Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Worship: Our First Ship…

We were created to glorify God. Simple, end of discussion. To do so is to worship God. Worshipping God is an experience, it is an opportunity, it is to bathe in the Light of the World. We do this thing called worship on Sunday mornings. We get together for an hour, gathering our neighborhood into our sanctuary, and for that time, we go to another place.

That other place is none other than God's presence. To worship is to praise God, is to adore God, is to be in the power of the Living God, is to celebrate the One God, Yahweh, our Father who art in heaven. Ultimately, the description of worship is more metaphor than it is logical progression, more symbolic entry into the divine than it is something we can break down and describe piece by piece. That is because to worship, our eyes must be turned upward. They must be turned to God.

The liturgy of the worship service is designed to keep our eyes on the prize. In worship, we are not trying to solve problems, we are not trying to run programs, we are not trying to build the structure of the church up. Rather, when experienced powerfully in the Spirit, while we worship, we transcend just for a little while. We step out of the mundane world, out of the sinful world, out of the world of pain and destruction, and for a few minutes we are hanging out with the angels. For a few moments, we may just touch the grace of the Almighty.

When we can do that, we have the reason for building our neighborhood in the Kingdom of God. When we have touched the divine, had our eyes opened to something new, taken the focus off ourselves and put onto the author of our creation, we have seen the love and the grace and the blessings and the caring and the perfection that is God. And it something to be anticipated, something to be pursued, something to be experienced, in body, soul, mind, spirit, emotions, holistically.

Sunday morning can be the time to charge your batteries for the week ahead, fill up at the pump of Living Water, build you up on Sunday so that you can face Monday. To work best, it doesn't just happen on Sunday. What happens on Sunday, the corporate gathering of the people of God, is the BIG ONE. But each of us, in our own lives, daily can worship the Living God, touch the perfection of heaven, and bask in the Light of the World.

This happens in devotional times that we set aside for God each day, times of reading God's word, coming to the Lord in prayer, communing with our Father. In those moments, we pursue individually what we celebrate all together on Sunday morning.

It starts with those delightful words, Let us worship the Living God…

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