Worship – Page 6 – nawinter.com

Worship Where You Are

We have dear family friends that were missionaries for 10 years. Upon returning to the States, I remember the matriarch of the family sharing with me a lesson that she taught her kids. They spent those 10 years in several different countries and often they would move to a new place before they learned the language. Despite not understanding the content of a church service, they still faithfully attended. The perspective was that “God tells us to go to church so that’s what we are going to do.” It didn’t matter whether you could understand the pastor or sing along with the songs, you could still worship.

It’s a lesson that has stayed with me. Although I have rarely been to a church service where I didn’t understand the words, the overarching message has changed the way that I view church, and worship. Church isn’t about me; church is about God. Worshiping Him is not dependent upon my circumstances, but Who He is. Therefore, regardless of whether I like the sermon or not, whether the set list was filled with my favorite songs or those that I do not favor, or whether I’m driving in a car, talking to my friends, or a thousand other things that I do, worship exists; I just need to join in with what Creation is already doing and worship my Savior.

God doesn’t change depending on our circumstances, and neither should our praise and adoration of Him. So wherever we are, we can worship.

Have you experienced the joy of worshiping God wherever He places you? What have you learned from that?

Postscript – The dear friend who taught me this lesson is having an operation today to remove a large tumor that was discovered last week. Please join me in praying for a successful surgery and a complete recovery. Our God is a big God who saves and who heals.

Time for Worship

As I’ve written about before, one of my “pet peeves” is when church services are segmented into “worship time” and the rest of the service. Generally this is done with the time of congregational singing. That’s designated the time of worship, while the rest of the time, for lack of any designated, is something else. Often I think this is probably done unintentionally; we don’t realize that by saying, “Now it’s time for worship” that somehow we’re indicating that the rest of the time, worship is not required.

What we do in church services, we also do in our daily lives. We comparmentalize when we serve God and when we don’t. We set aside “prayer time” and then go the rest of the day without communicating (or listening) to God at all. We designate certain hours of the day as the time where we “go to worship,” not realizing that this should be what characterizes our lives..

As A.W. Tozer said,

If you do not worship God seven days a week, you do not worship Him on one day a week. There is no such thing known in heaven as Sunday worship unless it is accompanied by Monday worship and Tuesday worship and so on. (“Tozer on Worship and Entertainment“)

As Tozer indicates, eternity will make this clear. In Heaven there won’t be times where we are worshiping and where we aren’t – our very existence will be focused on giving God glory. There may be times where this is through singing songs, or attending Heavenly church services, but other times this will likely be through a variety of other things that because of the way that we do them, we will be demonstrating how good God is. Worship time won’t be relegated to a specific hour or occasion – it will be the timbre of our lives.

If this is what followers of Christ are going to be spending eternity doing, shouldn’t we get busy about making our lives look increasingly like this now?

How can we worship God in all we do and not just at specific times?

Tag: Worship

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