May 18, 2015
Worshipping
I’ve visited a few churches
that have gone well beyond a two-hour worship service. I suspect that leaders/preachers
were caught up in their own presentation and lost track of time, or they were
extending the service in order to garner a spiritual experience for the
worshippers. Whatever the reason, they seem oblivious to the fact that they no
longer held the attention of some in the audience. Recently during a sermon
about “worshiping in spirit and in truth” some attendees simply got up and
left, and I eventually followed suit. It is somewhat difficult to focus on the church's idea of worship
when your stomach is growling, you’re late to meet others for lunch, or you
need a bathroom break. “Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true
worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind
of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his
worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23-24 NIV).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----If it wasn’t for the fact that worship is a daily part of the new life’s mental framework, I would wonder how even a two-and a half hour worship service could deliver the spiritual strength and growth the soul needs in this parched wilderness. This is a place constructed on the framework of death. For your body to be nourished something must die. Something died to nourish what you killed to eat. And whatever that was also killed to nourish its body, and so on. Scientists call it a food chain. It could just as truly be called a death chain, though it is a life chain. This temporal life is made of death.
-----And the sin in it is inescapable. Each of us must plan our own lives and execute those plans with a good part of our minds set upon our own survival. No one else will do that for us, and someone must do it. From the simplest things, like dressing ourselves in the morning and forking the dead stuff into our mouths for lunch, to the complicated things, like gaining an education and developing a career, we each focus resolute attention upon ourselves and perform many hard works for ourselves just to stay alive. This life requires a great deal of time and attention to be invested into the self in order to develop the character, resources, and intelligence necessary just to survive.
-----Moreover, the knowledge any one person has of any life around him is not really that life, but just reflections upon it. A person’s reflections can only be upon his own perceptions. There is no way one mind can reflect upon the ideas and concepts and perceptions inside another mind. So, even what we know about others is only more of our own perceptions. This life traps us deeply in selfness. We can not escape the selfness. Even in trying to escape it the effort is invested into the improvement of the self that such escape would make.
-----The breach in this life resulting from The Fall is the direction intention faces. In the perfect existence intention is to benefit everything's survival. In a perfect world this intention gets actualized because everything else intends the same, thus supplying every necessary resource anything needs. If a person brings that same intent into this broken life, he dies by giving himself away. It’s what Jesus did.
-----He could do that because He was perfect and had all the resources necessary to do a complete and full actualization of those intentions (the cross and the empty tomb.) We can and should have the intentions to benefit everything, but in actualizing those intentions we must quickly turn to worship and prayer upon the soon depletion of our meager resources. So, our efforts get rendered down to doing a few good things we can do. The rest of what we should but can not do we can actualize only into desires for righteousness. Our worship is intertwined with that and prayer. So it should be a moment to moment thing, 24/7 everywhere, as our resources to meet needs continually turn up short. Church services are only its expressions.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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