Are you ready to worship this weekend, prepared to love our God, and show it? Good, because now we have to worship to be ready, ready for His Kingdom and Christ’s rule over us. Revelation speaks frequently, 14 times, of the worship that will fill all eternity. We’d best be in practice for something we hope to be involved in forever and if we are going to practice it we should really know what it is. I won’t pretend to be an expert on worship and I will confess to using this posting to explore it and engage you in helping me deepen my personal worship, so let’s consider a few things, shall we?
My friend Webster (any of the youth around when the lay youth leaders were teaching know instantly that I refer to my dictionary as “my friend Webster”) says “to regard with great, even extravagant respect, honor or devotion; to perform or take part in worship or an act of worship”. I don’t always agree with my friends, even Webster. He’s close; I love the part of extravagant respect but I like it better as “great, extravagant respect, honor, and devotion”. It is all of those things wrapped up as one. When I think of extravagant I see a group of us going to breakfast together and someone trying to grab the check for the table and finding that a friend had already done that when they saw us walk in. We walk into a service or personal quiet time and exceed everything that was expected of us just because we love Him, that’s extravagance.
Presbyterians use the “Book of Order” to structure and govern the church, define worship, and define the rules of discipline. There aren’t page numbers to use a measurement so I took a copy and measured the pages by compressing the book and measuring each of the three sections, Forms of Government at 5/16”, Directory for Worship at 1/8”, and The Rules of Discipline at ½”. That’s telling but skewed since we also have a whole “Book of Confessions” that is full of worship, articles of faith, and confessions. I couldn’t find my copy right away but did find no less than four copies of the Book of Order. Hmmm… The Directory for Worship talks about the order and content of various types of services as well as explore the definition of worship on several levels. I recommend that any Christian could read this as a part of their search for worship and they will find nuggets of great truth; I’ll be doing some more pointed reading of this myself. Here is one such nugget: “Daily personal worship is a discipline for attending to God and accepting God’s grace. The daily challenge of discipleship requires the daily nurture of worship”.
In “The New Testament Church” by John Robert Stevens, lesson 20 explores Worship in the Services and he says worship is to bow yourself down in adoring contemplation of God. John goes on to say that worship is more than reading the Bible and meditating on it, more than listening to a sermon, and more than most singing and praying. As for me, I believe that if we were infused with worship as we did any of these things; reading Scripture, praying, singing, taking communion; any of them, then our revelation of Christ would be immeasurably more true and powerful.
In John 4: 21-24 Jesus tells us what the Father is looking for, worshipers in spirit and in truth. If we want to grow, for the church in numbers, power, and effectiveness, for the person in knowing the power of Christ’s resurrection, we must seek a spiritual truth in our worship. When it’s not there for us we know it, when we get close we know it, when we touch it, even just the hem of it, we know it and are transformed. For the individual it will leave us drained of self, weak, and ready to achieve God’s purpose. For the church, if will be when each person reaches that point of selflessness and we’ll know it by the harmonizing oneness of purpose. For each one and the church together it will rise up to the Father like pleasing incense and we will be His beloved.
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