King David shed his outer royal garments and danced before the LORD, completely mindless of his royal status. His joy at the return of the Ark of God to Jerusalem was spontaneous and uninhibited. In so doing he revealed his true self.
Sadly, his wife Michal, the daughter of Saul (whose hand David won by defeating Goliath) saw him from an upper story window and mocked him for making an exhibition of himself (2 Samuel 7:20). But David’s true self was apparent long before he became king of Israel. It’s the real person who gets lost in worship, not just the outer person that people see.
In the 1970s we had what was known as “the Pentecostal two-step”. It was hardly Davidic but not bad for those who didn’t dance at all, which was most of us. (Most Aussie men don’t dance at wedding receptions, we just shuffle.) I had never ‘danced’ until working for Pastor Clark Taylor, but everyone in church did in those days. I was still new to Queensland, and hadn’t shed my Victorian inhibitions.
That ended one day in our home on Coochiemudlo Island, in Moreton Bay, when Clark Taylor grabbed one of my arms and Geoff Woodward the other, and they began to ‘dance’. At that time a tea firm was introducing tea-bags, and their commercial on TV asked the question: “Are you a jiggler or a dangler?” –meaning, do you jiggle the tea-bag in the cup or just let it dangle”?
I realized that if I didn’t jiggle along with these two tall men, I would dangle between them! So, I jiggled — did the two-step! I then realized that it wasn’t all that bad; in fact, it felt pretty good. I lost one inhibition that day, and at the next meeting of the church there I was, jiggling along with the rest (if not the best)!
The point I’m making is that the new self is the true self. The “It’s no longer I that live” in Galatians 2:20 doesn’t mean we’re androids; it means that the old self has been replaced by the new one. (Count how many times “I” appears after “but Christ that lives in me”; the personal pronoun (NT “ego”) is indicative of identity.)
“Do you think you can dance?” you might ask. No, and I don’t think many churches still do that Pentecostal two-step (not that it didn’t free some Christians from their inhibitions). When revival comes, we’ll probably whirl like desert dervishes (but in the right spirit — the Spirit of God).
When the power of God is present in the anointing I do as I am led by the Holy Spirit, and it’s often like a rush of spiritual adrenalin. In the great (200-room) Kinmel Hall in North Wales, I was so full of the joy of the Lord that I jumped over a huge leather-studded sofa –twice!
When I was a boy, I often travelled with my father as he wrote signs around Northwestern Victoria. He had a signwriting contract with a tea firm named Bushells. The slogan he painted on walls and shopfronts was “Bushells’ Tea: More cups, finer flavour.”
These words, “more” and “finer” also apply when “dancing before the LORD” or whatever else we do to express the joy of the LORD. Michal thought her husband, king David, was out of order, but she was wrong. She was unable to have another child after mocking David.
Some will warn, “Oh, but the Devil dances too, you know!” (Joyless anti-charismatics are so predictable!) My suggestion to them is that they receive more of the Lord and join in — which is what I did back in the 1970s. How much they enjoy it might come as a big surprise!
“And the Spirit of the LORD will come upon you … and you will be turned into another man.” (1 Samuel 10:6) Normally you wouldn’t dream of doing the kind of things that you do in the anointing. Why did I jump over that huge, studded leather sofa repeatedly while preaching at that historic hall in North Wales.
Simply because I had an excess of energy! If you’ve ever had an adrenal rush — as happens to those who do extreme sports, and oce to me when I crossed from an island to the mainland in a small boat in the face of a strong wind — the power anointing is similar but is far more exhilarating!
We need to be filled with the Spirit continually, so that we act not who we once were but as we now are. Our churches could do with a recharge too. We recharge our mobile phones as their batteries lose power, so why not personal, spiritual recharges? My mother was English and traditional, and so by nature was conservative; but when the Spirit of the Lord comes upon me I become the new man that God made me in Christ!
Demons? POW! Sickness? WHAM! “Mountains” in my way? MOVE! It’s a way of life that you should try sometime, if you’ve not done so already. You really would like to become “another person” — a new you — in the Lord, wouldn’t you? Of course, you would! How to begin? Just do something that you’ve never done before. (Keeping it scriptural, decent, and not disorderly!) The answer to inherited or acquired inhibition is freedom in the Anointing!