To worship is to experience Reality, to touch Life. It is to know, to feel, to experience the resurrected Christ in the midst of the gathered community…worship is the human response to the divine initiative. (R Foster)
Worship is one of those words that I can get a bit hung up on. When we refer to a ‘time of worship’, in my head I inject the word ‘sung’ before worship, or replace ‘worship’ with ‘praise’. I know what we mean, but it still niggles me. I think it niggles me because words matter, and when we misuse the term worship, we can narrow in our minds what worship means and how we worship. And I think we stop being open to worshipping God in all sorts of facets and in all sorts of moments, other than when we are singing songs.
The challenge for this month’s discipline for me was to identify moments and mediums of worship alongside the Sunday sing-a-long. Somehow by doing this I felt I was moving away from focussing on the ‘what and how’ of worship and training my eye to find the ‘Who’. I began to seek and make use of anything that lifted my heart in praise, reverence and adoration to God – from classic Christian songs, to current chart music, to Blue Planet, to conversations, to news articles, to the weather, to new life, to provision – when I accept that God can use such a variety of things to summon my heart to worship, I find that life can become full of moments of praise, and moments of recognition of God’s reality in my life, punctuating my day.
I have always found being close to nature allows me to experience Reality more readily. There is so much of God to be seen and known through creation itself, and simply spending time in it brings me to a place of adoration. This is much more of a challenge now living in a suburb of the second largest city – and I often crave the open spaces where I used to so easily engage with God.
I also find Scripture moves me readily to worship – passages such as the Magnificat are a model of praise and adoration, filled with truth, reminding us of God’s faithfulness and declaring His goodness.
The divine priority is worship first, service second. Our lives are to be punctuated with praise, thanksgiving and adoration. Service flows out of worship. Service as a substitute for worship is idolatry. Activity is the enemy of adoration. (R Foster)
It is a challenge to remember that we are called to love greatly, rather than serve manically. Many years ago now, God clearly spoke to me with these words: ‘I am not a mission to accomplish but a God to enjoy’. These words were correcting and liberating for me at the time, and still are today. I am called to seize every opportunity and use every means possible to engage with God and respond to Him in adoration and gratitude…and somehow, the byproduct of that seems to accomplish the mission.
If you do not worship God seven days a week, you do not worship Him on one day a week. There is no such things known in heaven as Sunday worship unless it is accompanied by Monday worship and Tuesday worship and so on (A.W.Tozer).
And if that is the case, we need to broaden our thinking when it comes to worship. We need to free our worship from being limited to twenty minutes of singing once a week, and learn new ways to praise, train ourselves to offer ourselves and the content of our lives as worship, and be content with the adoration of God that we are called to.
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