coming before God, having an encounter with him, where we’re completely undone, just to continue on quickly. Revelation four and five, this passage, where in the very end of the story you see the elders that are falling on their faces. It’s interesting, because if you were to look, if you were to flip through the Bible, you would see people falling down a lot, you would see lots of people encountering God and falling down, and it’s interesting that that’s kind of, you see it towards the beginning, but the very end of it, they’re with the Lord, and they’re bowing down, they’re hitting their knees, they’re casting their crowns at Him, saying, “Holy, holy, holy, worthy are you, Lord. So we just see this theme over and over again. Joshua falling prostrate, the disciples of the Transfiguration – they’re falling, falling down.

Laura Story
Lots of scriptures that we don’t have time to get into. John Ortberg. I love this quote. He says, “The general sense that occurs in the writings of the scriptures is that when God shows up, his people get blown away, they fall to the ground, they hide their face, they get radiant light light bulbs, they beg for mercy. So, let me just pause after I’ve been talking like a mile a minute, because I have had many cups of coffee today. When you think of worship in your church, is this what comes to mind, like when’s the last time you were at your church and someone just lies down on the ground? Just I feel like if that happened at our church, probably someone with some, like, an ek, like a yes, you know what I mean. The shockers, they bust those things out, but the truth, I feel like.. well, let me go on. This guy’s gonna say it much better than I am. There’s a book called Worship in the Reality of God. John Jefferson Davis says it this way. He said, he asks the question, is there a vivid consciousness of the presence of the living holy God among his people. You think about Sunday morning, or you think about your time, your personal time with the Lord. And then he gives this statement. He says, ‘Your God is too light, your vision of the church is too low, your view of yourself is too high, and consequently your worship is too shallow. Okay, now that’s his words, not mine. And I wouldn’t necessarily say this about every church, but it’s a.. it’s good to ask that question. And I even.. the reason I wanted to include that quote is because I love the progression here, because I might even change it to say when your view of God is too light, your vision for the church is too low, your view of yourself is too high, and your worship is too shallow. And that really is the point of reverence. That’s the point of stand in awe. It’s when we begin to have the type of encounter that we see from the scriptures, our lives end up changing the way that we see these men and women in scripture change. Jamie Voss, who taught something yesterday that I missed. I’m so sorry I was coming back from Asia. I’m going to use that a lot as my excuse, but she and I taught a Bible study back at our church, encounters with God, and one of the things we would always talk about. Is that it’s impossible to have an encounter with God and not change, not be changed forever, and that’s what we see in the scriptures, and that’s really what I think that we long for when we, when we come before the Lord and worship. My alarm just went off for the Q and A. I’m going to keep going like five more minutes, and then I am going to do the Q and A, because they mentioned that, and I thought that was a great idea. Psalm 138 I give thanks to you, Lord, with all with my whole heart, before the gods I sing your praise. I bow down again, more bowing down towards your temple, and give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness, for you have exalted all things, your name and your word. So this idea, not we don’t just reverence God because he calls us to, he, he in some way, like the mysteries of the Trinity, he’s revering his own name, he’s exalting his own name, he’s exalting his word. So, second, second way that we can reverence God in our lives, basically our posture towards God, how we approach God, which I want to give another little side note. I don’t have time to get into any of this, but in my book I talk about four different ditches. Okay, so like if approaching God in reverence, if that’s how God wants to be approached, I list four different ways that we could fall off of that road into a ditch. Okay, one of those being approaching God too casually. Remind me to come back, I want to say something else about that at the end.

