Over the course of the past several months, the word “worship” has come up a lot in church body discussions. For years in my life “worship” was just a word I thought I was familiar with and had a good understanding of. It was an act in which I grew up knowing was a celebration of my love for Christ. As the years of my life passed, now as a pastor in a church with transition going on, I have discovered that my understanding of worship and how God calls us to act it out in the church has changed.
Lately, I have been following the desire to understand worship better. I have been intentionally watching worship in different churches and waiting on the Lord in prayer to help me as a leader to understand what God calls us to do in our worship time. This prayer time and truth-seeking have been leading me to different devotionals, scriptures, and taking time to watch online how other churches worship. To clarify, when I mentioned watching online how other churches worship, I mean all aspects of their worship; not just songs being sung. During this period of seeking, one devotional stuck out to me by Oswald Chambers, My Utmost of His Highest. Genesis 12 was highlighted when God called Abram to go to the land that He would show him. Abram listened and stopped in a very significant place. He stopped to pitch his tent East of Bethel and West of Ai. Chambers reminds the reader that Bethel is the symbol of God and Ai is the symbol of the world. This is where Abram pitched his tent to build an altar and WORSHIP. This passage struck me differently in this season of life. I was moved to tears when I was reminded that we are to worship not comfortably in our bubble, and of course not directly in the world, but right in the middle where God calls us to action. God calls us to worship in all areas of our life. It’s not the type of song we sing or the eloquent prayer that we pray aloud to others, but it is where we pitch our tent, and it is deeply rooted in our own intimacy with him. Once we are in that intimate place with Christ we can then get out of our own way. We can be used by God to allow worship in such a way that pitching our tent in the middle speaks to those who don’t know him yet. If we are rooted and have our own worship with Him, then we can go into the world and reach those who are not rooted without thinking of what “we” want versus what God calls us to do for Him.
Will you join me in pitching a tent in the middle and becoming so deeply intimate with God that our own desires for how we define worship would be HIS desires, not our own?
Blessings,
Pastor Hope
My Utmost for His Highest: https://utmost.org/worship/