In the opening verses of Isaiah 6, what the prophet encounters first in the house of God is the glory of God: "I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple" (v.1). It doesn't first say he encountered well-dressed people or hot coffee or influential power brokers or a booming sound system or a great organ. What he caught site of first was God's glory.
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There's a growing trend in some churches to offer door prizes to any returning visitor. One church visited recently by a friend of mine promised him a ten-dollar Starbucks gift card if he came back the following week.
Isaiah shows us the door prize that awaited him when he walked into the house of God--the uncomfortable, wrecking presence of God's glory: "Woe is me!" (v.5).
In the Bible, the glory of God refers to God's "heaviness," his powerful presence. It's God's prevailing excellence on display. The glory of God is the "augustness" of God--an old term conveying his awe-inspiring majesty. In fact, one reason why Christians in the Roman Empire were persecuted is that they refused to use the word august for the emperor--such a description belonged to God alone, they said. They understood that there is a transcendent majesty unique to God. This high and lifted up greatness of God is what Isaiah encountered--a God who is majestically and brilliantly in command.
All this means we ought to come to worship expecting first and foremost to see God. We come to encounter his glory, to be awe struck by his majesty. A worship service isn't the place to showcase human talent but the place for God to showcase his divine treasure. We gather not to be impressed by one another--how we sound, what we wear, who we are--but to be impressed by God and his mighty acts of salvation. We come to sing of who he is and what he's done. We come to hear his voice resounding in and through his Word. We come to feel the grief of our sin so that we can taste the glory of his salvation. We gather to be magnificently defeated, flattened, and shrunk by the power and might of the living God.
Source: Crosswalk
