Steffasong@aol.com
What picture comes to mind when you hear someone say, “Let’s go worship the Lord!”
I’ll bet I can guess. -- Music, drums, guitars and enthusiastic voices joyfully offering songs of celebration to our God, right?
What a wonderful experience it is to voice our love for God with songs of praise, and to praise Him in the midst of everyday life. This is a good thing, --- but not necessarily worship.
Paul gives us an inkling of what it means to be a true worshipper when he writes to the believers who were meeting in Rome, way back in the first century. In the midst of explaining to them the depth of the beauty and riches that we each possess as a part of the Body of Christ, this wise Apostle launches into a dramatic exhortation about what it means to truly worship. Let’s look at what he says:
”Therefore I urge you, brethren, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – which is your spiritual worship” (Romans 12:1)
Offering our bodies as a living sacrifice?
THIS is our ‘spiritual’ worship?
Oh yes!
It is not the melodic strands of a lush grand piano, the gentle rhythms of a djembe, the happening groove of a fat bass line, or the heavenly sounding harmonies that stem from the unity of voices raised in one accord, but rather the offering of the deepest parts of ourselves to our Lord, that comes closer to what it truly means to worship.
To gain a bit more insight, we need look no further than to Abraham.
God had an incredible purpose planned for the life of this man, and in order to be prepared to walk in that purpose Abraham had to learn what it meant to be a worshiper. It was then, when God asked Abraham to give up his brightest hope, the very best part of himself, that which was dearest thing to his heart, -- his only son,-- that Abraham learned what it meant to worship. Do you recall the story? Abraham left his two servants with the donkey on the side of Mount Moriah, and said to them, “Stay here while I and the boy go over there. We will worship, ….”
I guarantee you there was little celebration or joy in his voice as Abraham traipsed up the mountain, Isaac following behind with a pile of sticks and no animal to sacrifice. While Abraham’s heart trusted that God would in fact provide a substitute, his heart was surely seared with the pain of one who is abandoning ALL for the sake of obedience, ALL for the sake of God having His own way.
Thankfully, God saw Abraham’s heart and spared Isaac.
Thankfully, God has once for all provided the acceptable, perfect sacrifice in His own son, Jesus Christ.
We no longer have to think about blood sacrifice, but we do need to think about living sacrifices, and remember that it means nothing less than offering our entire self to our Lord every day.
This, He says, is our spiritual worship!
Offering our lives as our spiritual worship will involve different issues for each of us. Perhaps it is a simple desire or ambition that you hold dear. For someone else it may be a relationship, a material item, recognition or fame. As we offer these things to God as an act of worship we see that what we thought was gold, was really no more than a painted trinket! We find that what we thought was precious, was actually nothing in the light of His glory and His majesty and His love!
In His awesome faithfulness, God will often give us back that which we offer to Him in an act of worship. Certainly He has no need of our ‘stuff.’ He does, however, desire for each of us to be free from the hold these things may have on us. He desires that nothing possess us, nothing but His love. Dreams, goals, talents, ambitions, -- whatever it is that has the power to capture our heart, He calls us to lay down, and offer up to Him as a living sacrifice. It is there, as we bring them before God that we learn what it means to worship. It is there, at His feet, that we learn what it means to become a worshiper, and that, my friend, is surely something to sing about!
Copyright by Stephanie Bennett
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Stephanie Bennett is a professor of Communication and Media in Palm Beach County, Florida. Hailing originally from the northeast, Bennett has raised three children and been speaking and writing about relationship, worship, and other matters of the Christian faith for over thirty years. She hosts a discussion list online at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/KoinoniaLife/. And blogs at: http://koinonia.org.il/blogs/b2e/blogs/index.php?blog=6
