Worship
As we begin this new year how about adding a worship resolution to your list? Be honest about it. Do you allow other things to steal your attention during worship? Do your thoughts have a way of drifting toward the demands of the day? Do you find yourself preoccupied with activities planned for the week?
The fact is that we gain the most from worship when we give God our undivided attention. God wants to deposit truth in our heads that is designed to change our lives. Yet much of what people call worship these days is just going through the motions of singing, praying and sitting there mindlessly while a preacher drones on with meaningless words, cliches that sit like tombstones over dead ideas. How can that be when our Almighty Living God is speaking?
Henry David Thoreau wrote, “It takes two to speak the truth. One to speak and another to listen.” Walt Whitman confessed, “To have great poets there must be great audiences.” How true, there must be someone to write and someone to appreciate. To have great messages from God there must be a well prepared spokesman and an equally well prepared congregation. They work together.
Throughout 2009 try this. From the first note of music to the last word of the benediction tune in to God’s thoughts. Sometimes those thoughts come in the silence of communion time. Other times they come as someone leads in prayer. Often they come in the singing or sermon. Be still and listen to God, because He is communicating.
In Malachi 1:6-14 God condemned Israel’s complacent and contemptuous attitude toward Him in worship. God does not change. He is disgusted by the same attitudes in the worship now. Let’s resolve to focus only on God during worship throughout 2009. Not only will that allow us to give God the glory He deserves. It will allow God to change our lives in many good ways as He longs to do.
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