My heart is being drawn to worship. I believe that worship is not confined to a specific time and place like a worship service. Worship is offering up our bodies as living sacrifices to a God who is described as a consuming and refining fire. Yet, I also believe that the gathered people of God demonstrate through both praises and lamentations their love for God and their need for God. The gathered church comes together to meet with God and be changed. I call this being Worship Full.
Continue reading “Worship Full: A Vision for Gathered Worship”
“Hello, sir! I am calling from Microsoft to inform you that there is a security breach on your computer. Your computer has been hacked and we have to act quickly before they steal all your files and sensitive information.” Have you ever gotten one of these scam calls? It wasn’t my first time getting one of these so my response was, “Are they stealing all my Netflix movies? I haven’t watched them all yet!” 
“But you’re so young.” This was the concern of many minister search teams when I was interviewing for my next ministry. Once I responded with, “I’m thirty-five years old, it’s not like I’m living in my mom’s basement playing Halo.” I listened to my wife’s counsel not to respond to that concern in that way again. What we might be prone to think is that we want our leaders to have arrived. What if instead we desired that our leaders and ourselves be ever-growing. 
Worshipping God requires movement. I don’t mean swaying and snapping your fingers (acceptable church of Christ dancing). Moving worship is not just about expressiveness it is about God and the formation of our lives into the likeness of Jesus. I believe worship should be spirited and emotive but more than that it must be spiritual. This involves moving with the Spirit. Here are four movements required for spiritual, Christ-centered, life-changing worship. 
“I’ll give you more than a song. For a song in itself is not what you have required.” When we think of worship we may only think of it terms of singing but what made these lyrics from Michael W. Smith’s song “The Heart of Worship” so powerful is that worship is so much more.
Romans 6:1-7 (NIV) What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? 2 By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? 3 Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. 5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—7 because anyone who has died has been set free from sin.
There’s a universal truth in this world God has created: Healthy things grow.