Worship God Have you ever stopped to think about what we mean when we say “we are going to have a worship service”? The reason I ask is because there seems to be some confusion today about what worship is. I have noticed recently that some churches are advertising “celebration time” or “hallelujah hour” instead of worship services. Now, I am not so hung up on the term “service”. You can take that word out and replace it with “worship time”, “worship hour”, or any other appropriate term that describes the action of worship. I kind of like “worship offering”. All of these are acceptable ways to describe our time of worship, but worship it must be. The early church did not meet on the first day of the week to celebrate, they met to “break bread”, an act of worship. Our Lord said, “God is a Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24) God desires our worship, and He has expressed how we are to worship. We worship Him as an offering, or sacrifice that comes from our spiritual heart. Worship to God is not intended to entertain me. It is intended to honor and glorify my Lord. If I do not “get something out of it” it is probably because I didn’t put anything into it. Worship involves the communion of my spirit with God's. I do not know how to approach God, except in that way which He has prescribed. To attempt to approach Him in any other way is to presume that I am worthy to tell God how He is to be worshiped. To be willfully absent from the worship service demonstrates that I do not desire communion with God. The idea of true worship to God fills the greatest of human needs. It allows us to communicate and fellowship with our Father. It restores our broken spirit by fellowship with His Spirit. It heals. It soothes. It fills a need that nothing else can fill, but it can only do so when my worship is given in total, selfless submission to God. Only when I have sacrificed myself, along with my desires, opinions, and selfish motivation, can I experience the healing, uplifting, joyous occasion of worship. When I have learned to thus worship God, worship becomes for me an essential need, akin to the need of a father to protect or a mother to nurture. The idea of forsaking worship becomes unthinkable. The prospect of substituting true worship for some emotional experience designed to satisfy me becomes abhorrent. |