Three items today. Three very different items, but all involving worship.
The first is from the blog of Crossroads Church in Grain Valley, Missouri.
Impactful Worship
Acts 16
In Ethiopia, where we lived, the people would use a tree or even a mountain to bring their sacrifices to appease the evil spirits. They would take their sacrifices to the base of the mountain to appease the evil spirits. These sacrifices were ritual acts of worship; they were showing their adoration, devotion and respect to the evil spirits seeking the spirits blessings. However, this kind of worship never brought them joy or peace. They always lived in fear of whether or not they had done enough to appease the spirits.
Worshiping the God of the universe is different. It is not a ritual act in which we try to appease God and gain His favor. It is an action which should involve our entire being (heart, mind, and soul). We are to give total control or our lives to God which is our “living sacrifice.” We do this by being “transformed by the renewal” our minds (Romans 12:1-2). We must replace our human way of thinking with God’s way of thinking. In order to change our way of thinking, we must learn the truth about who God is in His Word, talk to God in prayer, and be obedient to Him.
In Acts 16, Paul and Silas were thrown in jail. What did they do? Instead of feeling sorry for themselves, they prayed and sang hymns to God. And it visibly impacted the people around them. No matter what situation we find ourselves in, when we truly worship God we can have “joy unspeakable,” and “peace that surpasses all understanding” – all the while impacting the world around us.
About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them, and suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken. And immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone’s bonds were unfastened. (Acts 16:25-26 ESV)
Today in Prayer
Private Worship: Romans 12:1-2
- Pray that your private worship would be made a priority on a daily basis, so that you would know Him more intimately.
- Pray that you find true joy in Him through your private worship.
- Pray that you see yourself as a living sacrifice, DAILY, so you can stay focused on Him and be in the world, but not of the world.
“Public worship will not excuse us from secret worship.” ~Donald S. Whitney
The second is from Core Christianity. This is only the second half of the article, so click the title below if you wish to read it all.
Why You Need to Be in Church
In Scripture worship is the intrusion of God’s alien kingdom upon us.
by Adriel Sanchez
It may seem quite ordinary to the one without faith, but for the faithful, something magnificent is happening in the mundane. The author to the Hebrews put it best when he said that in coming together for worship, we are coming to: “the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the general assembly and the church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood, which speaks better than the blood of Abel.” (Heb. 12:22-24)
Please, stop for one moment and consider that when you go to church, you are ascending the heavenly Jerusalem. Angels are present, though not to the naked eye. God has promised to meet you there, and your new-covenant mediator, Jesus, is in the midst of the assembly by the power of the Spirit (Rev. 2:1). Earlier in Hebrews, we’re reminded of the fact that in worship we “taste the heavenly gift,” probably a reference to the Lord’s Supper; and that the powers of God’s coming kingdom are breaking in on us like rain from heaven (Heb. 6:4 & 7).
All of this is in fact, quite alien to the normal person, even perhaps offensive. How can we speak of eating the body and blood of Jesus? Isn’t preaching from the Bible sort of outdated? No one uses words like covenant, and blood-sacrifice, today! We’ve forgotten that it’s this strange beauty that captivated the Greco-Roman world. The Christian church after the days of the apostles was accused of practicing cannibalism and incest because of how they spoke in their assemblies, but according to sociologist Rodney Stark, the church also experienced unprecedented exponential growth during that time (See Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity). It turns out, the heavenly service sets people’s hearts on eternity, and that results in their willingness to lay down their lives for their neighbors. The church grew not by trying to imitate this world, but by giving this world a glimpse of another world, even by offering them a taste of it in the Eucharist.
This Sunday, God invites you, together with your brothers and sisters, to ascend his holy mountain. To join the angels around us, and the martyrs, who preceded us. He promises to give you the rain of his holy Word, able to spark faith in your heart, and raise you from spiritual lethargy. He offers to feed you, not ordinary food, but heavenly food. A bread so sacred that the apostles warned that eating it could result in death if it was received with impudence (1 Cor. 11:30). In the Bible, worship was far from comfortable, but it was life-giving (Jn. 6:53). It’s life-giving still.
“Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” (Isa. 55:1)
This last one is from the early days here at C201. The phrase from The Lord’s Prayer appears now as a tag line for many churches, only with the name of their city or town substituted for “earth.”
On Earth As It Is In Heaven
We’ve prayed it many times:
Thy Kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven
But how is God’s will done in heaven?
I see two things, but perhaps you can think of others:
(1) There is constant worship. The KJV of Rev. 4:8 says “they rest not.” The NLT reads:
Day after day and night after night they keep on saying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty — the one who always was, who is, and who is still to come.”
So if you want to see a bit of the will of God done here on earth, there’s going to be non-stop worship.
(2) There is instant compliance. God simply speaks the word and it happens. “And God said…” is the constant theme of the creation narrative, giving new meaning to the old phrase “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” Except that in heaven, the middle part wouldn’t be “I believe it;” but something closer to “I’m obeying it.”
Simply: He speaks and it is.
Unlike creation, God cannot always simply make things happen unless we’re willing to be used as partners with him; he has chosen in this time and place to work through willing people.
Christianity 201 