What kind of worship does God really like?

I learned a lot about worship and love, when my daughters or son would come up to me when they were little and hand me a special piece of artwork.

Artwork created just for me. Their eyes were bright with wonder and love, and they would offer the simple child's love that comes free and trusting.  An offering that asks for nothing in return.  Love and faith, and a joy so simple and pure it just needs to be expressed and celebrated. When they would look up at me like I was some kind of superman, and hand me a drawing that they had done.  Some crayon sketch of something they saw in their hearts, and wanted to share with me.  There were usually trees and hills, and a house with a smoke stack, and stick figures of the family.  Yes I was usually the fattest one, but I had a great smile, and I knew all they intended was expressing their love. Then there at the bottom, sometimes with a practiced writing of their name, as if the offering were a class assignment, scratched in shaky and wavering fragile penmanship, the simple words "i love you daddy."

I looked at these children with the love and wonder in their eyes, and knew that the love they were expressing was as pure and boiled down as it came, and I was melted with their love into a quivering stupid heap.  Nothing at that moment really mattered, and finally I understood what everyone had only tried to tell me.  There is no way to prepare you to understand what that feels like, when someone simply and perfectly loves you, chooses you, expecting nothing in return.  With all the other distractions in their lives they took a moment to express love to their father.

Worship.  As sophisticated as we get in our worship styles, talents, traditional or contemporary, emergent, outreaching, well groomed and skillfully expressed, our love just really needs to be that simple doesn't it? To the God of the universe?  Is not our best worship, in light of the sovereign God of the universe, more like a crayon drawing of a tree, and a house, with flowers and stick figures, to the father, who just loves our expression of simple love for Him?

With our organ and choir, or our worship band.  Our tattoo so the congregation knows we survived a past, our projectors with motion video server, and worship software, silver communion set from 1875, whatever we like all good stuff, but idolitry without it all being for God himself, even our best music if offered for any other reason, is idolotry . . . but all this is just not important either, if we just want to love and enjoy God.  That's all there needs to be.  The other stuff is good stuff.  Party in God's spirit, do great worship.  But is it about and for God?  That is a simple question.

I think about that a lot. I have violated that, as a worship leader from time to time, and I don't want to do that.  Like Paul I do the very things I hate sometimes.  We need to offer our best in worship, but more we need to offer ourselves first.  Is God so very impressed with our abilities if our hearts are not full of authentic worship?  If we are, full of authentic love then he accepts our silly drawing as if it were the best and most lasting piece of art.

Sometimes I think I have become a good worship leader.  Maybe, but mostly, in light of the full glory of God, and being able to stand in His presence, and lead people to be in that place with me.  I just want to point to Him with awe.  I need to remember who I am.  As sophisticated, as I get as a worship leader, and musician.  I am . . . still . . . a child.  A child of the King—a child of the father who reaches down to accept the drawing, and looks at it, because it makes Him feel appreciated and loved too, and smiles, and pulls me up onto His lap.  Sappy?  yes, I know, but it's where I am this day, September 22nd, 2011.