Laura Story
Approaching God too casually, approaching God too self-focused, so all of you get like a that you don’t actually get a copy of the book, I think you get a copy of like half the book, isn’t not even half some of it, they picked out the really good parts and it was like eight pages, you get something when you leave here. Oh yeah, okay, so too casually, too self-focused, but in the book, there’s a, there’s a self-focused spirituality test that I made up that was brutal, brutal, basically. If someone was to look at your spiritual life, would they, would it just be like a Christianized version of self-help, and I asked when I asked, when I’m talking to worship leaders about this, I talked to them about their, their song selection, and I’ll say, if someone showed up to a church that had never been to church before, based on your song selection alone, would they think that God exists for us or we exist for God, so often we can get up, find ourselves in this, in this self-focused spirituality of God meeting my needs, and we’ll get into that in just a second. Oh, I was telling you the four things, I keep on getting derailed, I am so sorry, too casual, too self-focused, too shallow, and the fourth one is too distracted. I just attended the three. That’s amazing. I said too distracted, and like three people just laughed. Yeah, I’m not gonna tell you which one I struggle with the most. Okay, let’s keep going. So three ways to grow in reverence in our posture towards God. Basically, how we approach Him. Secondly, in our prayers, I think I just.. this is Luke 22 talking about Jesus. He withdrew from them about a stone’s throw and knelt down and prayed. If Jesus.. I don’t even have time to talk about this. if Jesus needed to pray, if Jesus needed to, to revere God in that way, to depend on God in that way. How much more do we let me keep going? I want to get to a specific one. You know, when the disciples say, Jesus, teach us how to pray. Okay, says, Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. I’m going to stop there. I think it’s interesting that the giving of us our daily bread comes secondary, and it’s not secondary in priority, it’s not that God doesn’t. it’s not that, that isn’t dear to his heart, you know, and we know from the whole of scripture how God loves, he was, he’s so glorified when he is providing for his children, but it’s interesting, he definitely tells us he wants to start us to start thinking of him first, that his name would be hallowed, that his kingdom would come, and that his will would be done. So, so we see reverence in the way that Jesus is teaching us to pray. Lastly, I’m going to, I’m going to share this one more passage with you, and then, and then I’m going to ask for questions, we. I’m not entirely sure how we’ll do that in a room with more than 30 people here. Three ways to grow in reverence. Lastly, in our priorities, this has been one of my favorite passages lately. This is John one. Let me just read this for us. So, in this account in John one, basically, there’s two people, two people in this passage that we’re going to look at. Go ahead and give you a hint. The first one is Jesus. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made in him was life, the life was the light of men, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. So we have this beautiful description of who Jesus is. Next character there was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to bear witness about the light that all might believe through him. It’s interesting, you look at these two two characters in this, in this passage, and he shares very little about John.

Laura Story
We hear more about, and even as we continue, we hear more about who John is not. This is this is a testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you? rather than saying who he was, he says who he’s not. I just love, I love this about John. And by the way, don’t you think it just would be, would have been so difficult being Jesus’s cousin. Can you imagine, like the family reunions? Why can’t you be more like Jesus? You know, but the beauty with John is John gets it that that he’s not supposed to be the focal point. John gets it that he, that Jesus is the point, and that John is the pointer, and really, this sums up reverence. This sums up this idea of standing in awe before the Lord, and allowing God to transform our lives through reverence. It’s realizing that we don’t have to be the main character in our stories anymore, so yeah, I just lot of stuff, I just kind of blew through it, but let me three more little reflection questions just to think about. I’ll read them for you, and then I want you guys, if you have questions, feel free to raise your hand, and I’ll come find you with a microphone first. Do I reverence God by seeking to be part of His greater story rather than seeking His help with my own story? Oh, kind of a quote that I skipped over that I actually don’t even know who to attribute this to, because that’s partly why I skipped over it. But the quote says, Christianity is inviting God into your story that you might find your place in His greater story. So, let me say it again. Christianity is inviting God into your story, that you might find your place in His greater story. I mean, I don’t know if anyone else like me.. like, I didn’t get that for a long time. I did not.. I thought that Christianity was inviting God into my story, and then he’s going to make my story better. He’s going to fully heal my husband. He’s going to make my children behave better. And when you have that kind of perspective, where your life is about your story, it like it makes sense now. People who are disillusioned with Christianity, when that’s the version that they understand, if they think that that’s the goal, but it’s rather inviting God into your story, so that you might find your place in His greater story, and that’s an aspect of reverence as well. Do I reverence God by seeking to be part of His greater story, or am I just seeking his help with my own story. Secondly, do I reverence God by submitting to his plans for my life? That was my phone, sorry, submitting to his plans for my life rather than doubting his goodness when the plan looks different than I expected. Yeah, that’s that’s how hard, that’s a hard thing. And one thing I’m kind of skipping over, that if we had longer together, I would talk to you about lament. I know that they’re going through the Psalms here, so they’ll probably touch on that at some point, but it’s not – it’s not that God is is dismissive of our grief, and it’s not that He – He’s not a God that says, like, hey, turn that frown upside down. He’s a God that meets us in our pain, but ultimately, as His children, we have to believe that He has our, that He has our good, our good in mind, even in the midst of kind of the hard stories that we find ourselves in, and thirdly. Me, do I reverence God by seeking His glory above my own?