November 10, 2006

[Rev. Doc]

Attentive Worship

"I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 'You shall have no other gods before me. 'You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 'You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my
commandments."
Exodus 20:2-6

Jeff Ingle writes:

I came home one weekend from college and found my father cooking. The reunion was nice and so was the food. However, as hard as we tried, we could not find the right tupperware lid to the container my father had placed the left-overs. First of all, you need to know my mother. This lady is in love with tupperware. I think it would have been wise to invest in tupperware. We have drawers and cabinets full of tupperware. Well, my father and I searched and searched, but never found the correct lid. Finally, we gave up and placed a lid that was too big and threw it all in the refrigerator. Then, my mother comes home and easily finds the containers lid in approximately 30 seconds. My father and I laugh over the whole event and sit in amazement at how my mom could find the lid so quickly when it took the two of us quite a bit of time and yet to no avail.

I believe that sometimes our worship is like tupperware. We come into church or our private time with the Lord and we just kinda throw everything together and whether we truly worship or not we get finished and throw the lid on and we leave and say we’ve worshipped. Whether we truly worshiped in Spirit and in truth doesn’t matter, what matters to us is that we did it and got it over with. Don’t you think God deserves more than that.

Prayer: Ask God to help you put all your focus and attention into worshiping Him.

"To worship God in spirit and truth means to worship God as we ought to worship Him. God is Spirit, so we must worship Him in spirit and truth, that is, by a humble and true adoration of spirit in the depth and centre of our souls. God alone can see this worship; we can repeat it so often that in the end it becomes as if it were natural to us, and as if God were one with our souls, and our souls one with Him."
~Brother Lawrence