Hi, I’m Bill Johnson from Bethel Church in Redding, California. Welcome to God Today. I love what we call the Lord’s Prayer. I love this prayer that is actually the cry of the disciple. But I want to point to how it starts. It actually starts in worship. It starts in praise. It’s “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Your name.” There’s this expression of honor towards the Lord. It concludes the same way – “For Yours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.” Enhanced in this opportunity to worship God is the cry for His heartbeat.
I want to just back up to the concept of worship for just a moment. When we are talking about seeing God’s will done on earth, the cancer being gone, the poverty gone, the broken relationships, all that stuff getting healed and mended, we’re actually not talking about simply principles from another world. We’re actually talking about a person. We’re talking about the presence of God, because when we talk about Heaven, we are actually talking about a culture where the presence of God is the supreme value. There’s nothing more important in all of Heaven. In fact, we can put it this way. There’s nothing in Heaven separate from His presence. Heaven is itself the manifest presence of God that people live and dwell in.
So for that reason, I want to turn your attention towards the presence of God and encourage you in worship, don’t just worship the worship. Don’t just worship the wonderful songs that are written and the things we get to do and to declare and show our zeal. But it’s actually about encountering the face of the almighty God. From that we see His heartbeat, we feel His heartbeat. We get this faith stirred up in our own heart to see His passion, His desire accomplished in the world around us. That is the Great Commission.
Let me pray for that for you. Father, I pray that in all of our times of worship, our corporate gatherings, our personal times with You, that there would be something so profound of Your presence. I pray that it would invade our world so that we pick up Your face, Your heartbeat above everything else, and that we would not be people of just principle by itself, but we’d be people connected to Your passion, to Your heart, to Your face, to what You love. I ask for that in Jesus’ wonderful name. Amen.