In Thy Name I Will Lift Up My Hands, and the Room Was Empty

A woman asked me a question after a service that I have never been able to stop thinking about.

She said: I have thought about God every single day for nineteen years, and I want to know why it feels like I have not actually been in a room with Him in five of them.

I asked her a few things. Her doctrine was solid. Her attendance was better than mine. She read her Bible in the mornings and she could have taught most of what I preach that night.

Then I asked her when the last time was that her body had done anything about any of it, and she looked at me like I had asked her something rude, and then she stopped, and then she said: I do not know.

Not a criticism. Nobody had ever told her that was a category. She had a full head and a still body and nineteen years of thinking about a name she had rarely said out loud and had never once said standing up.

Where he was when he wrote it

The sixty-third psalm has a heading, and the heading changes everything about how the verse reads.

David is in the wilderness of Judah. He is not in a sanctuary and he is not in a service. He is in a dry place, hiding, with a shortage of most things, and the psalm opens by saying his flesh longs for God in a land where there is no water.

And in the middle of it he says this.

Thus will I bless thee while I live: I will lift up my hands in thy name. (Psalm 63:4, King James Version)

In thy name. The name and the hands in one sentence, welded together, by a man in a desert with no congregation to look impressive in front of.

That is worth sitting with if the whole idea of a posture makes you uncomfortable. He is alone. There is no room. There is nobody to see it and nobody to be edified by it, and he still puts his arms up, because it was never about the room.

You have a body that was included in this from the beginning, and its inclusion was not an add-on for people of a certain temperament, and Psalm 63 has a hunted man doing it alone in a desert, and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who makes a posture an act of worship rather than an act of theater.

Why the head alone goes thin

I want to say the next part carefully, because I have no interest in shaming anybody's temperament and there are people whose worship is genuinely quiet and interior and it is real.

But there is a thing that happens over years, and I have watched it in myself.

A name held only in the mind slowly becomes a subject. It becomes something to have views about, something a person could explain, something they would defend. And a subject is not a Person, and nobody has ever been in a room with a subject.

The body is what keeps it from going abstract. Not because God needs the gesture. He does not. But because a person who has stood up has done something that cannot be done neutrally, and something in us knows it.

You have been given a way back out of the abstract that costs nothing and takes four seconds, and Psalm 63 welds the name and the hands into one sentence rather than leaving them as two ideas. That work is the Spirit's, and He keeps a gesture from being empty.

Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, and bless the LORD. (Psalm 134:2)

That is written to the night watch, to the people who served in the house by night, when the building was empty and nobody was there to see it.

You were made as one thing rather than as a mind with a body attached, and God asks for the whole of it, which is what Romans 12 means by presenting your body as a living sacrifice, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary gesture in an empty room into worship.

And Paul says something about this in a letter about how the church prays, and it is striking how physical the instruction is.

I will therefore that men pray every where, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting. (1 Timothy 2:8)

Every where. Which includes a living room with the television off and nobody in it.

What stops people, and it is not usually theology

Almost nobody who resists this is resisting it doctrinally.

What stops people is embarrassment, and the embarrassment is strange because there is nobody there. A person alone in their own house, with the door shut, will feel self conscious lifting their hands, which tells you the audience is internal.

That internal audience is worth naming plainly, because it has been running some of us for decades. It is the memory of a room where somebody did this and we found it excessive. It is the fear of being the kind of person we have quietly judged. And it is the suspicion that a gesture we did not feel first would be dishonest.

That last one deserves an answer. It is not dishonest. Scripture consistently puts the action first and the feeling after it. David decided while he was still in the desert. The night watch lifted their hands in an empty building because it was their turn to serve, not on a wave of emotion.

You have permission to move before you feel anything, and nowhere does Scripture make the feeling the entry requirement (Psalm 134:2), and the Spirit is the one who meets a person somewhere in the middle of a gesture they did not feel when they started it.