What is worship, worship is celebrating
God. Being excited about what He has done in your life to the point that you
don’t know any other way to express it but to tell Him what He means to you and
how great He is. Now I know all of us don’t worship the same. I love
worshipping through song. I love singing praises to God. That is one of the
ways you can worship. But worship isn’t only about singing. Worship is first
and foremost living an obedient life to Christ.
Your life should be how you worship. Believe me it is hard to do. My
life isn’t always a good example of worship. It is hard to live a life of
obedience to Christ, but that is our true act of worship. In Romans Paul says
it this way:
Since I have been working with
students I have noticed something. Students
are a very distracted group. I know you have school and work and homework and
sports and any number of things that you have to do, throw church two days a
week on top of that and you are swamped. Not to mention after all of the stuff
you “have to do” you still have a social life. Man it can get crazy. So a lot
of times when you get done with everything you have to do and get to the stuff
that you can or can’t do, according to your parents and the government, for
many of us church doesn’t fall under the things we have to do. So whether we
choose to come to church on our own or are made to come by someone else, we
come very distracted. How many times have gotten your cell phone taken up in
class because we were texting or it rang? I have. So when we are here at
church, worshipping God, a lot of times, our attention isn’t on God. Our
attention is on the person next to us, or the game we lost last week, or the
girl we plan on talking to tomorrow, or our phones that just vibrated in our
pockets. We are distracted. If when Courtney and I were dating, and I called
her and we were on the phone and then I got a text message and I started having
a conversation through text to a friend and ignored Courtney, if I were a
betting man I would bet that we wouldn’t be married today. You know where your heart is by what you pay the most attention to.
If I didn’t pay attention to Courtney and do things for her and treat her any
different than any other girl well, there wouldn’t be much of relationship to
talk about now. I gave her my time and attention. The same goes with God. When
you go throughout your week and don’t spend time with God any other time than
Sundays and Wednesdays and when you are at Church you aren’t focused on Him,
what does that say about your relationship with God, or about my relationship
with God? When we come to church it is a time for us to put everything else
aside, not to be worried about all our homework or the bad game we had or
anything like that. When we come to worship God we should come and lay down our
burdens at His feet and then when we have taken care of that, praise Him for
who He is, and what He has done for us. The fact that we woke up this morning
is evidence of God’s love, because we are never promised tomorrow. Worship is
our offering to God telling Him how much He means to us.
In Hebrews 13:15 the author
says “Therefore by Him let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to
God, that is, the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to His name.”
Worship is our expression of thanks
and praise to God. When we worship it isn’t about us. It isn’t about how good
or bad you sing or anything like that. It is about God and our response to Him.
People respond to Him differently. Some like to sing others don’t. There are other things you can do if you don’t like to sing. Read
the words of the songs; think about what they mean, apply them to your life.
Make sure your heart is right with God so you can come before Him and worship.
There are plenty of things that you can do to worship God without having to
sing. I am easily distracted during worship. Whether it is a phone ringing or
someone talking, or me wondering what others are thinking about me as I
worship. I am sure all of us are easily distracted. That is not something I
want to do during worship though. I don’t want to hinder God moving in someone’s
life because I am talking to them or to someone else. Worship prepares our hearts to hear the
message. Worship gets us in the mood to sit down and listen to God speak and
move in our lives. If you distract someone during the ‘worship’ part of the
service, it very well may carry over to the teaching part of the service and
distract them from hearing from God at that time. However being reverent
doesn’t mean you have to stand there with your arms crossed and not move or
show emotion. Emotion and expressions can be a big part of worship, as long as
they are not for show and they are from God. Not saying that you have to hear a
voice from heaven to tell you to lift your hands or close your eyes or
anything. I want you to understand that if you feel like you need to fall on
your knees and pray during worship, you are free to do it. If you want to jump
up and down and raise your hands, then do it. But not so others will look at
you, but as an extension of your worship. I don’t want you to feel either that
you have to do those things because if you aren’t comfortable raising your
hands or clapping then you don’t have to do that. However you praise God then
do it. You may say that if someone is
always raising their hands that it will distract you. I say that if you were
focused on worshipping God you wouldn’t be distracted by what someone else is
doing.
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