More and more, I hear people in the Christian community inviting God (or Jesus or the Holy Spirit) into worship. It has become fashionable to help cultivate an atmosphere of worship by inviting the Spirit to enter into and move within a place.
I do this myself, all the time. It comes out of a good heart, I believe. We are conjuring those versus that say “Come near to God and He will come near to you.” We are letting God know that we have come here and would like Him to show up as well.
Language is a powerful thing. And I think one of the dangers in modern Christian culture is not realizing that how we word things drives how we think about things. Our verbiage is an overflow of our theology.
Inviting the Holy Spirit into a place is kind of silly. He is there. It is like holding the door open for someone who is already inside. It is like a Broadway show getting ready to open and the marketing department invites the owner of the theater to attend. It is a nice gesture, a kind way of letting him know we want him to be there. But the truth is, he owns the damn place. He will be there whether we ask Him to or not, whether we want Him to or not.
The reason this feels important to me is because I often forget that I am the invited. I love because He first loved me. I come near as He is already near. When I get the roles reversed, I am asking God to step into my world rather than recognizing what I truly want – to step into His.
If my words represent my theology, I might as well say what I mean. I do not believe a place is void of God until I ask Him to enter it. I do not believe that I am the authority that draws God and I together. I do not believe God is like those vampires that cannot enter a space unless the owner invites. He built the house, owns the house, and is the house. I only want to invite Him because I recognize He is already here.
Sometimes, perception is reality. It becomes a self-fulfilling-prophecy: when we ask God to enter as we are ready, we wave Him goodbye when we are finished. We leave arenas, prayer groups, church services, and enter into our daily lives, struggling to remember God. He showed up like we asked and now we can all go home happy. It is hard for us to find the fault in this because it matches our desires so perfectly. But God wants more. We all want more, really, whether we realize it or not. We want him around all the time, or more accurately, we want to acknowledge – to know, celebrate, and be thankful – for the fact that He IS around all the time. And this struggle is not because I haven’t invited God to my car, my kitchen, my office, my gym, etc. It would be a little silly if I invited my wife everywhere we went. “Kylie, this is the foyer, would you please come there with me.” “Baby, this is the couch, you are welcome here.” “Love of my life, this is the stairs, please, I beg, walk up them.” If we are in love, we just do everything together. We just are. We smile at each other, we hold hands, we talk. Interaction becomes a lifestyle. We acknowledge it by participating in it.
Invitations are temporary. They are for events that start and end. Intimacy is eternal. The truth is that He is around, everywhere, all the time. He cannot enter a place because He cannot leave a place.
Whether it is my individual soul or a communal experience, when worship erupts it is because I/we are finally recognizing the Spirit all around us. We awaken to thanksgiving and celebration. It is not that He swoops in. It is that we finally see what has always been there (and always will be). I believe we are missing an essential truth about the nature of our relationship with God when we fail to realize that, when it comes to the throne of Heaven, we are the invited.
