1) Worship is all about God's glorification and not at all about my satisfaction. He pointed out that this seems to be a pretty basic truth, but if you ask people after a church service what they thought of it, their responses almost always are about themselves and not God. "The worship really moved me." "I thought the service was too long" "I love the pastor's teaching style" "I really liked the song choices" "I was so blessed by the special music" etc etc etc. You get the point. All of those types of responses reflect a focus on personal satisfaction - not God's glorification. This convicts me. I would tell you my purpose for going to church is to corporately worship God, but I am often focusing on my personal satisfaction.
2) Worship is a choice. I cannot just wander around waiting to feel moved to worship. It is a cognitive decision to glorify God and ascribe His worth. Not only do I need to choose to worship Him on Sunday mornings, but I need to choose to worship Him throughout my week. If I don't, I won't.
3) Worship takes preparation. During my quiet-time throughout the week I need to prepare myself to worship Christ each day. Sunday mornings I need to prepare myself to worship God during the service. I need to focus, make a choice, remove distractions, read, pray, sing - whatever it takes to prepare. If I don't prepare, I will remain distracted and self-centered.
There were other great points he made. I'm not even sure if these three are in the order he said them, but this was what stood out to me. I'm trying to put it into practice - this morning as I continued reading in Romans, I made the choice to focus on worshiping God thru my reading and took some time to reflect on Christ's sacrifice on the cross and what that means for me. For some reason I have been struggling lately with wanting to relax and be entertained instead of putting God first on my priority list. I've been feeling like my mediocre commitment was good enough. Well it's not. And taking some time to remember the cross really changed my perspective. Turns out that if I'm focused on glorifying Christ, I come away feeling satisfied.
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Remember my little tomato plant?! It's huge now! I love eating these tomatoes!!
Last Thursday while I was getting ready for work, Dave called to tell me he would be driving a work van past our house on his way to a job site. I went to the front door to watch for him and wave, and as I was standing there Adi came up to wait by the door with me. I thought it was so funny because she was waiting there while I looked out the windows, but she couldn't see a thing. I guess those details don't matter when you're a cat. :)
jj
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